This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
Doubt as Devotion – Cityside’s Practitioners
DESCRIPTION
In this closing reflection on the theme of Divine Doubt, we explore how uncertainty itself can be an invitation — calling us to release our grip, lean into trust, and return again and again to Love as our foundation.
SUMMARY
This Practitioner Sunday service explores Richard Rohr’s concept of “Divine Doubt” and the two halves of life, contrasting an ego-driven “false self” focused on identity, success, certainty, and being right with a more spacious “true self” characterized by paradox, mystery, humility, compassion, deeper wisdom, surrender, acceptance, and a need to love. Drawing on Carl Jung, the speakers explain “shadow” as the unconscious, denied aspects of personality formed when traits that support survival and belonging are accepted into the persona while unacceptable or dangerous qualities are repressed, later surfacing through triggers, crises, and midlife breakdowns. Rob shares a personal story of building an identity around competence, self‑reliance, and independence, then experiencing a career crisis and firing when he could not admit limits or ask for help, illustrating how disowned capacities like collaboration and vulnerability must be integrated through ongoing shadow work to move toward wholeness. Donna offers a parallel narrative of academic insecurity, factory work, and anger at perceived limitations, followed by a hard-won journey through college, Peace Corps service, low-paid social service work, depression, firing, and eventual completion of a master’s degree and graduate certificate, demonstrating how repeated challenges can build confidence and shift consciousness from self-doubt and blame to trust, resilience, and openness to growth. Integrating Rohr’s theology, Donna emphasizes that suffering—such as loss, disappointment, or major life transitions—can either entrench bitterness and old consciousness or soften us into greater compassion, reduced ego, comfort with mystery, and a transformed, love-centered spirituality that prioritizes empathy, forgiveness, gratitude, non-defensiveness, and awareness of our impact on others. The service concludes with a communal blessing and prayer affirming God as ever-present love, inviting participants to see challenges as opportunities for awakening, to trust that life is for them, and to carry an expanded consciousness of love and understanding into the wider world.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Donna Pitz:
Good morning everybody. Thank you. My name is Donna Pitts. I’m one of your licensed practitioners and welcome to Practice Sunday for both those in the room. We have a good crowd today and those online. So today we will wrap up the theme of Divine Doubt and we’re focusing on the two halves of life from the book Falling Upward by Richard Rohr. First, we focus on the shadow, the persona, and we’re going to follow by a personal story of falling upward, a community blessing, and then prayer. So Roar states that many of us spend that first half of life building our identity, finding security, building success, and living in certainty. But eventually life invites us into something much deeper, more spacious, compassionate, and humbling way of being.
When we speak of the first half and the second half of life, it’s not about being young or about being old. It’s about the consciousness. The first half is awareness that life is about me and that second half is a greater awareness moving beyond the self and making a decision from realizing that we are impacting the world. So older people can still live in an ego driven identity, the false self, whereas there are some young people who are very aware of their impact on others. So in short, it has nothing to do with age. Okay? And to demonstrate the difference between the consciousness of this first half of life and the second half of life, Don and Rob are going to do a dramatic dialogue for you. So I’ll call them up right now.
Don Mannery:
So good morning. My name is Don Mannery, one of your licensed spiritual practitioners as well. I’m what Roar calls first half of life, the false self. I’m trying to make my way in the world and this half we want, we have.
Rob Wozniak:
So I’m Rob Wozniak. I’m also one of your licensed spiritual practitioners and I’m representing the second half of life. This is what Roar calls the true self. I’ve learned a few things and in this half of life we discover.
Don Mannery:
First half, false self. We have want rules and clarity. True self.
Rob Wozniak:
We discover paradox.
Don Mannery:
Being right.
Rob Wozniak:
Mystery.
Don Mannery:
Identity.
Rob Wozniak:
Humility and compassion.
Don Mannery:
Success.
Rob Wozniak:
Deeper wisdom.
Don Mannery:
Answers.
Rob Wozniak:
Surrender.
Don Mannery:
Feeling of worthworthiness. Excuse me.
Rob Wozniak:
Enoughness.
Don Mannery:
Having judgment.
Rob Wozniak:
Acceptance.
Don Mannery:
A need to know.
Rob Wozniak:
A need to love.
Don Mannery:
Certainty.
Rob Wozniak:
Reality.
So the second half of life sounds great. So how do we get there? And so Rohr, one of the things that Rohr talks about a lot or encourages us to do is explore our shadow, which he describes as the denied and hidden parts of ourselves. If we can get to the slides. Yeah. So the shadow is a psychological term developed by Carl Jung, who I’ve spent time studying and gaining some certifications around coaching from a Jungian perspective. So briefly the shadow, that unconscious part of the personality that we’ve denied and certainly jung believed that in the second half of life, we don’t so much become a different person, but we move towards wholeness, our natural state, our kind of divine state. And so he called this process individuation and it starts when we become willing to face and integrate the parts of ourselves that we have denied.
So yeah, the parts we denied, it often reveals itself through triggers and reactivity. We’ll touch on a little bit of that today. And then of course the actual, what he developed as shadow work, the first part of individuation, really moves us towards this God quality of wholeness. But why do we deny parts of ourselves in the first place? And so young believe that from a very early age when we’re constructing our personality, we focus on those traits that help us survive and really importantly, help us belong. So we learn which qualities are welcomed, which are rewarded, accepted by our family, by our culture, by our community and those traits become part of our conscious identity. So at the same time, qualities that seem unacceptable, dangerous, or inconsistent with the image we’re trying to maintain, that sort of persona, that mass that we like to show others, those are pushed out of our awareness and young called this hidden region of the personality, the shadow.
So if we can go to the next slide. Yeah. So this is a little, with the help of AI, I put this diagram very quickly to sort of illustrate the process. And here’s someone probably like myself who would identify with something like, “Well, I want to be a productive person.” And that would be encouraged in our culture for sure. And at the same time, that person puts in their shadow the things they reject, which would be like laziness or idleness or unproductive time.
So like we said, these rejected qualities, they do not disappear. They simply move into the unconscious where they continue, but they continue to have influence on our lives. For example, a person who prides himself on being productive may disown his need for rest, may be very hard for that person to relax. Someone who sees herself as selfless may repress feelings of anger. A person who identifies as humble may unconsciously hide ambition. So the key thing to remember is that these rejected qualities, they often precipitate a crisis that we experience somewhere around midlife, could be earlier, could be later, might unfortunately be never. So in the milder forms, we may experience something like broken relationships, interpersonal conflict, moodiness, extreme cases can lead to things like addiction or disease. And so I stapled my notes in the wrong order, but so bear with me for a second.
In my own life, and I’m going to use an example, we’ll keep that up there for now.
My first memorable encounter with a shadow or a shadow precipitated crisis was in my career. I had started my career determined that I was determined to prove that I could make it, that I wanted to prove myself. And so I aspired to be in this really competitive technology consulting firm. And so growing up, I had the perception that people didn’t think I could do things. They didn’t have a great deal of confidence in me. So I developed an attitude of like, “I’ll show you and I’m going to do it all by myself.” So I worked really hard. I got into this career. I thought I was a big deal. The way I did things was that no matter the problem, no matter the situation, I could figure it out. I could get it done. I’m smart and you don’t know who you’re dealing with. So I built my identity around the qualities of competence, self-reliance, ambition, determination, independence.
So that worked for some time, but eventually I was tasked with something that I couldn’t do on my own. I had been given a leadership position. I had a lot of responsibility, but I didn’t know how to tell the client that I was serving at that time that what they wanted could not be done and it could not be done in the way they wanted it and in the timeframe they were requesting it. I was so afraid of what they would think of me if I told them anything that was disappointing. So I didn’t say anything because I had put all these things like collaboration, teamwork, asking for help, being open or vulnerable. I’d put all that into my shadow. So in this situation, I had no idea what to do other than to plow forward, try to make things work, work around the clock, stay up all night if I had to, try and make progress, but it was just too much for me.
