Falling Upward

The rebellions of two-year-olds and teenagers are in our hardwiring, and we have to have something hard and half good to rebel against. We need a worthy opponent against which we test our mettle. As Rilke put it, “When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.”

First of all, you can only see and understand the earlier stages from the wider perspective of the later stages.

None of us go into our spiritual maturity completely of our own accord, or by a totally free choice. We are led by Mystery, which religious people rightly call grace.

Although Jesus' first preached message is clearly “change!” (as in Mark 1:15 and Matthew 4:17), where

God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything, even and maybe especially in the deep fathoming of our fallings and failures. Sin is to stay on the surface of even holy things, like Bible, sacrament, or church.

The second insight about steps and stages is that from your own level of development, you can only stretch yourself to comprehend people just a bit beyond yourself.

The familiar and the habitual are so falsely reassuring, and most of us make our homes there permanently.

without law in some form, and also without butting up against that law, we cannot move forward easily and naturally.

We all become a well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly.