Maybe being a grandparent and seeing parents in their later years gives me pause to ask "where do I fit in? What will yield the fruit I am to produce?" I have been doing some Falling Upwards work through Alanon and my new franciscan based church community where Rohr's "everything belongs" is a motto. His "Both/And" inclusionary philosophy is biblically referenced which strengthens my love for the pursuit of that spirit which is within us all. Being a fan of biographies, I want to read Merton, Dali Lama, Helen Keller, and others who lived a full second half life. God hides and is found, precisely in the depths of everything....Sin is to stay on the surface of even holy things...." His use of scare quotes is unbelievable and belittles majority understanding whenever he gets a chance. “Salvation” “heaven” and “hell” are all just made up terms that are actually connected to modern psychology. He assigns whatever meaning he wants to Jesus’s words. Father Rohr points out, again and again, that there is a path here, through the later years of life, as age and the slings and arrows of existence take their toll, if we pay attention long enough to find the path. It can lead us home, and it can lead us into generativity and contributions to the greater good of society. Great message. Great book. I really, really liked it.

You might already have learned the free fall equation, but it's one thing to understand the theory and a completely different one to experience it. There are many ways to experience the thrill of a free fall – you could, for example, jump with a parachute or try bungee jumping!Rohr has helped me realize that much of the impatience and frustration I have been feeling with certain trends in my profession (I am a teacher at a Catholic high school) may derive from the fact that my own path has moved beyond the institutional structures that inform and often dictate what I can accomplish. Although such structures may be of value for the integrity of the institutions themselves, and for younger teachers who are establishing their identities within it, they are of little use to those who are in the second half of life (and even less so, I suspect, for those in the last quarter of their lives, like me). He puts all of “Christian Europe” at fault for entering into WWI + WWII, and implies that they shouldn’t have tolerated those wars (leaving the option of tolerating Hitler and Stalin’s destruction of millions of people). He also reminds us that the “official church” (whatever that means) doesn’t say that Hitler and Stalin are in hell (a place that is merely where we put ourselves by not growing). But we can’t know what the right filling for our container is until we’ve had the wrong one. The container must be filled in the first task first before it can be filled in the second. The Way Down is the Way Up

Or think of it this way. During the first half, you’re building the “container” for your life: your identity. The second half is all about “filling” that container – giving your life purpose.If Catholics need to be converted, Protestants need to do penance. Their shout of “sola Scriptura” (only Scripture) has left them at the mercy of their own cultures, their own limited education, their own prejudices, and their own selective reading of some texts while avoiding others. Partly as a result, slavery, racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, and homophobia have lasted authoritatively into our time—by people who claim to love Jesus! I think they need to do penance for what they have often done with the Bible! They largely interpreted the Bible in a very individualistic and otherworldly way. It was “an evacuation plan for the next world” to use Brian McLaren’s phrase—and just for their group. Most of Evangelical Protestantism has no cosmic message, no social message, and little sense of social justice or care for the outsider. Both Catholics and Protestants (Orthodox too!) found a way to do our own thing while posturing friendship with Jesus.” His exegesis of the (admittedly many) Bible passages cited is gut-wrenchingly bad. He takes so many passages out of context and obscures the meaning or rips out a pair of verses out of the context a passage to give it whatever meaning he wants. He does this so often I can’t cite all of the examples here. The worst is when he mentions Jesus saying to let the wheat and the weeds grow together (Matthew 13:29-30) as an argument for universalism, ignoring the end of verse 30 when Jesus says to bundle up the weeds to be burned. Short review: This is a book about embracing maturity. Age is not maturity, we all know immature people that are advanced in years. Rohr believes that we need to embrace the different parts of life. Our younger years are concerned with identity (what we do, who we marry, etc.). Our older years should be concerned with meaning. So if we properly understand how to mature, we live inside the structures of of life in our younger years and then we learn when to leave the structures of live in our older years.

There are several key places where I believe Rohr is articulating a spirituality grounded more in a "new age" spirituality than in Christian orthodoxy, despite is warm avowals of how for him Christ is the center. For one thing, he articulates a new age account of the fall of Adam and Eve as a "necessary fall" for their development of consciousness. I would agree with the formative nature of failure, transgression, and suffering that comes to the foot of the cross and finds grace. That is different from a theology that says the fall was necessary for the evolution of our consciousness. One involves restoration of what was lost through the cross. The other seems to involve evolutionary progress where a cross is superfluous.Every time God forgives us, God is saying that God’s own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.” (p. 57). He writes, "You must first eat the fruit of the garden, so you know what it tastes like." If he is referring to the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden...I really do not know how to respond to that. I suppose I can, in a tirade, but I am just rendered speechless for now.

It’s easy for us to be so content in the comfortable at “home” that we never venture out and thus never truly grow and understand. Repeatedly, Fr. Rohr reminds the reader that “God writes straight using crooked lines,” and the both of life’s “halves” reflect the truth that we are the “writing” brought about by such Grace. Offers a refreshing critique of culture – and sometimes church-based values so often imprisoned in a ‘first life’ sensibility . . . Rohr sees the arc of ageing as bewilderingly complex, shifting, unquantifiable and tragic in the truest sense of the word: the art of dying becomes the crowning glory of human life itself, the only route, it seems, to our eternal home. - Manna Magazine A second place is Rohr's proposal that "heaven" and "hell" have to do with our consciousness, rather than ultimate destinies. Certainly, our consciousness can be "heavenly" or "hellish." Views like this have become popular of late, perhaps as alternatives to ugly forms of "hell fire preachers". Yet I wonder if the grace Rohr speaks of can be meaningful without there being a real judgment.Although any Bible-reading Christian from a non-cult sect would say that Jesus is the Son of God and that he died to pay for the sins of man, Rohr tells us that there is no one theology of Jesus so there can’t be any true theology of Jesus. If you accept a punitive notion of God, who punishes or even eternally tortures those who do not love him, then you have an absurd universe where most people on this earth end up being more loving than God!” every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.” I'm a little skeptical of approaches to spirituality that seem to overemphasize finding God within oneself. There's some truth to it, I think. We are made in God's Image and can grow to be more Christlike though the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Greater self understanding is essential to understanding our relationship to God. But it can also lead to self-justification, even at the expense of others in the relative judgements we then make about them. We can end up trusting too much in our own inclinations as a basis for our understanding of God.