Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward offers a spiritual path for what he calls “the two halves of life.” We dedicated a week to the first half of life earlier in the year. Here Richard reflects on the freedom, generosity, and presence that characterize those living in the second half of life.

People in the second half of life are not preoccupied with collecting more goods and services; quite simply, their desire and effort—every day—is to give back to the world a bit of what they have received. They now realize that they have been gratuitously given to—from the universe, from society, and from God. They try now to ‘‘live simply so that others can simply live.’’

Erik Erikson calls someone at this stage a ‘‘generative’’ person [1], one who is eager and able to generate life from his or her own abundance and for the benefit of following generations. Because such people have built a good container, they are able to ‘‘contain’’ more and more truth, more and more neighbors, more and broader vision, more and more of a mysterious and outpouring God.

In the second half of life, we do not have strong and final opinions about everything, every event, or most people, as much as we allow things and people to delight us, sadden us, and truly influence us. We no longer need to change or adjust other people to be happy ourselves. We have moved from doing to being to an utterly new kind of doing that flows almost organically, quietly, and by osmosis. Our actions are less compulsive. We do what we are called to do and then let go of the consequences.

It’s true that the second half of life is a certain kind of weight to carry, but no other way of being makes sense or gives us the deep satisfaction our soul now demands and even enjoys. This new and deeper passion is what people mean when they say, “I must do this particular thing or my life will not make sense” or “It is no longer a choice.” Our life and our delivery system are now one, whereas before, our life and our occupation seemed like two different things. Our concern is not so much to have what we love anymore, but to love what we have—right now. This is a monumental change from the first half of life, so much so that it is almost the litmus test of whether we are in the second half of life at all. [2]

God’s goal is always union, which is very different from any private perfection (which is merely a goal of the small ego). Our carefully constructed ego container must gradually crack open (see John 12:24) as we realize that we are not separate from God, from others, or from our True Selves. We see that we have an eternal soul. Our ego slowly learns to become the servant of the soul instead of its master. [3]

A Breakthrough in Consciousness

Franciscan Sister Ilia Delio describes spiritual maturation as a growth in consciousness and a radical surrender into divine love.

The first half of our lives is spent building an identity, establishing our security, defining our boundaries, creating a zone of safety, and having controllable order. We can liken this first stage of life to operating on lower levels of consciousness. Many religious people get stuck on the level of mythic consciousness, with a narrow, ethnocentric, law-and-order mentality. God is a superior being outside oneself, and fidelity to God means abiding by the laws of religion and church. Wholeness means nothing more than obeying the rules. Looking for one’s center always outside oneself inculcates a basic sense of unworthiness, distrust of self, and subservience to those “better,” “more qualified,” or “superior” to counsel and guide.

What creates a breakthrough in consciousness, whereby authentic growth shifts from attention to authority outside ourselves to the inner law of the heart, is not simply growing old but, rather, it is growing inward in freedom: “If you make my Word your home,” Jesus said, “you will learn the truth and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31–32). Freedom requires a breakthrough into unitive consciousness, a radical surrender and complete letting go, trusting the spiritual impulses of life….

Life still breaks down as matter weakens and expectations fail, but the one who lives on the level of integrated consciousness lives in moments of failure or disruption with a lightness of spirit, a sense of openness to divine love, which appears like light shining through the cracks of darkness. Suffering is where divine love radiates in hidden darkness, where God is fully human; the power of life itself in the midst of disruption. We [live into our divine nature] when we cling to this power of life, finding that this power within liberates us beyond the threat of death because “fear is driven out by perfect love” (1 John 4:18). Living into our divine nature is the source of our freedom and happiness.

We cannot know this deeper divine reality if we live only on levels of mediocrity and self-preservation. We are created out of love and are made to energize the world in love…. Aging can be either a life of nostalgia or a wholehearted engagement with the future. It is a disruptive process as things break down, friends and pets die, houses are sold, and memories of the past haunt the present. Months melt into years, and we find ourselves in the flow of life.

Growing inward by falling upward means learning from our mistakes…. Even if the felt experience of life dims, we are invited to let go and surrender to the wild love of God, living into the endless vitality of life itself. Letting go into God is coming home to our true selves, where we discover that our root reality is infinite divine love, and in love, we are eternally free.