So fast forward, the project’s in major trouble and I’m sitting in my manager’s office, the one who thought I would be a good fit for this leadership role. And he says to me, “So let me get this straight. You knew all along that this couldn’t be done, but you said nothing.” And I had to admit, I was like, “Well, yeah.” And so a week later or something like that, he called me back to his office and he delivered those faithful words and they went like this, “Going forward, we don’t think you’re a good fit.” And so if you don’t know what that means, that’s corporate ease for you’re fired.
All right, you’ve been there. So needless to say, this was a major blow to the identity that I constructed, this persona that I created to get results at work. And as life goes, the shadow was not through with me. However, so in these situations, what is the solution? All right, so this is a problem. What do I do? And so jung really talks about this process of integration, integrating our shadow qualities. And so it’s really not about making anything bad, but kind of allowing it to show up, allowing it to breathe, taking action to integrate those aspects of our personality that we put in our shadow. In my case, this crisis really led to … I was kind of forced fed on humble pie and I had to learn to collaborate, to be honest when I was overwhelmed, to ask for help. I’ll be the first to tell you, that has not been an easy thing for me.
This integration is continuing to this day and that’s the beauty of shadow work. It really never is done. There’s always more to integrate. And so I really want to, as I’m wrapping up here, there are many wonderful qualities that I’ve been able to integrate as I kind of started on this journey of pursuing spirituality and other interests that I’ve had. And so one of the things is kind of like taking a real look at the shadow just in July we’ve got a workshop that’s scheduled that I’m going to be hosting and you’re going to have an opportunity to really look at your own shadow. I’ve designed some exercises for us to really be able to sort of dig deeper into this shadow issue and kind of look at it for yourself. So that’s a plug for what’s happening later. But before I turn things over to Donna, I just wanted to say a few clarifying words about this idea of shadow work because there’s a lot of misinformation or sensational descriptions that you can find on the internet.
I don’t want you to walk away with any misconceptions. So shadow work is definitely … I think if we can go to the next slide. So I missed this slide, but basically this was the slide that was supporting my example. So if you don’t transform what’s causing your pain, what’s underneath your pain, you’re going to end up kind of contributing it to the world That’s from Richard Rohr.
And so just a few things to clarify about shadow work. It’s not about discovering that you’re bad or you’ve got some nightmare thing in your shadow that you don’t want to look at. It’s just the things you haven’t claimed and it’s really about moving towards wholeness, this idea of uncovering what’s within us already. I think Roar likes to say, “The shadow often includes the qualities that we need for the next stage of life.” And they’re kind of waiting for us there. And so now Donna’s going to talk about falling upward or that which occurs after someone goes through an episode of suffering or crisis.
Donna Pitz:
Thank you, Rob. I need to set everybody else’s papers aside so I have room for mine. All right. Yes. I’m going to talk about falling upward. Rohr describes what often emerges after people go through something really difficult in life. Could be a death of a child, losing a job, could be some major disappointment or life transition. He calls a movement, you can either fall upward or you can stay stuck in that first person that we talked about earlier, that false self. So this is what I’m going to be talking about. I’m going to start with a story and then we’re going to look at some of the aspects of the different sides.
So when I was a child, I really felt a nice connection with God and I was raised Catholic and often went to church and even I went to a Catholic school and often went to church before school, both in grade school and high school because it was something I felt connected to.
And after I graduated from high school, my group of friends, we all came from pretty much blue collar families, but my friends were raised in families that were, they promoted education and college where mine was more practical, go out and get a job. So that’s what I did.
