AARP Falling Upward

by Richard Rohr

  Conditional and Unconditional Love

  In our century we have seen millions give themselves to ideologies of communism, fascism, terrorism, and unfettered capitalism (yes, Wall Street is also an embodiment of our ideology!)—often in angry rebellion either against an oppressive container or because they were given no soulful container at all. Like never before, we are now seeing the misplaced anger that was at the bottom of many, if not most, of the social movements of our age. Building on such a negative foundation inevitably produces a negative building.

  None of these “isms” ever create a “civilization of love” or even positive energy; they are largely theories in the head and come from the small egoic personality, leaving the soul bereft, starved, and saddened outside. Without elders, much of our history has been formed by juniors reacting, overreacting, and protecting their own temporary privilege, with no deep-time vision like the Iroquois Nation, which considered, “What would be good for the next seven generations?” Compare that to the present “Tea Party” movement in America.

  For any of you who might think this is just old religious moralizing, I offer the wisdom of Eric Fromm, in his classic book The Art of Loving.1 He says that the healthiest people he has known, and those who very often grow up in the most natural way, are those who, between their two parents and early authority figures, experienced a combination of unconditional love along with very conditional and demanding love! This seems to be true of so many effective and influential people, like St. Francis, John Muir, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mother Teresa, and you can add your own. I know my siblings and I received conditional love from our mother and unconditional love from our father. We all admit now that she served us very well later in life, although we sure fought Mom when we were young. And we were glad Daddy was there to balance her out.

  I know this is not the current version of what is psychologically “correct,” because we all seem to think we need nothing but unconditional love. Any law, correction, rule, or limitation is another word for conditional love. It is interesting to me that very clear passages describing both God's conditional love and also God's unconditional love are found in the same Scriptures, like Deuteronomy and John's Gospel. The only real biblical promise is that unconditional love will have the last word!

  The most effective organizations, I am told, have both a “good boss” and a “bad boss,” who work closely together. One holds us strongly, while the other speaks hard truth to us and sets clear goals and limits for us. Our naive sense of entitlement and overreaction against all limits to our freedom are not serving us well as parents and marriage partners, not to speak of our needed skills as employees, students, conversationalists, team players, or citizens. It takes the pain of others to produce a humane and just civilization, it seems.

  I am convinced that Fromm is wise and correct here, and his wisdom surely matches my own lifetime of observation. It seems we need a foil, a goad, a wall to butt up against to create a proper ego structure and a strong identity. Such a foil is the way we internalize our own deeper values, educate our feeling function, and dethrone our own narcissism. Butting up against limits actually teaches us an awful lot. “I would not have known the meaning of covetousness, if the Law had not said, ‘You shall not covet,’ ” says St. Paul in his tour de force against the law in his letter to the Romans (7:7)! (For all of his possible neuroses, Paul was also a spiritual genius; and somehow it is good to know that neurosis and brilliance can coexist in the same person.)

  Those who whine about parents and authority for too long invariably remain or become narcissists themselves. I say this after working with people on many levels, including in the jail, as a counselor, and as a confessor. It has been acceptable for some time in America to remain “wound identified” (that is, using one's victimhood as one's identity, one's ticket to sympathy, and one's excuse for not serving), instead of using the wound to “redeem the world,” as we see in Jesus and many people who turn their wounds into sacred wounds that liberate both themselves and others.

  Oprah would hardly have a TV show if she could not highlight these many amazing people who have turned their wounds into gifts for society, and they are often people who are not overtly religious at all. They often care about others, and don't want others to be hurt the way they were. It reminds me of Jesus' story of the two sons, one who said all the right words, but never acted on these words, and the other who said the wrong words, but in fact “went to work in the vineyard.” Jesus said that the person who finally acts and engages “does the Father's will,” even if he is a tax collector or she a prostitute and does not have the right “belief system” (Matthew 21:28–32). Jesus seems to often find love in people who might not have received much love themselves. Perhaps their deep longing for it became their capacity to both receive it and give it. This surely matches my own life experience.

  Holding a Creative Tension

  Mature people invariably thank their harder parent, law-driven church, kick-ass coach, and most demanding professors—but usually years later. This is a clear sign of having transcended—and included. It is what we should expect fifty- to seventy-year-olds to say, and what you seldom hear from twenty- to forty-year-olds anymore unless they have grown up quite quickly. Some, of course, have also been wounded quite lethally, as in situations of rape or abuse or bullying, and it takes them a longer time to heal and grow.

  I am trying to place you and then hold you inside of a very creative tension, if you will allow yourself to be held there. I do promise you it is a creative tension, because both law and freedom are necessary for spiritual growth, as Paul says in Romans and Galatians. He learned this from Jesus, who says seven times in a row “The Law says…but I say” (Matthew 7:21–48), while also assuring us that he “has not come to throw out the law but to bring it to completion” (7:17). Despite having been directly taught to hold this creative tension, rare is the Christian believer who holds it well. We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them—both immature responses.

