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The Second Half of Life
 
Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward offers a spiritual path for what he calls ‘the two halves of life.’   Much of what follows is influenced by Rohr’s work and some from Carl Jung. However, most of it is a product of my own reflection and experience. Both life stages are very different, and so they are meant to be. What is particularly useful from Jung’s work is his insight that whatever brought us happiness and fulfillment in the first half of life will not deliver, to the same degree in the second. Even what we were very good at will not lift our boat in the second half like it did in the first. He suggests that the real danger would be to still think that it should, and when it doesn’t to try all the harder to force it do so. This might mean expanding the already successful business, working even harder, acquiring more ‘toys’, (or changing one’s partner). If the first half of life was about acquiring, achieving, and making a name for oneself, them the second should be about the very opposite; downsizing, taking more time to be, and decluttering one’s life. It’s as if the flow of energy in the first half of life was going in one direction, but in the second it reverses and flows opposite. Suffering will inevitably result when we resist and don’t allow ourselves to flow with what is.
 
Reflecting further on Jung’s insights into the two halves of life, he believes that the flow of consciousness is always towards wholeness. completion and balance. In order to achieve a roundedness in life, he suggested that we need to become aware of the parts of ourselves that were most underdeveloped in the earlier part of life. Whatever we achieved during that period was probably at the cost of another side of ourselves, and it is this underdeveloped potential, that now deserves our attention. For example, the pursuit of an academic career would inevitable have involved not having had the time to develop other creative pursuits. To have formed a successful business could have come at considerable cost to other areas, like the pursuit of hobbies, or even spending time with family. Particularly to be a good parent, or even ‘good enough’ probably came at the cost of having had to put one’s own life on hold during those childrearing years. To go with the energy of what the second half of life is inviting us into is to be re-energized and find that in doing something different, something deep within begins to come alive.
 
When I first read Jung’s insights into the two halves of life, I had already begun to experience their truth in my own experience. Love of the sea and all things nautical was my passion during early years and it became like a second career. Yet, when I changed parishes after twenty-eight years and went more inland, I surprised myself, and those who knew me, by not missing it nearly as much as expected. From that I learned that to live something fully is the way to eventually be able to leave it behind and move on to something else. During those early years, often spent on the high seas, I had no involvement with wood or crafts and creative sparks were few and far between. Now well into the second half of life, creativity has become a passion, and Wood You Believe has taken on a life of its own. Similarly in my early years, I wrote almost nothing and avoided it whenever I could. It was in response to many invitations to put the teachings around wood symbols on paper that I reluctantly put pen to paper. In so doing I experienced a surge of new energy and began to really enjoy practicing the craft. Now, even with twelve books in print and daily postings going out for the past four years the idea of being an author still feels very strange.
 
