Falling upward

The first half of our life, Richard Rohr tells us, is spent establishing our identity and grounding our lives in security. Some people spend their whole lives doing this.

But to grow spiritually, Rohr says, we must take the trials of the first half of our lives and use the pain and suffering to look at ourselves and our lives in a new way, a life of undoing, unknowing, letting go, a life led by forgiveness for our own imperfections and the imperfections of others, a life of solving problems by falling into what Rohr calls a larger brightness.