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Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

Seven Themes of an Alternative Orthodoxy

Fifth Theme: The separate self is the problem, whereas most religion and most people make the shadow self the problem. This leads to denying, pretending, and projecting instead of real transformation into the Divine (Transformation).

Necessity of Falling

Meditation 24 of 53

In order to construct our life’s container we all need some help from “the Perennial Tradition” that has held up over time. We cannot each start at zero, entirely on our own. Life is far too short, and there are plenty of mistakes we do not need to make—and some that we need to make. We are parts of social and family ecosystems that are rightly structured to keep us from falling, but also, more importantly, to show us how to fall and also how to learn from that very falling.

We are not helping our children by always preventing them from what might be necessary falling, because we learn how to recover from falling by falling! It is precisely by falling off the bike many times that you eventually learn what the balance feels like. Those who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with. Please think about that for a while.

Adapted from Falling Upward:
A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
, pp. 40, 42, 43

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