People rave about this book, but I just thought it was OK. He is a philosophy guy, and that is not really my thing. His premise is that we have two halves of life and most people don't really get to the second half of life. We all have to go on a journey to find our true home and true self, and he compares this throughout the book to Homer's epic poem, The Odyssey. That was fun since I have spent a lot of time in that poem.
I think I started "falling upward" pretty early in life. So grateful for a breakdown at 23. I think that is really the best thing that has every happened to me. It was a marker point in history. The humiliation was so public, spread throughout my organization and my office. But it was so freeing at the same time. Pain has a way of doing that. Failure is a path to freedom. So grateful. I found so much about God through that "fall"! So maybe this quote encapsulates it for you. Sorry that I do not have the page number. I read a library book so I did not underline but found this in a review:
Failure and suffering are the great equalizers and levelers among humans. …There is a strange and even wonderful communion in real human pain, actually much more than in joy, which is often manufactured and passing. In one sense, pain’s effects are not passing, and pain is less commonly manufactured. Thus it is a more honest doorway into lasting communion than even happiness…. Many of us discover in times of such falling the Great Divine Gaze, the ultimate I-Thou relationship, which is always compassionate and embracing, or it would not be divine. Like any true mirror, the gaze of God receives us exactly as we are, without judgment or distortion, subtraction or addition. Such perfect receiving is what transforms us. Being totally received as we truly are is what we wait and long for all our lives. All we can do is receive and return the loving gaze of God every day, and afterwards we will be internally free and deeply happy at the same time.
Falling Upward: A Spirituality of Failure - Beyond Blue
http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/beyondblue/2011/05/falling-upward-a-spirituality-of-failure.html#VPpVQSijsoDDFRA2.03
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