In essence the first part of life is about pursuing an outer life while the second half is more about cultivating an inner life. The career orientated person concerned with external success and climbing the ladder will experience at some point an inner invitation to turn inwards towards an inner career and becoming more aware. Usually, the well-developed persona of professionalism and apparent competence that was the envy of many will undergo a radical shattering and eventual disintegration. Life will find a way of dislodging the social climber thereby causing him or her to fall downwards into their own truth. This invitation comes veiled in a myriad of forms. It could be an overlook in promotion, a health scare, a family bereavement, a relationship breakdown, or problems with children. Usually, this invitation comes uninvited since it upsets the illusion that all is well and that I am in charge of my life. Unfortunately, this severe upset, that is really an unconscious setup, is seldom responded to. Instead, the recipient deals with the issue as an ‘inconvenience’, it gets dealt with in an external manner and so nothing is learned, and the deeper message goes ignored. The worrying symptom may be treated while the underlying cause remains.
The second half of life is meant to be very different from the first. Rather than achieving more or accumulating more the desire changes to needing to give more – to give back to the world in gratitude for so much of what has been received. This is why volunteerism at this stage is so important and on average those who do gain an extra two years of life. Living more simply so that others can simply live becomes the motto for so many in that category. This is the time when people think of the legacy they will leave to future generations that can not just be written on paper. It is when they become more aware of the beliefs, talents and gifts that they would like to see continue in their children and grandchildren. This second half of life ideally is where we no longer try to change anyone apart from ourselves. It is when we realize that we are responsible for our own happiness and stop the blame game. At this stage we have hopefully moved from a doing mode to a being mode. This does not equate to doing nothing but rather to a new kind of doing that happens quietly and organically. In spiritual terms it is when we bear fruit rather than produce results. 
Perhaps a litmus test to determine whether we have made the transition into the second half of life or not is whether we are still seeking to have that which we love to love what we have. Carl Jung believed that true religion belonged to this second half of life and that it was all about coming home to ourselves. For this to happen all the vestiges of the false self, that thrives on illusions, needed to be stripped away and while this would be a cause of great suffering it would also be a time of enormous spiritual awakening. Out of this would emerge a renewed sense of purpose, a fruitful quest for meaning and an awareness of Destiny and its demands. The soul now gets its satisfaction from being true to its highest purpose. Here it realizes that God’s goal is all about union and that we are not in any manner separate from God, from ourselves or from others. This is also the stage where the ego that has been gradually and painfully cracked open learns to become the servant of the soul instead of its master.
 


Religious or Spiritual?
 
This is one of the most often heard statements of our age that, ‘I’m not religious, I don’t go to church, but I am spiritual’. The latter part about being spiritual is quite nebulous and can range from having a deep awareness of God in my life and being committed to a spiritual discipline, to having given up on church but still holding on to vestiges of former beliefs. Any claim to being spiritual that is isolationist and doesn’t carry a good degree of interconnectedness and belonging has to be considered suspect. Spirituality and relatedness are like the two sides of the one coin and so to believe that one can maintain a spiritual life while living in splendid isolation is simply not possible. To paraphrase the Book of Genesis, ‘It is not good for man/woman to be alone; we need helpmates for our journey. It is worth noting how in that account of Creation God saw all that He had made and saw that ‘it was good’. The only thing He declared that was not good, was ‘for man to be alone’.
 
 
Wed 22nd Nov
 
Religion and Isolation
 
Our traditional religious practice while it revolved around church attendance was also quite isolationist. Churches were designed in a manner where the minimum of social interaction was possible, with seats in rows and everyone looking towards the Altar. Christ was far more recognized in the tabernacle on the altar than in the tabernacle of the heart. Talking was frowned on, and no one could turn sideways for too long without straining their necks. The church spire was seen to point to God up there rather than to the transcendent God both within and without. Religious vocabulary used expressions like ‘Him up there’, ‘saving my soul’ and ‘fulfilling my obligations’. In many homes religion was seen to be so divisive that like politics it was not to be talked about. In effect religion was understood to be a private matter where the essential link between communion, coming together and community was scarcely understood.
 
Thurs 23rd Nov
 
Religion V Spirituality
 
Christ warned his followers about the danger of ‘honoring him with their lips while their hearts were far from him’. Here he was obviously defining religion as a matter of the heart, and not just of external observance. It is an unfortunate fact that so much of our Catholicism in the past was defined much more in terms of external observance than interior disposition. Like the religion of the Scribes and Pharisees in New Testament times our religion became identified with adherence to rules and regulations and at its most basic level a catholic was classed as someone who went to Mass on Sundays. Within that context there was an abundance of sincerity, piety and devotion, but coinciding with an absence of spiritual awareness. The God of Fear had superseded the God of unconditional love, and so many good people lived and died with guilt, and a deep sense of unworthiness where no matter what they did, it was never good enough.
 
