Reading Gracefully

Trinity Ecumenical Parish · Aging Gracefully Ministry · November 2026

Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

Revised & Updated Edition, 2023 · Introduction by Brené Brown

This best-selling book is by Fr. Richard Rohr, O.F.M.: Franciscan friar, ecumenical teacher, and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation.

For November: Fr. Stephen Stanley’s review of Brené Brown’s Introduction and Fr. Richard’s Chapters 1 & 2

Before We Open the Book

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Let’s begin our reading of Falling Upward with four things: first a metaphor, then a poem, a scripture, and finally a prayer.

The Metaphor: “Turning Another Page”

Turning another page is, yes, a physical act, but more significantly it is a profound metaphor for moving through the “pages” and “stages” of our lives, from youth to maturity to elderhood and beyond. Literally, you move to the next page in a book, a document, or online in order to continue reading. The story you’ve been reading had a beginning (“Once upon a time…”), but as yet there is no end in sight. Skipping pages to get to the end is not usually a good idea; you might discover “who done it” and yet never learn why. You move by pages because there is always more to learn in doing so.

You even pause from time to time to let the story sink in, or to consider it from a different point of view than you might have held twenty years ago. If so, your former theories about the story (read: “your life”) might need to change, which can lead to new vision, new revisions, and even a reformation of how you see and how you read. Your new reading of the text may call for an emotional, even a spiritual shift, not just a movement from one page to the next. You may choose to let go of some old baggage of grief, failure, or painful experience from your earlier life in order to embrace a new opportunity in the life you have yet to live, even now. You can make a fresh start, not by repeating the choices you have already made, but by beginning to see and encounter the parts of your life you neglected earlier or have not yet dared to live. You come to see that there are chapters in your history, but that your history, for good or for ill, is not all there is to your life.

Two wise sayings make this clearer, as you learn in this book not just to reread your past but to write new chapters you could not have written until now.

The Poem

First, I refer you to the poem “I Will Not Die an Unlived Life” by Dawna Markova (from her book of the same title, 2000). Read it slowly. Its images of seed, blossom, and fruit, and its refusal to live in fear of “falling or catching fire,” are the perfect doorway into Fr. Richard’s book. [The full text of the poem is quoted in the original handout; it is also widely available online under the poet’s name.]

The Scripture

Second, I send you to St. Paul, who captures the same calling to perpetual growth, maturity, and self- understanding:

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I

became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.” — 1 Corinthians 13:11 (NRSVue)

The Prayer

With that foundational metaphor, poem, and scripture, let us now pause and pray a meditative prayer on 1 Corinthians 13:11.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, and You listened. I understood as a child, and You did not hurry me. I reasoned as a child, and You let the reasoning be enough for that page. Now the book has thickened in my hands, and I find the childish things have not all been put away. Some I still carry — the need to be right, the fear of being small, the quick word spoken before the deeper one has formed. Gentle God, do not take them from me roughly. Let me set them down the way a child sets down a toy at evening: not because it was wrong to hold, but because the light is changing and the page is asking to be turned. And there is another life I have kept — the one I did not live, the self I meant to be, the chapter I keep rereading though it was never written. Let me fold its corner down with tenderness and close it, not in grief, but in release. What was unlived was never lost to You. Teach me the speech that is slow to begin and slower to end. Teach me the understanding that can live beside what it does not understand. Teach me the reasoning that bends toward love rather than toward winning the world. Turn the page, Lord. Turn it gently. And when I grow old enough to become a child again, let it be Your kind of child— trusting, unhurried, no longer needing to read it all, but content now to be read, to be turned, to be fully known. Amen.

Reading for Perspective

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As we approach Falling Upward in this way, we are not just “getting through” its chapters, as we so often rush to “get through” the chapters of our lives. We are not getting through the book; we are allowing the book to get through to us. We go deeper than the surface of the page, and we refuse to “judge the book by its cover” or by our own initial presumptions, just because we paid money to make it our own! Spiritual reading is reading for perspective: not simply gaining facts, information, and contents, but gaining new perspective and wisdom about how our lives wait to be uncovered in the spaces between the sentences, still to be read between the lines. If so, we are not just moving forward in a book; we are moving onward and upward in our lives.

