by Richard Rohr
Invariably when something upsets you, and you have a strong emotional reaction out of proportion to the moment, your shadow self has just been exposed. So watch for any overreactions or overdenials. When you notice them, notice also that the cock of St. Peter has just crowed! The reason that a mature or saintly person can be so peaceful, so accepting of self and others, is that there is not much hidden shadow self left. (There is always and forever a little more, however! No exceptions. Shadow work never stops.) This denied and disguised self takes so much energy to face, awaken, and transform all one's life that you have little time to project your fear, anger, or unlived life onto terrorists, Muslims, socialists, liberals, conservatives, or even hate radio.
As the shadows of things continue to show themselves (shadow, even in the physical universe, is created by an admixture of darkness and light), you lose interest in idealizing or idolizing persons or events, especially yourself. You no longer “give away your inner gold” to others. You keep yours, and you let them keep theirs. That does not mean you stop loving other people; in fact, it means you actually start. It does not mean self-hatred or self-doubt, but exactly the contrary, because you finally accept both your gold and your weaknesses as your own—and they no longer cancel one another out. You can finally do the same for others too, and you do not let one or another fault in a person destroy your larger relationship. Here you understand the absolute importance of contemplative or nondualistic thinking, which we will talk about in a bit.
The gift of shadowboxing is in the seeing of the shadow and its games, which takes away much of the shadow's hidden power. No wonder that Teresa of Avila said that the mansion of true self-knowledge was the necessary first mansion. Once you have faced your own hidden or denied self, there is not much to be anxious about anymore, because there is no fear of exposure—to yourself or others. The game is over—and you are free. You have now become the “holy fool” of legend and story, which Paul seems to say is the final stage (2 Corinthians 11), when there is no longer any persona to protect or project. You finally are who you are, and can be who you are, without disguise or fear.
Depression and Sadness
There will always be some degree of sadness, humiliation, and disappointment resulting from shadow work, so it's best to learn to recognize it and not obsess over it. It is the false self that is sad and humbled, because its game is over. Holy sadness, once called compunction, is the price your soul pays for opening to the new and the unknown in yourself and in the world. A certain degree of such necessary sadness (another form of necessary suffering!) is important to feel, to accept, and to face.
In our work with men, we have found that in many men this inability or refusal to feel their deep sadness takes the form of aimless anger.1 The only way to get to the bottom of their anger is to face the ocean of sadness underneath it. Men are not free to cry, so they just transmute their tears into anger, and sometimes it pools up in their soul in the form of real depression. Men are actually encouraged to deny their shadow self in any competitive society, so we all end up with a lot of sad and angry old men. Men are capable of so much more, if they will only do some shadowboxing.
But let me distinguish good and necessary sadness from some forms of depression. Many depressed people are people who have never taken any risks, never moved outside their comfort zone, never faced necessary suffering, and so their unconscious knows that they have never lived—or loved! It is not the same as necessary sadness, although it can serve that function. I am afraid that a large percentage of people in their later years are merely depressed or angry. What an unfortunate way to live one's final years.
One of the great surprises is that humans come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing their own contradictions, and making friends with their own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting. We tend to endure them more than communicate with them, because they have little to communicate. Shadow work is almost another name for falling upward. Lady Julian put it best of all: “First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God!”
Chapter 12
New Problems and New Directions
Learn and obey the rules very well, so you will know how to break them properly.
—THE DALAI LAMA
If you are on course at all, your world should grow much larger in the second half of life. But I must tell you that, in yet another paradox, your circle of real confidants and truly close friends will normally grow smaller, but also more intimate. You are no longer surprised or angered when most people—and even most institutions—are doing first-half-of-life tasks. In fact, that is what most groups and institutions, and young people, are programmed to do! Don't hate them for it.
Institutions must by necessity be concerned with membership requirements, policies, procedures, protocols, and precedents. If they are working organizations, they need to have very clear criteria for hiring and firing, for supervision and management, and have rules for promotion and salaries. They have to be seriously concerned about lawsuits and litigation. You would resent them even more if they did not do these things well, but these are nevertheless ego needs and not soul needs. That is our common dilemma, and it is not easily resolved. But it can be a very creative tension.
We avoid this necessary and creative tension when we try to resolve and end it with old shibboleths like “In the real world…” or “On the bottom line…” Much of the Gospel has been avoided by such easy dismissals of soul wisdom, which is seldom first of all practical, efficient, or revenue generating. The bottom line of the Gospel is that most of us have to hit some kind of bottom before we even start the real spiritual journey. Up to that point, it is mostly religion. At the bottom, there is little time or interest in being totally practical, efficient, or revenue generating. You just want to breathe fresh air. The true Gospel is always fresh air and spacious breathing room.
