“…By denying their pain and avoiding the necessary falling, many have kept themselves from their own spiritual depths—and therefore have been kept from their own spiritual heights. First-half-of-life religion is almost always about various types of purity codes or “thou shalt nots” to keep us up, clear, clean, and together, like good Boy and Girl Scouts. A certain kind of “purity” and self-discipline is “behovely,” at least for a while in the first half of life, as the Jewish Torah brilliantly presents. (I was a Star Scout and a Catholic altar boy myself, and did them both quite well, but it made me love me, not God.)
Because none of us desire a downward path to growth through imperfection, seek it, or even suspect it, we have to get the message with the authority of a “divine revelation.” So Jesus makes it into a central axiom: the “last” really do have a head start in moving toward “first,” and those who spend too much time trying to be “first” will never get there. Jesus says this clearly in several places and in numerous parables, although those of us still on the first journey just cannot hear it. It is far too counterintuitive and paradoxical.
Our resistance to the message is so great that it could be called outright denial, even among sincere Christians. 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 is not working…”
Adapted from Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, pp. xxiii-xxiv
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