The SPCK Book Club has arrived!

July 30, 2018 Snehal Chavan

We’ve officially launched the SPCK Book Club – please join in the discussion with the hashtag #SPCKBookClub!

We’ve picked Falling Upward by Richard Rohr for July. This short and thoughtful book can be read in an evening, but it’s one to return to again and again. Full of wisdom from many years leading congregations, teaching students, and engaging with literature and philosophy, Falling Upward is packed with valuable life lessons.

The core message of Falling Upward is that failure is not weakness. This is a message that can resonate with the religious and secular reader, and one that has been explored in work reflecting on creativity, relationships, sense of self, and purpose in life. Teachers, authors, and speakers like Brene Brown, Glennon Doyle, Kate Bowler, Elizabeth Gilbert, Elizabeth Smart, Marie Forleo, and Cathy Rentzenbrink have pushed this message time and time again: transformation cannot happen without failure first.

The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus’s journey home from the Trojan War. When we discuss this text in a mythology seminar, a classics lecture, or a book club, we often focus on the main journey of Odysseus’s voyage back to his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus. But Rohr touches on a point that we often miss: Odysseus returned home and spent one night with his wife before he was called on an entirely new adventure. Only when he’d completed the first could he begin the second.

When Odysseus embarked on a second journey, he was given different tools, different resources, and a different purpose. He’d reached a point of life experience and maturation that enabled him to start a second journey, and he couldn’t do so with the resources from the first.

Rohr draws on this parallel in the way we experience life. The first half of our lives are for our young and immature selves. It’s okay to have a certain amount of narcissism when we’re younger (as long as we are wise enough to grow out of it). We are meant to explore, make mistakes, fall on our faces, and fail. It’s the only way that we can learn to survive, and the only way we can come into more emotional maturity. If we aren’t allowed to fail and we don’t learn to cope with setbacks and mistakes, we can never develop the maturity we need later in life.

Rohr continually references psychologist Carl Jung, who wrote, ‘There is no coming to consciousness without pain.’ We cannot transition from the first half of our lives to the second, where we have more self-assuredness, accountability, perseverance, and unselfishness, unless we’ve experienced enough support to feel encouraged and enough messiness to understand how to deal with it. He writes that adults who are childish have not found validation and purpose from God and within themselves. They continually look for it from outside sources and other people.

Parents can often feel that they have failed if they cannot protect their child from pain and suffering. They can have a need to prevent mistakes from happening and to take pain away when a child is hurt. But being allowed to fail is the only way that we grow. Rohr argues that adversity prepares us to deal with pain and setbacks and can give us more empathy toward others.

He writes that older people who are in their second stage of life are more accepting and understanding of selfish younger people because they have been there themselves and have come through it. Narcissistic and selfish adults can be stuck in what Rohr terms the first phase of life. They might never outgrow this perspective because they can be continually protected from failure and pain or avoid it.

Rohr’s central message is that pain and failure are natural and necessary. It is how we respond to these experiences that matters and ultimately shapes us into the people we become.