So our question now becomes, “How can I honor the legitimate needs of the first half of life, while creating space, vision, time, and grace for the second?” The holding of this tension is the very shape of wisdom. Only hermits and some retired people can almost totally forget the first and devote themselves totally to the second, but even they must eat, drink, and find housing and clothing! The human art form is in uniting fruitful activity with a contemplative stance—not one or the other, but always both at the same time.1
Groups of any kind have to be concerned with such practical things, but that is exactly why you will become impatient with such institutions, including the church, as you grow older and wiser. The implications are staggering. Historically, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, you just went off to the side and became a monk or a nun, but now even religious life suffers from the same institutionalization, and is not always a satellite of freedom or the wisdom school that it was meant to be. We have been “churchified,” I am afraid.
It is very rare to really absorb the Gospel or wisdom thinking in the first half of life, so we settle for “answers” and organizations, and build the whole structure around such non-answer answers. You cannot turn the other cheek if you are an American, nor can you have Eucharistic table fellowship with non-Catholics if you are a Catholic. You end up denying the first and deeper river for the sake of the small river that everybody happens to be floating on. In fact, you just try to improve the barges, boats, and bridges on this small upper river so that people can float more comfortably. The Catholic Church is now expending huge amounts of effort and time changing words in the liturgy back to the “original Latin” (which Jesus never spoke and was actually the language of his oppressors), while the world is facing unparalleled disasters at every level. The sanctuary is the only world where the clergy still have a bit of control, it seems. So again the meticulous navigating of our small river surpasses ever diving into the Big River.
It makes me wonder if Jesus' first definition of church as “two or three gathered in
my name” is not still the best way to avoid these sorts of illusions (Matthew 18:20). So many people I know who are doing truly helpful and healing ministry find their primary support from a couple of enlightened friends—and only secondarily, if at all, from the larger organization. Larger institutions might well provide the skeleton, but the muscle, meat, and miracles invariably happen at the local level.
The ego—and most institutions—demand a tit-for-tat universe, while the soul swims in a sea of abundance, grace, and freedom, which cannot always be organized. Remember, in the Gospel, at the end of the day, the employer pays those who worked part of a day just as much as those who worked the whole day (Matthew 20:1–16). This does not compute except at the level of soul. Soulful people temper our tantrums by their calm, lessen our urgency by their peace, exhibit a world of options and alternatives when all the conversation turns into dualistic bickering.
Soulful people are the necessary salt, yeast, and light needed to grow groups up (Matthew 5:13–16). Note that Jesus does not demand that we be the whole meal, the full loaf, or the illuminated city itself, but we are to be the quiet undertow and overglow that makes all of these happen. This is why all institutions need second-half-of-life people in their ranks; just “two or three” in each organization are enough to keep them from total self-interest.
If there are not a few soulful people in each group, you can be sure that those who come at the end of the day, who are at the back of the line, or who live on the edge of what we call normal will never get paid. Sadly, that seems to be the direction of both our politics and our churches. So we have to prepare and equip the two or three second-half-of-lifers in how to stay in there with mostly first-half-of-lifers! That is surely what Jesus meant by “carrying the cross.”
When I say that almost all groups and institutions are first-half-of-life structures, I say that not to discourage you but in fact just the opposite. I say it first of all because it is true, but also to keep you from being depressed or losing all hope by having false expectations. Don't expect or demand from groups what they usually cannot give. Doing so will make you needlessly angry and reactionary. They must and will be concerned with identity, boundaries, self-maintenance, self-perpetuation, and self-congratulation. This is their nature and purpose. The most you can hope for is a few enlightened leaders and policies now and then from among those “two or three gathered in my name.”
In your second half of life, you can actually bless others in what they feel they must do, allow them to do what they must do, challenge them if they are hurting themselves or others—but you can no longer join them in the first half of life. You can belong to such institutions for all the good that they do, but you no longer put all your eggs in that one basket. This will keep you and others from unnecessary frustration and anger, and from knocking on doors that cannot be opened from the other side. In short, this is what I mean by “emerging Christianity.”2
Even Jesus said that it would be a waste of time to throw our seeds on the busy footpath, the rocky soil, or among the thorns. He told us we should wait for receptive soil (Matthew 13:4–9). I call such people multipliers, contemplatives, or change agents. Today, I often find this receptive soil more outside of churches than within, many of which have lost that necessary “beginner's mind” both as groups and as individuals. Yet Jesus predicted it himself: “The children of this world are often more clever than the children of light” (Luke 16:8), which is probably why he made the sinner, the outsider, the Gentile, the Samaritan, the woman, the Roman centurion, the poor person, and the leper the heroes and heroines of his stories.
