Liturgies

Sunday, October 27th 2013

Falling Upward

By Terry Fitzpatrick

In the days when churches were left open all day and half the night, an old man could be seen sitting right at the back of an old church in the corner, in semi-darkness.

As the priest would be in and out of the church several times a day, he would often see this old man sitting alone in silence. As he passed he would smile and the old man would smile back. Then one day the priest sat next to the old man and they began to talk. The priest asked what he did when he came so frequently to the church. Did he have a set amount of prayers to pray every day? The old man laughed, "No" he said simply, "sometimes I sits and thinks about God and sometimes I just sits."

When I finished my formal studies at the seminary, and was waiting to be ordained as a deacon, myself and another classmate, Stephen, went to the Cistercian Monastery 60km north-east of Melbourne, in the heart of the Yarra Valley, Tarrawarra Abbey - some of you may have been there.

We did a semi-silent 14 day retreat, silence and prayers with the monks during the day and talk around the dinner table with the other retreatants at night. On some of these nights we would retire to the fireplace in another room where an old monk (probably in his nineties) would be tending to the fire - stoking and staring into the flames. On one of those nights, Stephen and I engaged him in conversation. We asked him a number of questions about being a monk and his answers were always brief and profound. Among the questions I remember asking was, what books he was reading? He sat staring into the fire, and after giving it another stoke, he replied "I no longer feel the need to read any more books to be inspired in my journey into God, I just sit and look at the fire."

Our journey throughout life could be likened to the Camino Walk, the Way of St James- The pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiagotrip de Compostela in Galicia in north western Spain, which Phil Stanton and Ingerid Meagher spoke about at the TLC last year. Kathy Hedemann and Kerry Lawrence have recently done the walk and Noeleen Rosenberg has driven it. Many of you may have seen the film The Way which depicted such a journey that a reluctant father (played by Martin Sheen) made in honour of his son who died attempting the walk.

I have not done the walk but seasoned campaigners tell me that many people who first set out on the walk take too much stuff, which they gradually, if they have any sense, dispense of on the journey as it becomes too heavy to carry- So that by the end of the walk, they are carrying significantly less stuff than when they started-A metaphor for our lives if we have any sense.

It is what the old monk who stoked the fire discovered. It is what the old man who frequently sat in silence at the back of the church discovered. It is what the tax collector who stood at the back of the temple discovered and what the Pharisee in the front of the temple had missed.

Franciscan Priest Richard Rohr says in his book Falling Upward, the task of the first half of life is to create a proper container for one's life and answer the first essential questions:

"What makes me significant?" "How can I support myself?" And "Who will go with me?"

fallingupwardThe task of the second half of life is quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver. In other words, the container is not an end in itself, but exists for the sake of your deeper and fullest life.

In the first half of life, success, security and containment - "looking good" to ourselves and others - are almost the only questions.
But hopefully as we transition through life we discover that human life is about more than building boundaries, protecting identities, accumulating wealth and creating tribes.

As Jesus said "Why do you ask what am I to eat? What am I to wear?" And to that he says " Is life not so much more than food? Is life not so much more than clothing? (Luke 1223) "What will it profit you if you gain the whole world and lose your very soul?" (Matthew 1626)

And it is discovery that your very soul is the soul of the universe, the formless ONE life , we do not lose it, we cannot lose it?
But we may never find it if it is constantly clouded by many of the first half of life's concerns - success, security, containment and looking good.

Much of the clouding can be erased in the hardships and struggles that life presents us with. They present themselves as opportunities to evoke the latent courage, patience and imagination that can move us into the second stage of our life's journey. For most of us some falling apart of the first journey is necessary, to move into the second; so we waste time lamenting experiences like poor parenting, lost job, failed relationship, physical handicap, gender identity or economic poverty.

They all can be opportunities to be let go of and emptied in order to be filled with something greater-to allow ourselves to fall into the hands of God, the ground of our being. Most of us tend to think of the second half of life as largely getting old, dealing with health issues, and letting go of our physical life, but it is exactly the opposite. What looks like falling can largely be experienced as falling upward and onward, into a broader and deeper world, where the soul has found its fullness, is finally connected to the whole, and lives inside the Big Picture.

Money cannot buy this connection, it is only forged in the furnace of life's mystery.

And once obtained, it is the Pearl of great price which one is prepared to sell all that one has to possess it.

Allow me to finish with some words from Rainer Maria Rilke in his book "Book of Hours"

"How surely gravity's law, strong as an ocean current, takes hold of even the smallest thing and pulls it toward the HEART OF THE WORLD… This is what the things can teach us; TO FALL, Patiently To trust our heaviness. To trust and fall."