Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.

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.

The most common one-liner in the Bible is, "Do not be afraid." Someone counted, and it occurs 365 times.

Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.

Until we learn to love others as ourselves, it's difficult to blame broken people who desperately try to affirm themselves when no one else will.

When you get your,'Who am I?', question right, all of your,'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves

The ego hates losing – even to God.

I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you.

Much of the work of midlife is to tell the difference between those who are dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you.

People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.

The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem, our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the scene of our crime.

Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.

In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you.

The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo – even when it's not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future.

I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona.

We all become well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. Most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself, along with a very inflated self-image to boot.

When we fail we are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us.

If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage as if it were God.

Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God.

What some now call 'emerging Christianity' or 'the emerging church' is not something you join, establish, or invent. You just name it and then you see it everywhere- already in place! Such nongroup groups, the 'two or three' gathered in deep truth, create a whole new level of affiliation, dialogue, and friendship...

Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.

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.

Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events.

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!

Those who are not true leaders will just affirm people at their own immature level.

Life is all about practicing for heaven." p 101.

Whatever good, true, or perfect things we can say about humanity or creation, we can say of God exponentially. God is the beauty of creation and humanity multiplied to the infinite power.

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.

If we seek spiritual heroism ourselves, the old ego is just back in control under a new name. There would not really be any change at all, but only disguise, just bogus self-improvement on our own terms.

You ironically have to have a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while.