With so many good and sincere people in their ranks, the only way you can explain why the religions formed in the name of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed became groups that defined themselves by exclusion and “againstness” is that history up to now has largely been asking first-half-of-life questions. It is always interesting to me that the “power of the keys” that Jesus gave to Peter both to “bind and to loose” (Matthew 16:19) is invariably used to bind and so seldom used to loose—unless it is to the church institution's advantage. But when I remember that the first half of life defines itself by “no” and the second half of life by “yes,” I can understand. I am grateful that Jesus himself was a teacher from the second half of life, who, according to Paul, “always said yes” (2 Corinthians 2:20).
Loneliness and Solitude
There is a certain real loneliness if you say yes and all your old friends are saying no. So be prepared when your old groups, friendships, and even churches no longer fully speak to you the way they used to. But I promise you that those confusing feelings are far outdistanced by a new ability to be alone—and to be happy alone. One of the great surprises at this point is that you find that the cure for your loneliness is actually solitude! Who would have imagined that to be the case? I am writing this now in my Lenten hermitage, alone for most of forty days. I could not be happier, more united with everybody else, prayerfully united with the tragic sense of life on this planet, and yet totally “productive” too. Most cannot imagine this, I guess, but it is a different level and a different quality of productivity. Once a person moves to deep time, he or she is utterly one with the whole communion of saints and sinners, past and future. (By the way, I think that is a good way to understand reincarnation!) In deep time, everybody matters and has his or her influence, and is even somehow “present” and not just past.
Basically, the first half of life is writing the text, and the second half is writing the commentary on that text. We all tend to move toward a happy and needed introversion as we get older. Such introversion is necessary to unpack all that life has given us and taken from us. We engage in what is now a necessary and somewhat natural contemplation. We should not be surprised that most older people do not choose loud music, needless diversions, or large crowds. We move toward understimulation, if we are on the schedule of soul. Life has stimulated us enough, and now we have to process it and integrate it, however unconsciously. Silence and poetry start being our more natural voice and our more beautiful ear at this stage.3 Much of life starts becoming highly symbolic and “connecting,” and little things become significant metaphors for everything else. Silence is the only language spacious enough to include everything and to keep us from slipping back into dualistic judgments and divisive words.
Poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mary Oliver, David Whyte, Denise Levertov, Naomi Shihab Nye, Rainer Maria Rilke, and T. S. Eliot now name your own inner experience, even if you have never read poetry before. Mystics like Rumi, Hafiz, Kabir, John of the Cross, Therese of Lisieux, Baal Shem Tov, Lady Julian of Norwich, and Rabia will speak to you perhaps more than people from your own tradition—whereas before you did not know, or did not care, what they were talking about. Like Jesus, you may soon feel as though you have “nowhere to lay your head,” while a whole set of new heads are now making sense to you! This is true politically too. In fact, if your politics do not become more compassionate and inclusive, I doubt whether you are on the second journey.
This is initially quite scary, but the issue is no longer “Is she or he in my group, my country, my political party, my social class?” but “Has she or he ‘passed over’ to the Big Picture?” Members of this new “nongroup group” can talk to one another rather easily, it seems. What some now call “emerging Christianity” or “the emerging church” is not something you join, establish, or invent. You just name it and then you see it everywhere—already in place! Such nongroup groups, the “two or three” gathered in deeper truth, create a whole new level of affiliation, dialogue, and friendship, even though they can still enjoy being among their old friends too, as long as they do not talk about anything serious, political, or religious.
A kind of double belonging is characteristic of people at this stage. No one group meets all of their needs, desires, and visions. I bet that if you've lasted this long with this book, you yourself are a “double belonger,” maybe even a triple or more! Colonized people,
oppressed people, every kind of minority have had to learn several levels of belonging to survive and get through the day; for us more comfortable folks it is still a stretch, but finally a stretch that many are making, perhaps without even realizing it.
Both-And Thinking
What this illustrates, of course, is a newly discovered capacity for what many religions have called “nondualistic thinking” or both-and thinking.4 It is almost the benchmark of our growth into the second half of life. More calm and contemplative seeing does not appear suddenly, but grows almost unconsciously over many years of conflict, confusion, healing, broadening, loving, and forgiving reality. It emerges gradually as we learn to “incorporate the negative,” learn from what we used to exclude, or, as Jesus put it, “forgive the enemies” both within and without.
You no longer need to divide the field of every moment between up and down, totally right or totally wrong, with me or against me. It just is. This calm allows you to confront what must be confronted with even greater clarity and incisiveness. This stance is not passivity at all. It is, in fact, the essential link between true contemplation and skillful action. The big difference is that your small and petty self is out of the way, and if God wants to use you, which God always does, God's chances are far better now!