 
Fri 24th Nov
 
Catholic Guilt
 
Talking to an elderly parishioner one day he told me of how he was preparing for his final journey. He was a kind loving man who had lived a good life and had never caused hurt nor harm to anyone. He spoke of how he was looking forward to meeting his parents and all his old friends on the other side and anticipated a joyful reunion. Then he paused and with sadness said, ‘I guess that could still be a long way off, I will first have to get through the ‘bit’ in between. Obviously he was thinking of Purgatory, after a lifetime of being indoctrinated with the belief that while God is merciful and does forgive our sins, there is a remnant of guilt that still exists that only a time in Purgatory can resolve. In effect it was a belief that God forgives but He still remembers. His eyes lit up with the news that when we remember and confess our sins, God forgets. It was this bit of good news that allowed him to find peace, to walk with a pep in his step and only a few months later to die with a smile on his face.
 
Sat 25th Nov
 
When we remember God forgets
 
Here is a truth that is worth reflecting on – ‘when we forget God remembers but when we remember God forgets.’ From the Bible we have the divine reassurance that God is All Merciful and when we confess our sins he casts them to the bottom of the sea. In effect He forgets. This is the eternal nature of God that doesn’t change, yet our experience shows us that we suffer as a consequence of our actions and bad choices. This feels as if God is punishing us for our wrongdoing. However, could the deeper truth be that we are punished by our sins rather than for them? Drawing on many texts from the Scriptures especially the Gospel of St John, we can glean that only that which is held in darkness is subject to judgment, while that which is exposed to the light is beyond judgment. In other words, to live in a state of denial, where we fail to acknowledge our dark side, and instead project it onto others, is in effect to experience the dark side of the God who paradoxically remains all light.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Sun 26th Nov
 
Last Judgment
 
The American writer Mark Twain said one time that it wasn’t the passages of the Bible that he couldn’t understand that he found most difficult but the ones that he could clearly understand. I can think of hardly any passage in the Scriptures that is more challenging than that one today concerning the Last Judgment. It could be phrased as a simple question: Who will stand firm at the Last Judgment? The answer it spells out so clearly is the one who lovingly stands by those in need.
 
From the early Kingdom of Spain comes a story that is very similar to that of the Gospel message. One day King Richard was out hunting. When deep in the forest he was overtaken by a violent thunderstorm and found himself soaked to the bone, alone and hopelessly lost. It was evening and as he tried to find his way back to the royal palace he wasn’t able. As the night came on it became cold and he was out in the open. Tormented with hunger he wandered endlessly around the forest. Wet and exhausted he came at last in the early morning to a lonely farmhouse. He knocked on the door and knocked several times but no one answered. In despair he tried the door that was not fastened and creaked open. The peasant farmer leapt from his kitchen table and shouted ‘You scroundrel, you’re trying to steal something here. See that you get out immediately or I will set the dogs on you.
 
The King begged and pleaded but the peasant only got more angry. Finally he struck the king in the face and slammed the door after him. Some people were passing by and with their help the king managed to get back home. Days later the king invited the peasant to visit the Palace. The peasant thought, why am I being called to see the king, I have done nothing to him and I don’t even know him.
 
He had to enter the great hall all by himself and stand before the assembled princes of the kingdom. The king was on his throne with his royal robes with scepter in hand and crown on his head. For a long time he gazed at the trembling peasant in silence and then asked; ‘do you know me’? Suddenly the penny dropped for the peasant and he was so struck by those words that he just collapsed and died.
 
All the great religions of the world have a similar version of the last judgment and they all say that we will each hear those words….. I was hungry……. I was sick………I was a stranger ……….I was naked.
 
Our challenge is to so live that Christ will not have to say to any of us, You failed to recognize me in the least of your brothers and sisters, away with you into everlasting fire. What you failed to do to your brothers and sisters you failed to do to me.
 
 
Mon 27th Nov
 
Ideology or Humanness
 
In general humanity divides into two categories: Those who place ideology above humanness and those who place humanness above ideology. Unfortunately traditional Catholicism could be classed as an ideology, since it quite disrespected the reality of our humanness. As a religion that was based on the Incarnation, God becoming human, this was a total contradiction where one would have expected to be taught that to become more human was to become more like God. Yet the reality was that our bodies were to beaten into submission, our sexuality was to be feared, our emotions were suspect, our personal or ancestral story was given little importance and relationships were viewed with suspicion. No wonder Patrick Kavanagh the Monaghan poet called the Catholicism of his time, and to a fair extent what has been ours, ‘an insult to the Incarnation’. At the root of the widespread rejection of Catholicism of our time must surely lie this anti-human bias. This is such an unfortunate accretion that it distorts the Good News of God embracing us in the fullness of our humanity, and being comfortable to live in the messiness of being human.

​The truth of that Gospel today is something that does not come naturally to us adults. To love ourselves sounds like blatant selfishness and yet its central to the most basic of the commandments, Love God and your neighbor as you love yourself. This implies very strongly that without a proper healthy love and respect for myself I am incapable of loving another. That’s such strong stuff that we might be inclined to disagree, yet its there in black and white as the wisdom of the ages and has taken psychology 2000 years to catch up with.
 
This is also stuff that comes so naturally to kids today that they seem to be born with it. A mother who was driving along with her six year old daughter. The child asked, ‘Mummy who do you love the most you or me?’ The mother immediately replied ‘I love you most of course, honey’. The child seemed surprised and said ‘But Mummy do you not realize that if you don’t love yourself first you can’t really love me.’ You can imagine how that shock left mummy’s driving somewhat erratic.
 
‘Love God and eighbor’ is what many of us have grown up with, as our working definition of Christianity, and to love ourselves in a manner that isn’t akin to being selfish sounds almost a new language. New it may seem but it makes perfect sense. If God loves me then how can I not love myself? If God delights in me as his creation then, who am I belittle myself and think he made something inferior. If we don’t have the humility to give love to ourselves how foolish we are to think that we can give it to others. How can we give what we haven’t got?
 
When you kids produce something in school by way of artwork how you can’t wait to get home to show it to mummy or daddy. Even if it’s not great its still your creation and you love it.
 
Sometimes when I make something out of wood I find myself reflecting on these things. For example I have here a piece entitled Sun And Moon. The Sun is orange and smiling in the background while the moon is lying back and looking very contented in the foreground. It carries the deeper truth that if God is smiling upon me with satisfaction should that not make me feel good about myself? Making that would have taken many hours and there’s a great sense of satisfaction when its eventually completed. I might even take a certain delight in the work of my hands. In a way I am like that piece and God is the great artist who has made me and fashioned me and he too delights in me as the work of his hands.
 
So think about this, if God delights in me have I any right not to love myself. If He forgives me and everyone else have I any right to be unforgiving towards myself or towards anyone else?
 
Throughout my 43 years as a priest that message has been the one that I have been drawn back to over and over again. It really is the foundation of the entire Christian message. ‘Love God and eighbor as you love yourself.’ And that word ‘as’ is so important because it is as we love ourselves that we are enabled to love God and others. If we don’t do it in that order then we become a walking mass of contradictions. It is precisely because we are so infinitely loved by God that we can love and value ourselves. As the Book of Sirach says: ‘With humility have self-esteem and prize yourself as you deserve. Who will acquit the one who condemns himself and who can lift up the one who puts himself or herself down?’ The implication is that not even God can do so.
 
This means that the essence of sin is rejection of ourselves, of who we are as God’s creation, and his children. The only permanent relationship we can have from conception to eternity is our relationship with ourselves that is based on our relationship with God of course. It is also true that we can never love another person more than we love ourselves and neither can we ever be closer to another than we are to ourselves.

Some years ago a woman named Kim McMillian, after a lifetime suffering from doubt and self-criticism, discovered the importance of loving herself, and the incredible difference it made in every aspect of her life. It was the key that unlocked the dungeon of the torture chamber into which she had imprisoned herself. Shortly afterwards she wrote a book where each page contained just a few lines relating to her newfound discovery. It has the catchy title, When I loved myself enough, it was very popular and had huge sales worldwide. Unfortunately she died just a few months after writing the book. At only 53, and not knowing she was ill, this was to be her essence and final message to the world.                           

​The book is still available so I am not going to reproduce her work. However on a recent retreat I invited the participants to write their own book based on the same title. This weeks reflections are based largely on what they came up with, and when finished reading you might like to write your own and perhaps email them to me so I can compile for a future posting.
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When I loved myself enough, I would allow things to happen and not try and force them.
When I loved myself enough, I would allow other to be who they are and not try and change them.
When I loved myself enough, I would admit when I am wrong and not just say ‘sorry’.
When I loved myself enough, I would feel my feelings and not try to analyze them.
When I loved myself enough, I would befriend my difficult emotions and so give them space to transform.
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When I loved myself enough, I would not try and change myself, Instead I would accept myself as I am with all my imperfections.
When I loved myself enough, I would stop being critical and judgmental towards myself and others.
When I loved myself enough, I would not argue with my hunches and go more with my gut instincts.
When I loved myself enough, I would stop blaming others and take responsibility for my own feelings and reactions.
When I loved myself enough, I would stop playing it safe and take far more risks with the game of life.
When I loved myself enough, I would allow myself to feel and not slip into denial and evasive ways, like reaching for my phone.
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When I loved myself enough, I would declutter my home and make space for new and exciting possibilities to materialize.
When I loved myself enough, I would stop being invisible and playing small.
When I loved myself enough, I would let me light shine and allow my gifts to be a gift to others.
When I loved myself enough, I would see my loneliness as an invitation to come more home to myself.
When I loved myself enough, I would speak to myself with respect and compassion.
When I loved myself enough, I would listen to my body and not push it beyond its limits.
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When I loved myself enough, I would take care of my needs and not feel guilty.
When I loved myself enough, I would give freely to others without questioning motives.
When I loved myself enough, I would stop trying to be perfect and allow myself to become whole.
When I loved myself enough, I would stop comparing myself with others.
When I loved myself enough, I would accept my limitations and weaknesses.
When I loved myself enough, I would meditate and give myself time to recharge my batteries.
When I loved myself enough, I no longer needed to impress anyone.
When I loved myself enough, I would indulge myself with silence.

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When I loved myself enough, I would be my own best friend and not my worst enemy.
When I loved myself enough, I would treat myself to nice things regularly.
When I loved myself enough, I would not allow myself the luxury of a negative thought.
When I loved myself enough, I would cease struggling and practice the art of surrender.
When I loved myself enough, I would try to own every part of my personal story.
When I loved myself enough, I would embrace my family story, with all its characters because without my ancestors I would not be here.
When I loved myself enough, I would embrace even the very worst traits in my character and the contradictions of my personality.

​The mushroom inside a mushroom is a piece of traumatized wood, also made of yew like the outer piece, but discolored because a foreign body like a nail had been driven and it was forced to outgrow. This represents the wounded inner child that needs to be brought in from the cold and given its proper place in our lives. The overall piece is shaped like a well, and this is most significant because it is the wounded and vulnerable part of ourselves that becomes our well of strength and compassion.
 
In terms of loving ourselves, the part that we usually most need to love and connect with is our inner wounded child. In the previous posting the deeper issue was not that the lady had been abused when she was aged five, but more that she was still abusing that child. It was her relationship with that part of herself that was now causing her grief. She was still holding that child responsible for what had happened and not allowing it to be part of her life. In effect she was still doing to that child what had been done to her. It was this core part of herself that needed to be brought home and embraced in love.

​Becoming aware of how the past replicates itself in the present is a major component of psychological work since it provides a key to maturity and understanding. An event can be happening in the present and how we are dealing with it, and the emotions we experience, can be entirely dictated by something that happened in the past. A woman found herself going to Court to obtain a custody Order for her child. It was a standard and necessary procedure that was precautionary and the child was in no danger of being taken from her. Yet the fear of losing the child became all-consuming. The strength of the emotional reaction indicated something much deeper going on. The story unfolded that when she was five her mother had been abused by an uncle who had warned her that something terrible was going to happen if she broke their little secret. Her life from that time was characterized by anger, mistrust, guilt, low self-esteem, and poor self-confidence. She was kind hearted and helpful by nature and had tried to love others but without ever managing to love herself.

