Jordan Shirkman's Reviews > Falling Upward: A Spirituality For The Two Halves Of Life

If you’re expecting a book about how the gospel and following Jesus lead us to maturity and into the “second half of life”, this is not the book for you. That was what I expected from a Franciscan priest. Father Richard Rohr has strayed so far from orthodoxy that anything and everything–Buddhism, Islam, Zen Masters and some out-of-context teachings of Jesus–can lead us to the second half of life. In this second half, he encourages us to to fall down and get back up through our own enlightenment about what life is really all about. A fine sentiment, but ultimately an unsatisfying explanation of how that is to take place through rejecting any and all faiths in their orthodox forms and looking deep within to find our meaning.

Here’s what I enjoyed about the book:

It’s not age that leads us to maturity, but how we handle suffering and what we learn from those experiences.
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.
His observation about Westerners not being comfortable to hold in tension truths that at first seem paradoxically but are actually congruent and trying to rush to a conclusion too quickly rings true for me personally.
There are a handful of quotes worth pondering:
“More suffering comes into the world by people taking offense than by people intending to give offense.” – Ken Keyes
“We can save ourselves a lot of distress and accusation by knowing when, where, to whom, and how to talk about spiritually mature things.”
“When we are only victorious in small things, it leaves us feeling small.”
“You learn how to recover from falling by falling.”
“We clergy have gotten ourselves into the job of ‘sin management’ instead of sin transformation.”
“Self-help…will help you only if you pay attention to life itself.”

That’s where the good abruptly stops.

Here’s what I hated about the book:

He slams orthodoxy and fundamentalism constantly and essentially rules it out as a path for growth and “enlightenment.” He views historical Christian views (and historical, orthodox views of other religions for that matter) as an obstacle rather than a path.
He uses the same quotes from the same people and examples from the same stories ad nauseam. Odysseus this and that, Lady Julian “fall…and…recover(y)…both are the mercy of God”, Carl Jung almost every chapter. It’s fine to have a favorite few authors, but he doesn’t just quote them on different topics, he uses the same quote from the same author multiple times.
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.
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.
Rohr tries to use exceptions to make the rule, in the case of “salvation.” He says that because there are mentally ill people, we can’t believe “any of our theories about the necessity of some kind of correct thinking as the definition of ‘salvation.’”
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).
Rohr can’t rectify a loving and just God. His god simply allows and accepts all things and acts (like those of Hitler and Stalin) and just wants people to grow beyond systems and orthodox religion.
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.
He mocks substitutionary atonement because he built a strawman argument which completely misses what it is. He doesn’t understand that Jesus didn’t die so that God would love us, but Jesus died because God loves us.
He comments on the fact that many other religions do a better job of understanding God and man, yet remains a “Catholic” because of the “tools” the church gave him. Tools which apparently allowed him to deny all of that church’s doctrine and still call himself a priest.
I nearly threw the book away at page 102 when he talks down at us for misunderstanding God. Although earlier Rohr commends paradoxes, when he finds one he doesn’t like, he condemns it. He tells us that “If you accept a punitive notion of God…you have an absurd universe where most people on this earth end up being more loving than God.” So he tells us that a loving God cannot be a just God, fully contrary to Jesus’s own teachings. He goes on to say that Jesus’s love is unconditional and never requires anything, except that in all of the passages he mentions Jesus loves the people and commends them for their faith in him. Rohr also pretends that Jesus never mentioned hell, although he did so more than any other person in the New Testament.
Although he does some things in humility, his hubris is frustrating and laughable at times: “The only people who do not believe that the Enneagram is true are those who do not understand it or have never used it well.” So we can’t believe any faith is the end all be all, but the Enneagram is?

The above list is not exhaustive. I’ll summarize by saying this: It’s not just that I disagree with the Rohr (which I expect to some degree with any author) it’s that he pretends to write with humility yet comes across constantly with an air of superiority. He says things like, “It is very surprising to me that so many Christians who read the Scriptures do not see this” as he explains that you must leave any religion or system to truly mature since these systems and faiths are too limiting. He tells us that if our view of heaven excludes anyone (i.e. if it isn’t universalism) then it is not heaven. So now Rohr gets to define heaven instead of the Creator of Heaven defining it.

This book is a mixed bag of the occasional encouraging or thought-provoking quote, but the bag is mixed mostly with garbage and I don’t recommend plodding through the frustrating contradictions, statements of superiority, and New Age “look within” and reject-the-system junk that it requires to find the rare gem.