Richard Rohr finds clear and unambiguous respect for creation in both Jesus and his own Franciscan tradition:

Creation itself—not ritual or spaces constructed by human hands—was the primary cathedral for Francis of Assisi (1182–1226). It is no accident that the majority of Jesus’ stories and metaphors are based on human and natural observations, not classroom theology. It is not unimportant that both Jesus and Francis were peripatetic teachers—talking while walking—on the road of the world. In our own time, major teachers like Thomas Berry and Ilia Delio have rediscovered this natural and universal theology.

The gospel transforms us by putting us in touch with that which is much more constant and satisfying, literally the “ground of our being,” and has much more “reality” to it than theological concepts or the mere ritualization of reality. Daily cosmic events in the sky and on the earth are the Reality above our heads and beneath our feet every minute of our lives: a continuous sacrament. I find that a preoccupation with religious rituals tends to increase the more we remain untouched by Reality Itself—to which the best rituals can only point.

Jesus himself commonly points to things like the red sky, a hen, lilies, the fig tree, a donkey caught in a pit, the birds of the air, the grass in the field, the temple animals that he released from their cages, and on and on. He was clearly looking at the seemingly “nonreligious” world, ordinary things all around him, and appeared to do most of his teaching outside. Francis said, “Wherever we are or wherever we travel, we have a cell with us. Brother Body is our cell, and the soul is the hermit who remains inside the cell to pray to God…. If the soul does not remain in quiet and solitude in its cell, a cell made by hands does little good to a religious.” [1]

Both Jesus and Francis knew that everything created was a message about the nature of God. Nature was not empty of divinity. Seeing nature as secular or merely functional created much of the loneliness and seeming meaninglessness in our contemporary worldview.

In the five-day Men’s Rites of Passage (MROP) [2]—which was a focus of my work for fifteen years—so many men felt that prayers and rituals inside of human-scale buildings were rather domesticated and controlled. They often perceived that the salvation offered inside these artificial constructs was also “small” and churchy. Almost without exception, the greatest breakthroughs for our men occurred during extended times of silence in nature, where the human and the merely verbal were not in control, or during rituals that were raw and earthy.

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Joy Fueled

Unforced Rhythms of Grace

Jesus says it this way in Matthew 11:28-29 MSG: Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly. In the LK10 Community, we are committed to helping people learn the unforced rhythms of grace by walking and working with Jesus.

The word unforced is particularly important. We think this is what it means to be joy fueled. Instead of forcing ourselves to do and be, we show our weakness, our exhaustion, our true feelings and we let Jesus meet us there, hold us, invite us into his joy and pull us through. We think this is a radical departure from the ways that Christians have often been motivated in the past, just as it was a radical departure for the Jewish leaders when Jesus said it 2,000 years ago.

If you are anything like us, you may be wondering: With such a beautiful invitation from Jesus himself to work from a rested, joy-filled space, why do we not enter into it more often and let it motivate us? Good question. It reminds us of when God said to the Hebrews: “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it!” (Isaiah 30:15 NIV). Apparently, it is very difficult for us to rest and receive strength. We seem to gravitate towards trying to prove ourselves worthy.

White, John C.; Daniels, Toni M.; Smith, Dr Kent. Joy Fueled: Catalyzing a Revolution of Joyful Communities (LK10 Core Values) (pp. 16-18). LK10. Kindle Edition.

CAC teacher Brian McLaren has a deep love for the natural world and all that it reveals about God and our place on the Earth:

If we’d like to bring our God-concepts into better sync with a Creator who makes sense in this particular universe, we’d better face up to this sobering fact: God loves tortoises. (Jolt)

And really, God loves reptiles in general. (Not to mention insects, if we judge based on how many species exist: three hundred thousand beetles, seventeen thousand butterflies, and five thousand dragonflies, for example, out of over two million insects in total.)

Fathom it: For 245 million years, there were zero people around, but lots and lots of reptiles….

Apparently, God did not say, “Wow. These things are boring.… Praise be to me, for my sake let’s get these reptiles out of here so we can get some religious primates evolving, fast!”