  Actually, I have seen many Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists do it much better, but very few Christians have been taught how to live both law and freedom at the same time. Our Western dualistic minds do not process paradoxes very well. Without a contemplative mind, we do not know how to hold creative tensions. We are better at rushing to judgment and demanding a complete resolution to things before we have learned what they have to teach us. This is not the way of wisdom, and it is the way that people operate in the first half of life.

  “Primitive” and native societies might well have held this tension better than we do today.2 There is much evidence that many traditional societies produced healthy psyches and ego structures by doing the first half of life very well, even if they were not as “developed” or individuated as we are. I have seen this myself among indigenous and “undeveloped” peoples in India, the Philippines, and Latin America. They often seem much less neurotic and anxious than we are, and can deal with failure or loss far, far more easily than we can. Any of you who have been in the barrios, favelas, and townships of the world know how often this is true. Owen Barfield says that they enjoy a kind of simple but transformative “original participation” with reality and with God.

  In the Western world, it seems we cannot build prisons fast enough or have enough recovery groups, therapists, or reparenting classes for all of the walking wounded in this very educated, religious, and sophisticated society—which has little respect for limitations and a huge sense of entitlement. How could this happen? How could neuroses and depression be less the exception and more the very norm? Our elderly are seldom elders, it seems to me. When they are true elders, we all fall in love with them.

  The presumption has been against law and authority for several centuries now. Tradition or any talk of limits has not been attractive since the protesting Reformation, the unenlightened Enlightenment, or the rise of democracy (all of which were necessary, by the way!). Now we all start our kids in a kind of free fal
l, and hope that by some good luck or insight they will magically come to wisdom. The ego cannot be allowed to be totally in charge throughout our early years, or it takes over. The entirely open field leaves us the victim of too many options, and the options themselves soon push us around and take control. Law and structure, as fallible as they often are, put up some kind of limits to our infantile grandiosity, and prepare us for helpful relationships with the outer world, which has rights too.

  First Half Done Poorly

  I am also deeply aware of the damage that misuse of law, custom, authority, and tradition has done in human history and to personal development. I know the destructive and immature state that mere reliance on structure and authority has engendered. The anger and blindness it often brings is devastating, because it often takes away both a necessary self-confidence and a necessary self-questioning. We see this in our political debates today, in people's lack of basic self-knowledge (too-quick answers keep you from necessary searching), and in scary fundamentalist thinking in all of the world religions.

  Most wars, genocides, and tragedies in history have been waged by unquestioning followers of dominating leaders. Yet there is a strange comfort in staying within the confines of such a leader and his ideologies, even if it leads us to do evil. It frees us from the burden of thinking and from personal responsibility. We are also creatures who love the familiar, the habitual, our own group; and we are all tied deeply to our early conditioning, for good and for ill. Most people will not leave the safety and security of their home base until they have to. Thus the Gospel call, again and again, is to leave home, family, and nets (Mark 1:16–20). Without that necessary separation, order itself, and my particular kind of order, will often feel like a kind of “salvation.” It has been the most common and bogus substitute for the real liberation offered by mature religion. “Keep the rules, and the rules will keep you!” we were told our first day in the seminary. Franciscans should have known better.

  But I am not here to say either-or. I am here to say both-and. It is not just “the exception that proves the rule” but somehow that the loss or transgression of the rule also proves the importance and purpose of the rule. You must first eat the fruit of the garden, so you know what it tastes like—and what you are missing if and when you stop eating it. We are perhaps the first generation in history, we postmodern folks, who have the freedom both to know the rules and also to critique the rules at the same time. This is changing everything and evolving consciousness at a rather quick rate.3

  In the Roman Catholic Church, we are now involved in an enormous example of what some would call “the regressive restoration of persona,” a desire to return to the “good old days” when we were supposedly on top, secure, sure of ourselves, and marching together. (I am not persuaded myself, because I lived in those good old days, which were not always so good for a vast majority of people.) We see this especially in young priests, who are seeking the church as their security system and lifelong employer.

  Nevertheless, this new tribalism is being found in all of the world religions—a desire for rediscovery of one's roots, one's traditions, one's symbols, one's ethnic identity, and one's own unique identity. Some call it the “identity politics” that rules our country. This is understandable in the midst of massive and scary globalization among six billion people, but it also keeps us trapped at the bipartisan divide—and we never achieve the transpartisan nature of mature elders. People think that by defeating the other side, they have achieved some high level of truth! Very sad indeed, but that is as far as the angry or fearful dualistic mind can go.