So let’s not just plunge into these pages. Let’s look at the cover first. Let’s look at the title of the book as a key to opening a door: a starting point, a map, a threshold of meaning that both literally and figuratively opens the book for us. Up on the marquee it says:

FALLING UPWARD: A SPIRITUALITY FOR THE TWO HALVES OF LIFE

“Falling”

If this were a movie marquee, would you buy a ticket, even if you didn’t know exactly what the title means? Well, first there is FALLING, as in “London Bridge is falling down.” At first glance, a pretty negative word with which to begin. When we were infants and children, our parents tried to protect us from falling down, or, as in my case as a toddler, from being pushed down by an older brother who didn’t care for the sight of me learning to walk. We can fall down, life can push us down, and we can lose our balance suddenly and repeatedly. We are all afraid of falling down. But is that what the author means? I guess not, or he would have entitled his book The Spirituality of Falling Down, and he would not have sold 400,000 copies so far! So if Fr. Richard says with his very first word, “There is more to falling than you think,” then read on beyond the cover, because he may be right.

“Upward”

Then there is “Upward.” We know what it means to fall down. But who has ever heard of falling up? One only has to sneak a peek at Adam and Eve, Moses, Joseph, Job, the Psalmist, the prophets, and yes, St. Peter rising from deep waters, Lazarus rising from his tomb, and Jesus alive again for Mary Magdalene on Easter morning, to see what “falling upward” might really be.

“A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life”

Then the subtitle. You may get a bit shaky on the word “spirituality” and equate it with flaky, fuzzy unrealities. Yes, God made life, but where does the Bible say it came in two halves? Besides old and young, male and female, flesh and spirit, life and death, and those sorts of things? If life is made from a bunch of pieces, then who or what puts them together, and, if broken, who or what puts them together again?

If you prefer the word “religion” instead, that’s fine. But you should know that the root of that word, the Latin religion, shares its root with the word “ligament.” Ligaments bind together different parts of the body, just as spirituality is the work of the Spirit binding together the parts and stages of your life, and all life, and all of Creation. How we are bound, and bound together, is the essence of spirituality. Think of a jigsaw puzzle: it always begins with separate parts that some patiently guiding hand must fit together again, so the whole picture can be seen as one.

So, for our purposes here, we ask: What binds together the halves of our lives? What binds us together when we are formed? What binds us together when we fall apart from time to time? The two halves in the title make us wonder how those halves differ from each other. Are they simply one season of life after another, or can they be in a deep conversation with each other in our souls? Paul says, in effect, “Once I saw through a glass darkly; I saw in pieces. But in the life that is coming, I shall see in full.” If the title raises questions, those questions may make us want to go deeper, to start working the puzzle we call “life,” piece by piece and page by page.

We can do that together. But first we ask: Who made these puzzle pieces, in this odd-sounding book we are invited to read and share? Why is the Church recommending it to us? And why now, at this time of our lives?

The Puzzle-Maker: Fr. Richard Rohr

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Let’s look briefly at the “puzzle-master,” Fr. Richard Rohr. What kind of aging guru is he? We start with “He’s a Catholic priest,” as if we know what that really means. If you have read any of his many books or heard him speak, you know that Fr. Richard does not fit neatly in that Catholic box, just as his mentor, St. Francis of Assisi, did not fit in his ecclesiastical box. Second, Fr. Richard is a friar, and not merely a dutiful Friar Tuck–like brother of some mystical religious order. Yes, he follows a monastic way of life, but like Fr. Thomas Merton he is a world-renowned author and ecumenical teacher of millions of people, many of whom might never set foot in a Catholic sanctuary, or any sanctuary for that matter. Fr. Richard is a mentor of seekers who value deeper questions more than pat answers.

In his bio on the jacket cover we read that Fr. Richard teaches us how God’s grace guides us to our birthright as beings made of (and for) God’s love. Some may ask, “Yeah, but is that Christian?” as if we fully comprehend what “Christian” is supposed to be. It’s just about right and wrong, right? It’s about how we punch our ticket to get to Heaven, right? It’s about judging who gets in and who doesn’t, right? Or is there more to it than that?

