Stumbling and Falling

Throughout this Lent I have been reading with a keen eye the daily offerings by Franciscan Richard Rohr.  So much good stuff here.  I was particularly moved and impacted by his April 1 meditation called “Stumbling and Falling.”

Sooner or later, if you are on any classic “spiritual schedule,” some event, person, death, idea, or relationship will enter your life that you simply cannot deal with, using your present skill set, your acquired knowledge, or your strong willpower. Spiritually speaking, you will be, you must be, led to the edge of your own private resources. At that point, you will stumble over a necessary stumbling stone, as Isaiah calls it (Isaiah 8:14). You will and you must “lose” at something. This is the only way that Life-Fate-God-Grace-Mystery can get you to change, let go of your egocentric preoccupations, and go on the further and larger journey.

We must stumble and fall, I am sorry to say. We must be out of the driver’s seat for a while, or we will never learn how to give up control to the Real Guide. It is the necessary pattern. Until we are led to the limits of our present game plan, and find it to be insufficient, we will not search out or find the real source, the deep well, or the constantly flowing stream.

The Gospel was able to accept that life is tragic, but then graciously added that we can survive and will even grow from this tragedy. This is the great turnaround! It all depends on whether we are willing to see down as up; or as Jung put it, that “where you stumble and fall, there you find pure gold.” Lady Julian of Norwich said it even more poetically: “First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God!”

When I was young I would hear the urban legend that suggested that if, during a dream, you actually reached the bottom of the cliff, mountain, or building that you were falling off of – that you would cease to breathe, have a heart attack and die. Imagine: even in a dream you could die! Scary stuff for kids camping out and telling ghost and other horror stories. Over the years though I realized that there is a lot of falling in dreams. My dreams at least. Usually I jolt myself awake before I hit the ground. But there have been dreams when I did hit the bottom. 

In life we stumble and fall. We fall hard sometimes. One has to train one’s mind and spirit to really believe that there is anything good in falling. Falling is tough, embarrassing, sometimes private yet often public, and it can hurt.

Rohr reminds us when we need it the most that there is a cosmic helping hand to get us up off the ground, out of the ditch, back on track and dusted off for another day.  All the clichés and memories of childhood come flooding back. As it turns out, it is necessary to get back up on that bike after falling off, to go back to school, work or back into relationship.  Life as you knew it is not over.  It is actually only beginning.  Good news. 

I commend Rohr’s daily readings.  You can sign up here: Go to Rohr website