I worked in the factory for several years and then over one summer they hired these college kids to come on in. And at that time I was one of the people that was responsible for training them. And this was a plastic manufacturing company and I was working nights. So night after night, they’d come in and I have to retrain them and retrain them to make sure they were doing things right and making sure everything was in the right order. And it was at that time that I learned that these kids went to really good schools like U of I or Rice or wherever, schools that not anybody could get into and certainly not me at that point in my life. And it was then that I realized, wow, these people learn like I do. They have to be trained and retrained. It’s not just something they have, which is what I thought.
So as a kid, I wasn’t a very good student and I didn’t really fit into the world of academia and I found it to be a really humiliating experience. I hated the fear of being called on in a classroom. I just wanted to hide a lot of self-judgment, which didn’t help in any. And I remember when I graduated from high school, I looked at my best friend from high school and I said, “This will be the last diploma or degree I will ever see. I will never do this again.” And I really meant it. I really meant it because it just wasn’t my thing.
So after working in a factory a few years and seeing what my friends who went from high school to college and what their life experience was, I really realized that I could return to school, that people learned from their mistakes and they learned like I did. So I decided to go back to school. Now I didn’t have the confidence to quit my job and just go to a four year university and leave home. I didn’t know if I was going to make it and I had to take a couple 099 classes like a math class. So anyway, I was still living at home and I was working hard for my money and I wasn’t ready. There was no way I was taking out a college loan. That just was not going to happen. It just wasn’t something I was thinking about. So I kept my job of working nights and going to school during the day.
And I was also living at home and it just wasn’t something that was going to happen at that time. I worked my butt off and I was determined and I had a lot of anger at that time. I felt like I had to walk through a lot of personal walls of insecurity, of negativity, not good enough, not smart enough. And I felt like for a lot of people, it was going from high school to college was a step in life. But for me, I had to work through all this crap and I wasn’t happy about it. I was angry wondering, why wasn’t I raised with this or whatever, blaming other people instead of taking responsibility for myself. And after a lot of not wanting to be there and kicking and screaming and actually going to college, I graduated in four years with a bachelor’s degree, which was a miracle.
I never thought that would happen. And after four years, I went into the Peace Corps, which was great opportunity. And when I got home, I found a job. I didn’t know where to look for a job. I didn’t really understand the white collar world. And I found a job working for a social service agency making $7 an hour. Now, it was the only job I could find and I was uninsured because it was too expensive to health insurance and there’s no retirement plan. So I was depressed. I was angry and I felt like I picked myself up from a factory through four years of college, busted my back, walked through walls and somehow I depreciated. I ended up with less than what I had before. So I just had all this anger. I ended up on an antidepressant, gained weight, which I’ve lost some of it, but not all of it.
So long story short, I was just not happy and I ended up getting fired from the job. I guess we have a theme here. Apparently when you have a job, they expect you to show up and be on time. I was so depressed that I couldn’t even get out of bed and I didn’t care. So naturally they fired me, which was a blessing on both sides, I think. So I started working as a teacher and I was teaching ESL and I was making more money part-time than I was full-time, but something was still missing. I still did not have benefits even though I liked my job. So I realized I have to get a master’s degree. Well, this really ticked me off because that was like a mountain and something that I just wasn’t prepared for. I mean, come on, I came from a factory through four years of college.
I never thought I’d do that and now you want me to go to another level. So I was angry. I was blaming everybody, kicking and screaming and fighting in every way. And finally I got there and I returned to school and ended up graduating with a master’s degree after two years, which was a huge accomplishment. And later I went on and got a graduate certificate. And if anybody knew me in high school, they would say, “No way that would have happened.” And I would have agreed. So anyway, but my point is, I guess we never know where we’re going to go in life and it’s these challenges that take us from that first step of life to the second half. I gained a lot of confidence by facing my fears and insecurities.
