Genuine Wisdom

Do you make a summer reading list? I don’t formalize it, but I do have a number of books I intend to read this summer. We’re just back from a few days on the French River in Ontario, and in that beautiful setting I made some significant progress on a couple of books.

One of them is called Falling Upward by the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr. For a while people have been asking me if I've read Richard Rohr. Now I can gladly answer “yes” to that question and look down my nose at all those who haven’t, since he’s written more than 20 books.

This is a book about midlife spirituality, and it’s a treasure, best read and absorbed slowly. Rohr as a writer and thinker defies easy categorization – you can’t say “he’s conservative” or “he’s liberal” or “he’s radical” or “he’s traditional.” For one thing, he regularly writes against our tendency towards dualism, which divides and defines all things into either-or categories. He transcends into “both-and” thinking often, and how much richer, I kept thinking, American Christianity might be if it were able to adopt his approach. Here are a few choice lines for you to meditate on:

The ego clearly prefers an economy of merit, where we can divide the world into winners and losers, to an economy of grace, where merit and worthiness loses all meaning.

I worry about “true believers” who cannot carry any doubt or anxiety at all.

Literalism is usually the lowest and least level of meaning.

The Eight Beatitudes speak to me much more than the Ten Commandments now. I have always wondered why people never want to put a stone monument of the Eight Beatitudes on the courthouse lawn. Then I realize the Eight Beatitudes of Jesus would probably not be very good for any war, any macho worldview, the wealthy or our consumer economy.

We all become a well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly.

Holier-than-thou people usually end up holier than nobody.

Ironically, the refusal of the necessary pain of being human brings to the person ten times more suffering in the long run.

Life is a matter of becoming fully and consciously who we already are.

A journey into the second half of our own lives awaits us all. Not everybody goes there, even though all of us get older … We are a “first-half-of-life culture,” largely concerned about surviving successfully … and never get to the “unified field” of life itself … many of us learn to do our “survival dance,” but we never get to our “sacred dance.”

Like it? If you are of a certain age (let’s say over 35 or so) get the book. It’s Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, by Richard Rohr, Jossey-Bass, 2011. Maybe, if you are under 35 or so, you’re ready for the book anyway, because life has dealt you enough heartache to realize pat answers and prescriptions don’t cut it. Either way, it’s worth falling into Falling Upward.