The back cover says the book offers “hope and direction for life’s further journey.” So there must be more than we have already seen, in the journey and in the book. Read the back cover for more on that. Forget the chapters for now. First read the book jacket, and then you will be more ready to grasp the purpose for going inside the book, and inside your own soul.

I promised you a quick summary and review, and I have already failed at that! But “I press on toward the upward prize,” as St. Paul told the Philippians. (Just note that Paul uses the word “upward,” too!)

Some have called Falling Upward a “self-help” book. I would call it a “soul-help” book. See if you agree. Fr. Richard’s book quickly argues what one of our hymns alleges: that in our culture and our lives we are “rich in things and poor in soul.” To make his case, Fr. Richard draws on Christian teaching and scripture, but also on the deep insight of the pioneering depth psychiatrist Dr. Carl Jung and other world teachers of wisdom and spiritual growth. Fr. Richard is also a published scholar of maturation and rites of initiation in modern men, of the dynamics of life in monastic communities, and of those deeply engaged in the work of restoration and reconciliation in society.

For the Introduction to this newest edition, Fr. Rohr chose Dr. Brené Brown, research professor at the University of Houston’s Graduate College of Social Work, visiting professor in management at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, and best-selling author on courage, vulnerability, and shame.

The Introduction, by Brené Brown

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Briefly, in her Introduction Dr. Brown speaks of “nostalgia” for home, from the Greek words nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain). In the second half of life, we get “homesick” for at least some of what we have left behind. She says, “We get homesick for a place that no longer exists.” Caring for her mother with dementia, Dr. Brown goes deeper into what it is like to care for a person who no longer exists as she once was. After reading Falling Upward, this caused her to consider how she might come “home” to herself, not just to some former place.

But that nostalgia is tempered by seeing how people and institutions get “stuck” in the first half of life, when the main concerns are establishing a personal (or superior) identity, creating boundary markers for ourselves, seeking security, and perhaps linking ourselves to what seem like significant people or projects: what the ancient Archimedes called “a lever and a place to stand.” This early-life striving and effort can get us places, for sure, and may be good and necessary. But it can also lead us to stasis when it comes to seeking the deeper essence of living, the soul of it all. Dr. Brown says we reach “crossover points” in the necessary sufferings that keep us moving on, and that make us realize how often we are “clumsy stewards of our own souls.”

Without examining the “inner blueprint” that returns us to our more essential selves, usually as a result of facing our own mortality in one way or another, we cannot develop the new “tools” needed to keep building the journey of the second half of life. She says spiritual maturity often comes at a cost, especially when we realize that most of our struggling has been to survive, not to thrive. We have built the basement but are not sure how to build the upper floors. Some kind of inexplicable suffering will beset us all. Fr. Rohr will call this “necessary suffering,” the school of hard knocks, if you will. Jesus told us that two groups will resist this necessary suffering at all costs: the very rich and the very religious.

At this point Dr. Brown turns to Fr. Rohr, who writes that this message of falling down and moving up is, in fact, the most counter-intuitive message in most of the world’s religions, including and especially Christianity. And here is the bottom line, in Rohr’s own italics:

“We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.”

That is, those who have gone “down” are the only ones who understand “up.” Maybe that sounds irrational, but Fr. Rohr presses on: the opposite of rational, he reminds us, is not always irrational. It can also be transrational, bigger than the rational mind can process. I like to say that God is not a rational being in the way we are rational. A God who wants to suffer with us is not rational by any measure we can conceive. And so, Fr. Rohr says, we need some transrational myths, like the story of the Odyssey, in which some kind of “god” or outer authority sends us on a path toward our own inner authority. In the Odyssey we realize that to go forward there is always something that must be released, moved beyond, given up, or “forgiven” in order to enter the larger picture of the gods, or even just to make our way home. To do that we must find out what “home” really is for us. Home is not just our nostalgic place; our home is the journey itself, our inner compass. Home is the essential metaphor for our souls.

And, my friends, that is just the Introduction to the book!