No. For 245 million years, and for 99.999 percent of the 66 million years since, God was happy to have a good universe that included neither a single human nor a single religion, but lots and lots and lots of reptiles….

For humans to make sense to ourselves, I think we’re going to have to rediscover our kinship with the reptiles—and the fish, insects, birds, mammals, and palo santo trees—with which we share the world.…

In his beautiful Canticle, [Saint Francis] describes how we humans are related to all our kin in the family tree of creation. I’ve adapted his prayer as a song:

Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Sun,
who brings the light of day;
He’s beautiful and radiant, like you!
Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon,
Through all her sister stars.
They’re luminous and wonderful, like you!

Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Wind
And Sister Cloud and Storm.
They bring flowers from Mother Earth for you.
Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Bird;
You gave him wings to fly.
He sings with joy and soars up high for you.

Through Sister Water, Lord, be praised;
She’s humble, useful, too.
She’s precious, clear and pure, O Lord, like you.
Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
Whose beauty glows at night.
He’s cheerful, powerful, and strong, like you.

Be praised through all those who forgive,
The patient, kind, and brave,
Enduring suffering, trial, and pain, like you.
Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Death,
Who will embrace all life,
And carry us up to the arms of you….

McLaren comments:

In this grand vision, we aren’t ruling from the heights of a great top-down pyramid or chain of being, generals under King God in the divine chain of command. In this grand vision, we aren’t given by our rank a carte blanche to dominate, oppress, exploit, and exterminate everything below us. No, we aren’t at the top of anything; we’re simply at the tip, the tip of one small branch of a very huge, verdant tree, and all created things are our grandparents, cousins, and siblings.

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Joy Fueled

Wilder and Warner go on to explain that Western Christianity has overemphasized propositional truth (left-brain) and underemphasized relational truth (right-brain). Relational truth is reflected in the Hebrew word yada which is translated “to know.” It is not enough to know about God. He wants us to know him in a deep, communal, experiential way. And… he wants us to let him know us in the same way. Jesus addressed this problem with the Jews. You have your heads in your Bibles constantly because you think you’ll find eternal life there. But you miss the forest for the trees. These Scriptures are all about me! And here I am, standing right before you, and you aren’t willing to receive from me the life you say you want. John 5:39-40 MSG

These Jews were the smartest and best scripturally-educated people around. No one knew the Scriptures better than they did. But what they totally missed was exactly what those very Scriptures pointed toward—a relationship with Jesus. We affirm that both ways of knowing are important. It’s not head or heart, but head and heart. We in LK10 are seeking to restore a balance by equipping and training people in how to connect with each other and with God on a heart level as well as a head level. For example, in our Church 101 course, people learn to practice two simple rhythms of attention as a pathway to relational connection. Pastors, missionaries, elders, seasoned and new Christians alike finally discover a relationship with God that they only dreamed was possible. Given that knowledge as propositional, left-brain truth alone does not result in godly character or sustainable transformation, it is inadequate to motivate us in ministry and mission. Did Knowledge Move the Disciples to Mission? Consider the disciples. Here’s the commission that Jesus gave them… All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. Matthew 28:18-20

The part of this instruction that the disciples couldn’t process was “all nations.” They had walked with Jesus for three years in Israel. They were all Jews and understood making disciples of other Jews. But that was the limit of their thinking. The Greek word for nations is ethne, which can also be translated as “gentiles.” A gentile is simply someone who isn’t a Jew and is therefore a heathen and a pagan. During Jesus’ time, many Jews took such pride in their cultural and religious heritage that they considered Gentiles “unclean,” calling them “dogs” and “the uncircumcised.” To make matters worse, it was the Roman Gentiles who were the hated occupiers of Israel at that time.