And today when I challenge myself, it’s very different. There’s no more of that. I won’t say there’s no more kicking and screaming because sometimes I can fall into that, but it doesn’t last as long. I’m not stuck. I can get out of it. I can call for prayer. I can shift my own thinking. I have a lot more confidence. I have a lot more certainty and I know that whatever’s going on in my life that this is for me, regardless of how it looks and how much I don’t want to be in this space at times, this is for me and I can breathe into it and things open up and I can always live in that expectation that something better, something better is happening here. So I just want to talk a little bit about … So that’s my story and I want to talk a little bit about where it says we have to go through something major for us to really transform and instead of becoming bitter or closed, which some people stay bitter and closed, there’s other things that we become when we reach this other level of consciousness and the slides up here, great.
We can become more compassionate, more understanding, less judgmental. I have more understanding for other groups of people. Maybe I don’t need somebody to have my experience to understand other people’s experiences of what they’re going through, less ego, more comfortable being in the mystery of not knowing what’s next and trusting that something’s going to happen, more loving and forgiving of myself and others. Rohr suggests that spiritual maturity, it’s not about perfection, it’s about transformation. It’s not about having all the answers. It’s about leaning into how do I live in the space of trusting the unknown? And that’s what we call kind of that second half of life. Rohr also states he doesn’t glorify suffering, but he argues that suffering can soften us and open us and I believe that’s really true, that pain can break our illusions, deepen our empathy. That’s for sure I can see that in my space of understanding other people.
Reduce our ego. Can help us reconnect with others. Sometimes families go through something and it brings the family together. It’s just an awakened spiritual awareness being in the second half of life. So Rohr says people who have suffered deeply often become gentler, more understanding people. Now there’s others who don’t move to this other side of consciousness. They can become very bitter, very angry. And that would be an example of somebody who’s stuck in that old consciousness or that first half of life. So overall, it’s our choice of who we want to be. And like I said, it’s not just you’re there, you can go back and forth. It’s part of being human, but you stay in that previous space for a shorter amount of time. The goal of all this is love. So the point of spiritual growth is not superiority. It’s the point is love.
Signs of a spiritual, mature person are compassion, patience, forgiveness of self and others, non-defensiveness, realizing when somebody’s throwing their stuff at you, it’s not about you. It’s theirs. And not being so defensive, but understanding that not only for yourself, but for them, what’s going on with them. Being in a space of gratitude, not only when things are going well, but when things are challenging us, being in that space of, “Okay, this is for me.” Freedom from that constant self-focus. It’s not all about me. It’s not all about me. Okay? There’s a whole world out there. There’s other people. What we do impacts others.
And so again, it doesn’t mean that we won’t get triggered because we will, but we have that self-awareness and that ability to come back to love. And with that, I’m going to conclude and I’m going to invite the music team to come on back as we move into a community blessing and after the blessing, I’m going to close with a prayer. So I just invite everybody to just relax in their chair. If you’re at home, just lean back, be aware of your breath. If you’re not comfortable closing your eyes, just have a steady gaze in front of you.
Graced are we who no longer need easy answers. Fortunate are we who have fallen and become softer. Cherished are our questions. Beloved are unfinished selves. Sacred is a love beneath all curiosity. And at this point, I’m going to ask the ministers and the practitioners to stand to hold the space as we pray. In this divine moment, I recognize God that all powerful, that all knowing that ever present, that ever has been, it always will be. I know it is right here right now in that integrity, that wholeness, that there is nothing missing in this moment. And the same energy that always has been and always will be is right here right now and just how magnificent that is. I recognize God as love as all there is. I recognize God as that beloved sacred energy that just knows what to do. I know I am one of it and one in it, as is each and every one of us.
I just say yes to cityside being the vessel for spirit to move through and as. And just call forth that which is challenging us and knowing that is part of life. There is nothing that we have done wrong and to be in that moment and to know that this is for me, that this is a time to awaken, this is a time to love, this is a time to be gentle with ourselves and to trust that God, that life is for us. I just say yes to this right here and right now knowing it is the truth and knowing as we walk out through the week that we take this consciousness, this extension and just continue to move through and as life from a space of love, from a space of understanding, not just for ourselves, but for all people, for all things and just this expansion of consciousness throughout cityside, throughout the world and together we say, and so it is.