​In our emotional landscape, it doesn’t take much to trigger a volcano. Many of us are passive aggressive where by repressing emotions we allow our inner pressure to build up and then a trigger factor comes into play and we blow. The problem with such explosions is that they are indiscriminate and whoever is in the line of fire can get seriously hurt. Particularly when a big hurt of childhood trauma like sexual abuse breaks through, the subsequent anger needs careful handling as it has the potential to be devastating. For some reason we are almost genetically programmed to outlaw our negative emotions. We tend to treat them as enemies to be got rid of rather than friends to be entertained. The problem with trying to control, repress and deny them is that they will resist, persist and become even more controlling in our lives. The very energy that we use to keep them out of sight is empowering them to claim even more headspace than before. Learning the art of practicing inner hospitality is a major turning point in life when it comes to dealing with difficult emotions. Even the difficult and unpleasant emotion of anger that rises to meet us, is our hidden creativity, coming in disguise, waiting to greet us.

​Some years ago while engaged in cruise chaplaincy work, one trip brought us around Iceland, stopping off at many ports along the way. It’s a country with a remarkable landscape that gives a sense of never standing on solid ground. All around the mostly barren countryside are fissures in the ground from which steam continually arises. Across the country lies a major fault line that is similar and even related to the famous San Andreas Fault in California. Then there are mountains with strange names, viewed with mistrust, because they are potential volcanoes that could erupt at any time, and these are carefully monitored for seismic activity. I thought of the fault line as representing the fundamental inner division that can exist within, between I and myself that is so important to get right. The fissures mirrored the sensitive areas of life where we continually react and give off steam. Finally, the mountains were the big and potentially dangerous areas; that given enough time and under sufficient pressure, could erupt with devastating consequences. When such emotional eruptions occur in our lives, the question is how do I handle it so that both myself and others are not blown away by the fall out?

​Contrary to what we may have been taught to believe, the memory of traumatic events might never have reached our conscious memory, but instead became lodged in our bodies. Over and over we see that the part of the body that expresses physical symptoms, can mirror something that happened many years earlier. For example, a heavy burden, like guilt, can express itself in shoulder pain, that doesn’t always respond to medical treatment. Talk therapy serves a purpose in allowing a buried emotion to surface and in making sense of why the body is reacting as it is. However, the emotional issue can only be resolved in our bodies and not in our heads. This is where the adage comes into play, ‘that if you don’t feel it you can’t heal it.’ The first stage of healing is always telling as much of the story as we are conscious of. The second is to feel whatever needs to be felt, and to the fullest possible extent. This is not as easy as it sounds, since we are conditioned to reject rather than accept our negative emotions. Yet it is only when we learn to be hospitable towards them, will they transform and leave us in peace. Once these blocked emotions have been acknowledged, the fuller picture of what took place usually becomes much clearer in our our conscious memory.

​A young lady came one time in such deep emotional pain that she felt in danger of having a heart attack. Observing her body language, and listening to what she was not saying, as much as what she was, everything pointed to childhood trauma that was very likely related to sexual abuse. When asked if she had experienced any violation of boundaries as a child, it was as if a volcano of emotion erupted. When the energy subsided, having taken considerable time, she couldn’t believe how intense it had been and how her body had been carrying such a burden for so many years. She said ‘I was convinced I had dealt with that years ago. I went for some counseling sessions where I told my story, shed some tears and then got on with my life. I figured the issue belonged to the past, I couldn’t change it, so it was time to put it behind me, and try to forget it ever happened. Only now do I see that it has been with me all along, weighing me down and crippling my health.’ Such an approach is common for so many, where such a deep traumatic issue has been dealt with, but in a totally inadequate manner that amounts, not to healing but to another form of repression, that now hides under a psychological umbrella.