It’s hard for us today to imagine the negative feelings that Jews in Israel, including, no doubt, the disciples, had towards gentiles. We see this inward focus in Acts 1:6. Jesus had given specific instructions to make disciples of all the nations/gentiles. The disciples don’t even ask about that. Rather, the only question they can think about has to do with Israel. “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” They simply couldn’t imagine anything outside of Israel and the Jewish people. So, Jesus, after refusing to answer their question, once again shows the scope of what he is thinking. He told them that when the Spirit comes on you, you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem (“Ok, we can do that.”), and in all Judea and Samaria (“Ok, maybe we can do that.”), and to the ends of the earth. (“I’m sorry. What did you say?”) So, what eventually motivated the disciples to go to the ends of the earth and share the good news of Christ with the gentile nations? It wasn’t the knowledge of the great need of the world to know him. And, it wasn’t even the specific instructions of their master, Jesus. It was only the active presence of the Holy Spirit with them that could bridge the cultural gap and guide them into attempting the seemingly impossible.

White, John C.; Daniels, Toni M.; Smith, Dr Kent. Joy Fueled: Catalyzing a Revolution of Joyful Communities (LK10 Core Values) (pp. 23-26). LK10. Kindle Edition.

We now turn our thoughts to the Creator, or Great Spirit, and send greetings and thanks for all the gifts of Creation. Everything we need to live a good life is here on Mother Earth. For all the love that is still around us, we gather our minds together as one and send our choicest words of greetings and thanks to the Creator. Now our minds are one.  
—Thanksgiving Address, Haudenosaunee Confederacy

Potawatomi author Kaitlin Curtice invites us to consider how we pray in, for, and with nature: 

The gifts of prayer—of sweetgrass, sage, tobacco, and cedar—are said to have been given to us to keep us connected to Segmekwe, Mother Earth, to share her good gifts and to ask Creator to hear us, to be present with us. As a Potawatomi person, I pray to remember, and I pray to keep the shkodé, the fire, lit inside of me….

Growing up in the Baptist tradition, I heard little mention of communicating with God through the earth. On Sundays, we would often hear sermons about how prayer is something we should just try harder at, instead of something we enter into. When I began to pray in Potawatomi, I understood something different about prayer—that it is a holistic act that involves all of me, and all of the creatures around me, communing with God.

If we truly believe that God surrounds us, we believe that prayer is an everyday experience of being alive…. When you step outside and engage with the world in quiet listening, prayer will happen, and it will take on its own way of being for you. Perhaps prayer is just poetry, and we are living the expressions of what it means to be human. This is why Creator gave us gifts to remember.… When I burn sage or lay tobacco down, I know that I am tethered to a love that has remained steady throughout the centuries and that always calls me back to its own sacredness. And that sacredness will always lead me back out to the world to do the work of love.

Curtice frequents a state park on land where the Muscogee Creek and Cherokee peoples lived: 

I hear the trees speaking, and they remember everything. As the rocks invite me to sit, they’re asking me to take a moment to remember. And when the water stills to reflect the blue Georgia sky, I am being asked to remember, to reclaim something. So I lay my tobacco on the water’s surface and whisper, “You’re not forgotten.” I listen to the ancestors and to the created world that longs to tell its own stories. I whisper a prayer to Kche Mnedo, to Mamogosnan, Creator, who never forgets, who knows the language of every tribe…. If we listen, the land is speaking. If we listen, we are doing the active work of paying attention, not only to our own lives but also to history telling its own story again and again.

PROBLEMS ARE PART OF LIFE. They are inescapable, woven into the very fabric of this fallen world. You tend to go into problem-solving mode all too readily, acting as if you have the capacity to fix everything. This is a habitual response, so automatic that it bypasses your conscious thinking. Not only does this habit frustrate you, it also distances you from Me. Do not let fixing things be your top priority. You are ever so limited in your capacity to correct all that is wrong in the world around you. Don’t weigh yourself down with responsibilities that are not your own. Instead, make your relationship with Me your primary concern. Talk with Me about whatever is on your mind, seeking My perspective on the situation. Rather than trying to fix everything that comes to your attention, ask Me to show you what is truly important. Remember that you are en route to heaven, and let your problems fade in the Light of eternity.

PSALM 32:8; I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my loving eye on you

LUKE 10:41–42; “Martha, Martha,” the LORD answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, ⁴²but few things are needed-or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

PHILIPPIANS 3:20–21; But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the LORD Jesus Christ, ^21who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.

Young, Sarah. Jesus Calling Morning and Evening Devotional (Jesus Calling®) (p. 690). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.