Exploring how Richard Rohr’s wisdom echoes through the Midlife Homecoming journey
We live in a world that no longer feels like the one we were prepared for.
The rules of belonging are changing.
The markers of success, faith, and identity that once defined us seem to be dissolving beneath global uncertainty, shifting values, and relentless change.
For many in midlife, this season feels less like a gentle unfolding and more like a free fall. Relationships, community, career, and even faith — the things that once held us steady — are shifting under pressure. The old maps no longer fit the terrain.
It’s here, in this in-between space of disorientation, that Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward meets us with a quiet kind of grace.
The Sacred Art of Falling
Rohr, a Franciscan priest and spiritual teacher, writes with the compassion of someone who’s lived through the paradoxes he describes. His central idea is both simple and profound:
Life comes in two halves.
The first half is about building the container — identity, belonging, achievement, security. It’s where we learn the rules, climb career and relationships ladders, seek a sense of place in the societyies we inhabit, and build an external scaffolding to anchor in.
But inevitably, when we enter midlife, that scaffolding can no longer fully meet our deeper evolving self. Something cracks the container — an easiness, a sense of loss, a disillusionment, or deep weariness. What once worked stops working. And in that unraveling, the second half of life begins.
“It takes a foundational trust to fall or to fail — and not to fall apart,” Rohr writes.
“Faith alone holds you while you stand waiting, hoping, and trusting.”
To fall upward is to discover that what feels like descent is actually the beginning of ascent — an invitation to deeper freedom, meaning, and faith.
Faith for an Unmoored World
We are all living through a kind of collective falling.
The structures that once seemed steady — economies, institutions, even cultural identities — now wobble under the weight of change. Technology, new generations, new values and voices are rewriting the rules of belonging.
Rohr’s wisdom offers a language for this moment. He reminds us that falling and failing are not evidence of collapse, but signs that the soul is stretching beyond old containers.
“The second half of life,” he says, “is where we move from doing to being, from proving to trusting.”
And yet, trusting feels harder than ever in a world so noisy with opinions, prescriptions, and competing ideologies. This is why Rohr’s invitation feels revolutionary: turn inward, not outward. Listen for the steadying voice beneath the chaos. The deeper work of the soul happens in the quiet — not in certainty, but in surrender.
A Mirror for Midlife
Reading Falling Upward is less like being taught and more like being remembered.
It speaks directly to the midlife heart — that tender place between “no longer” and “not yet.”
For many of us, midlife exposes the gap between the life we’ve built and the life that calls us now. It confronts us with regrets, missed dreams, and unlived potential. But it also opens the door to wholeness — if we’re willing to step through.
Bronnie Ware, in The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, distills it into one truth that echoes Rohr’s message:
“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
Falling Upward gives us permission to do exactly that — to shed false selves, to grieve what’s gone, and to trust that the fall is carrying us somewhere sacred.
Where Falling Meets Homecoming
In my own writing, The Midlife Homecoming series explores this same turning point — the moment when identity, belonging, and purpose all ask to be redefined.
Where Rohr offers a spiritual compass, The Midlife Homecoming explores the psychological terrain — how to untangle from enmeshed social systems, heal inherited patterns, and rediscover a self that can belong without self-betrayal.
If Falling Upward teaches us how to fall, The Midlife Homecoming helps us learn how to land — gently, truthfully, and awake.
Both journeys ask the same thing of us:
To trust the unravelling.
To let the cracks become openings.
To find the sacred in the ordinary.
As Rumi wrote,
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
And Rohr would say: “That light has been there all along — waiting for us to see it.”
A Final Reflection
The second half of life isn’t about reinvention as much as revelation — uncovering what’s been within us all along. It’s a homecoming to the soul, a return to simplicity, and a re-alignment with what’s real.
In times like these, when everything feels uncertain, Rohr’s wisdom reminds us:
We are not falling apart.
We are falling into something deeper.
If you’re navigating your own season of falling and becoming, you’ll find resonance in my Midlife Homecoming series — reflections on identity, belonging, and the quiet courage of returning to your truest self.
🕊️ You can read it on my Substack at Midlife Reflections, or follow along on my blog for essays that explore midlife as a time not of decline, but of awakening to your whole self.
If you’re searching for more practical guideposts, The Midlife Roadmap, my signature self-paced resource is for anyone struggling to find a footing in the new landscape of midlife seasons.
Until next time, take care!