Chapter 1: “The Two Halves of Life”

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Chapter 1 begins with a profound and mystical quotation from the great analyst Carl Jung:

“We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”

Chapter 1 describes the first half of life as the building of a “container” for one’s life. It involves the often central questions, “What makes me significant?” “How can I support myself?” and “Who will go with me?” Pursuing these big questions involves a lot of energy, excitement, and discovery. And yet as we grow older we hear an old song asking, “Is that all there is?” Is life basically an ego project that we are compelled to pursue? Are we aware of what we are becoming as a result of what we are doing? If all we ask is “What shall I do?” the journey stops there, without further steps toward maturation and growth.

C. S. Lewis once wrote, “Hell is any place we stop on the way to Heaven and say, ‘This must be it.’” St. Augustine, after much carousing in his early life, said of the God he had not yet known, “My heart is restless until it rests in Thee.” We have not yet clarified the roles, the real differences, and the challenges of the two halves of life. But Rohr says, “So let’s try.” That is what his book is for.

Hindsight, Insight, Foresight

The upward passage between our two half-lives is almost never a graceful ascent. It is often a fall: a loss, a failure, an illness, a grief, a change we did not choose. Our container loses its “containment”! But it is never a fall from God’s grace. Fr. Rohr’s hopeful wager is that these “falls,” held by grace, are not interruptions of the spiritual journey but the doorway into it, into what Fr. Richard calls the “deeper journey.” We fall upward, from hindsight, to insight, to foresight.

Hindsight is reading life backward: looking at what has happened to us and in us, including the falls, and seeing a pattern we could not see at the time. Most of us at this stage have a great deal of material to read.

Insight is reading life inwardly: not the events but their meaning; not what happened but what it made of us, and what it still asks of us. This is where the text begins to read the reader.

Foresight is reading life forward: what hindsight and insight free us to do with the time that remains. Not planning, exactly. More like trust. Not just preparing for death, but preparing for eternal life.

Chapter 2: The Hero’s Journey

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Chapter 2 picks up the transrational theme of the “Hero’s Journey,” in which the hero is called to leave the world he has taken for granted and pursue an adventure unplanned and unknown, just like Abraham and Sarah, called to a new place they did not know. It is a place where they are meant to thrive and not merely survive, outside their “comfort zone.” That is living into real life, not just living up to life’s expectations. It is a process that cannot be mapped out or rushed. Our first house must lead us to our next, and our next, until we find our forever home, not up in the sky but within our own hearts. There is no security in “staying home” if we refuse or neglect the journey of “finding home.”

The next chapters will look at how we build our first “house,” and how we must learn from it how to move on and build anew. Or, as the great Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., American physician, poet, and polymath, once wrote: “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul.”

The first half of life, Rohr says, builds a container: identity, work, home, belonging. The second half asks us, “What life will my second half hold?” Not just old résumés and memories, but new hindsight, insight, and foresight, not for a final journey but for a deeper journey ahead.

A Personal Story

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I end this review with a personal story, found not in a book but in my own life.

When my father retired from medicine in 1980, a man with his martini at a party asked him, “Dr. Stanley, why did you retire? What do you plan to do with the rest of your life?” Pop looked at him and said, simply, “I’m going to become a better person.” The man turned and walked away. I was stunned that a war hero, a pioneering physician, the wisest man I have ever known, thought he could still become a better person.

Hindsight, insight, foresight. That is the key to reading, and to living, life well. This illuminating book and others like it can help take us there.

Your Practice for November

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I invite you to pray first, then read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest these truths. Find your own way forward using the Companion Reflection Journal. Look at the reflection questions there, but don’t try to do them all. Pick the question or questions that speak most powerfully to you, and attend to those in the month and months ahead.

Try this month’s spiritual practice: draw your own timeline, your own map, of your ups and downs. Find one place where you “turned another page,” and share it, if you will, with others, either as yourself or anonymously.

See you next month for more chapters of Falling Upward. See TEP News for details.

Read well, live your best life, and God bless your page-turnings, one and all. ✝

Fr. Stephen R. Stanley · Reading Gracefully · Trinity Ecumenical Parish, Moneta, Virginia