Hungry, and You Fed Me: Homilies and Reflections for Cycle C, Jim Knipper, ed. (Clear Faith Publishing, 2012) I love the way reading and studying Scripture and theology has deepened my faith, broadened my vision, enriched my ministry and changed my life. I hope that what you find here might help you along a similar path. BB: I was interviewing Chris Germer, who is a Buddhist and teaches mindful self-compassion. And I asked him… We were talking about spirituality, and I said, “What is your favorite kind of compassion?” And he said, “I like in-the-trenches compassion.” And I said, “Yeah, me too.” I’m really close to a very specific kind of honky tonk Jesus. So when I saw your shiner, I was like, “Yeah, this is the home of honky tonk Jesus.” I like it. BB: I mean, especially when I think about this, like, could you imagine going to a church that where the task was healing, reconciling, forgiving, and peacemaking? That’s why I think the Sunday after George Floyd was murdered, I thought, “Boy, if that’s not the topic of every sermon in every church, we’re missing something.”

Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

RR: That’s why, I know you’ve read Falling Upward, yeah. It’s the second half of life religion which is used almost entirely in Western cultures as a first half of life religion to create a container for me to live my life inside of and feel safe and superior. RR: Remember Ken Wilber… Maybe you’ve heard this, “Cleaning up, growing up, waking up, showing up.” Most people never get beyond the cleaning up stage. They use religion to appear pure. RR: We’re missing something major. That’s so true, Brené. When I was helping Francis MacNutt, he was a Dominican priest who restarted the healing ministry in the Catholic Church in the 1970s, and I served on his team several times. And he used to say often in an opening talk, “Most Catholics don’t even know the word healing applies to the gospel. The gospel is much more about, ‘Forgive me.’” I can get away with saying it because I’m a priest. I guess I can. It’s about punishing, not healing. And everything according to the depth of the sin deserves a greater and greater punishment. Now, when you’re concentrating on reward, punishment, you never get to healing. RR: Where it presses up, it’s not a willful choice, it’s just owning itself within you for no reason in particular. Either gratitude is universal, or it doesn’t last. Yeah. You just feel it toward… This is all undeserved. That I opened my eyes this morning. Undeserved. That I’m almost 80. I never thought I’d live this long. 80, undeserved. That I’ve been able to write these books. Undeserved.

RR: No, at least not in the Northern Hemisphere. You’ll find little churches in Africa and South America where the majority are such suffering people that the message can’t be avoided. It’s everywhere. But we can avoid it here. We’ve created what I’ve been calling lately, and I’ll try to explain this sometime in our talk, a cult of innocence. BB: Yeah. Tell me what this means because I think it’s going to make me crazy. “All mature spirituality in one sense or another is about letting go and unlearning.” Rohr was born in Kansas in 1943. He received his Master of Theology degree in 1970 from the University of Dayton. [4] He entered the Franciscans in 1961 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1970. Rohr founded the New Jerusalem Community [5] in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1971 [6] and the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1986, [7] [8] where he serves as founding director and academic dean of the Living School for Action and Contemplation. [9] [10] The curriculum of Rohr's school is founded on seven themes developed by Rohr and explored in his book Yes, And.... [11] Core faculty members include James Finley, Brian McLaren, Barbara Holmes and Cynthia Bourgeault.

Falling Upward, and Unlearning Breathing Under Water, Falling Upward, and Unlearning

BB: I reread it before this podcast, and I wonder sometimes, I think about my church and other churches, I wonder if the people who run churches gather and say, “Don’t forget everybody. Our supreme task is healing.” Christian crowd vows to 'reclaim Jesus' from polarized U.S." Crux. 2018-05-26 . Retrieved 2018-08-06. BB: Yeah, it was the whole idea that workers got there at 6:00 in the morning and they were excited because this person paid well, and then other workers came at noon, and workers came at 3:00, and everybody got paid the same, and it was a fair wage. But if the people have been working there the longest, it doesn’t… BB: Before we get started, let me tell you a little bit about Father Richard. He is a Franciscan friar and teacher, an internationally recognized author and spiritual leader. He teaches primarily on incarnational mysticism, non-dual consciousness, and contemplation, with a particular emphasis on how these affect the social justice issues of our time. He is the author of, I don’t know, 60 books and he has been a huge influence on my life. I wanted to connect with him about his writings and ask him about a number of my favorite quotes and so in this episode we focus on his writing in… Ah! This book is so dang good, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps.In Falling Upward, Richard Rohr seeks to help readers understand the tasks of the two halves of life and to show them that those who have gone ''down'' are the only ones who understand ''up.'' Those who have somehow fallen, and fallen well, are the only ones who can grow spiritually and not misuse ''up''. More than anything else, he describes what ''up'' (in the second half of life) will look like and could look like.

Falling Upward, by Richard Rohr | The Christian Century Falling Upward, by Richard Rohr | The Christian Century

In the second half of life, the ego still has a place, but now in the service of the True Self or soul, your inner and inherent identity. Your ego is the container that holds you all together, so now its strength is an advantage. Someone who can see their ego in this way is probably what we mean by a “grounded” person. Foreword" in Roots of Violence in the U.S. Culture: A Diagnosis Towards Healing by Richard Alain (Blue Dolphin Publishing, 1999) ISBN 978-1-57733-043-1 RR: Now there you go. Let’s say that we’re very good astute observers. Well, we do see it in ourself.

BB: I don’t know whether it was you or Anne LaMott because in the version of the book that I have, Anne LaMott wrote the foreword and someone said, “For all the things that we are finally able to give away, they all have claw marks on them.” BB: So, this is a continuation, “When religion does not give people an inner life or a real prayer life, it is missing its primary vocation. Let me sum up, then, the foundational ways that I believe Jesus and the 12 steps of AA are saying the same thing but with different vocabulary.” Woo, here we go. This is big. “We suffer to get well. We surrender to win.” RR: Unlearning. Not learning, but unlearning. The patterns that come so naturally to the ego. Yeah. It’s not about learning, which is what we made it into. Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation (Crossroad Publishing Co, U.S., 2004) ISBN 978-0-8245-2280-3 RR: That’s right, it is talked about in a number of books. People have had great experiences there. And it’s like the work of art. We have a lot of art around the place that’s sent to us, but this one was here already and gathered us, I think.

The Two Halves of Life — Center for Action and Contemplation

For the last few years I have taught theology and overseen the research degrees programme at Vose Seminary in Perth, Western Australia. I also assist Monica in a new church planting endeavour in our city. In 2013 my first book was published: Church as Moral Community: Karl Barth’s Vision of Christian Life, 1915-1922 (Milton Keynes: Paternoster). I can say that without a doubt, it is the very best book I have ever written and well worth a read!RR: Because I’m on the receiving end. I’m on the vulnerable end. You figure it out. Without vulnerability, you can’t get the gospel. You just can’t. If it’s another steering exercise, a way to steer my life. Longhurst, Mark (September 19, 2014). "Learning Action and Contemplation at Richard Rohr's Living School Living School". Patheos Emerging Voices. RR: And you know, much of my middle years was men’s work. If you think that’s true for women, it’s very true for men. We have a much more defended ego, a much more self-sufficient, well, I don’t have to tell women that, but we got a huge problem with the male in our culture. Look at the Senate and the House. I mean, my God. Jung writes of his own experience: “It was only after the illness that I understood how important it is to affirm one’s own destiny. In this way we forge an ego that does not break down when incomprehensible things happen; an ego that endures, that endures the truth, and that is capable of coping with the world and with fate. Then, to experience defeat is also to experience victory.” [3]