  When some have not been able to do the task of the first half of life well, they go back and try to do it again—and then often overdo it! This pattern is usually an inconsistent mix of old-fashioned styles and symbols with very contemporary ideologies of consumerism, technology, militarism, and individualism. This tends to be these individuals' blind spot, which makes them not true conservatives at all. In fact, neoconservatives are usually intense devotees of modern progress and upward mobility in the system, as we see in most Evangelicals, Mormons, and “traditionalist” Catholics. Only groups that have emphasized actual and costly lifestyle changes for themselves, like the Amish, the Shakers, the Mennonites, Catholic Workers, Poor Clares, and the Quakers, can be called true conservatives.

  I saw this pattern in my fourteen years as a jail chaplain. The inmates would invariably be overly religious, highly moralistic, and excessively legalistic (believe it or not!), and many overly intellectualized everything. They would do anything to try to compensate for their dashed, maybe never developed, but publicly humiliated criminal self. Here I was the Catholic chaplain, and the last thing I sometimes trusted was a lot of “religious” language and Jesus talk. Again, it was a regressive restoration of a failed first half of life. It seldom works long term.

  A recent study pointed out that a strong majority of young men entering seminaries in the last ten to twenty years came from single-parent homes, a high percentage having what we would call “father wounds,”4 which can take the form of an absent, emotionally unavailable, alcoholic, or even abusive father. This overwhelmingly matches my own experience of working in Catholic seminaries, and of men in jail, the military, or any all-male system. Many of these men were formed in postmodern Europe and America, where almost nothing has been stable or constant or certain since the late 1960s, and even the church was trying to reform itself through the Second Vatican Council.

  All has been in flux ever since about 1968. Then add to all of that fifteen years of nonstop public scandal over the issues of pedophilia and cover-up by the hierarchy. Such bishops, priests, and seminarians often had no chance to do the task of the first half of life well. It was a movable famine to grow up in, so they backtracked to do what they should have been able to do first—second! They are out of sequence through no fault of their own. They want a tribe that is both superior and secure—and theirs! Men join a male club, like the church, to get the male energy they never got as sons, or because they accept the male game of “free enterprise” and social advancement. I have often wondered if I did the same. I hope not.

  The result is a generation of seminarians and young clergy who are cognitively rigid and “risk adverse”; who want to circle the wagons around their imagined secure and superior group; who seem preoccupied with clothing, titles, perks, and externals of religion; and frankly have little use for the world beyond their own control or explanation. Ecumenism, interfaith dialogue, and social justice are dead issues for them. None of us can dialogue with others until we can calmly and confidently hold our own identity. None of us can know much about second-half-of-life spirituality as long as we are still trying to create the family, the parenting, the security, the order, the pride that we were not given in the first half.

  Most of us from my generation cannot go back on this old path, not because it was bad, but precisely because we already did it, and learned from it. Unfortunately, we have an entire generation of educators, bishops, and political leaders who are still building their personal towers of success, and therefore have little ability to elder the young or challenge the beginners. In some ways, they are still beginners themselves. Self-knowledge is dismissed as psychology, love as “feminine softness,” critical thinking as disloyalty, while law, ritual, and priestcraft have become a compulsive substitute for actual divine encounter or honest relationship. This does not bode well for the future of any church or society.

  So let's look at a way through all of this, because spiritually speaking, there are no dead ends. God will use this too—somehow—and draw all of us toward the Great Life. But there is a way to move ahead more naturally, if we can recognize a common disguise and dead end.

  Discharging Your Loyal Soldier

  In his work at his Animas Institute in Durango, Colorado, Bill Plotkin takes people on long fasts and vision quests in nature. His work offers a very specific and truth-filled plan for moving from what he calls an “ego centri
c” worldview to a “soul centric” worldview.5 Like me, Plotkin is saddened by how much of our world stays at the egocentric first stage of life. His work reveals a historical situation in post–World War II Japan that demonstrates how people could be helped to move from the identity of the first half of life to the growth of the second half. In this situation, some Japanese communities had the savvy to understand that many of their returning soldiers were not fit or prepared to reenter civil or humane society. Their only identity for their formative years had been to be a “loyal soldier” to their country; they needed a broader identity to once again rejoin their communities as useful citizens.6

  So these Japanese communities created a communal ritual whereby a soldier was publicly thanked and praised effusively for his service to the people. After this was done at great length, an elder would stand and announce with authority something to this effect: “The war is now over! The community needs you to let go of what has served you and served us well up to now. The community needs you to return as a man, a citizen, and something beyond a soldier.” In our men's work, we call this process “discharging your loyal soldier.”

  This kind of closure is much needed for most of us at the end of all major transitions in life. Because we have lost any sense of the need for such rites of passage, most of our people have no clear crossover to the second half of their own lives. No one shows us the stunted and limited character of the worldview of the first half of life, so we just continue with more of the same. The Japanese were wise enough to create clear closure, transition, and possible direction. Western people are a ritually starved people, and in this are different than most of human history. Even the church's sacraments are overwhelmingly dedicated to keeping us loyally inside the flock and tied to the clergy, loyal soldiers of the church. There is little talk of journeys outward or onward, the kind of journeys Jesus called people to go on.