The
Two Halves of Life: How did we get them so mixed up?
Richard Rohr, OFM
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It is striking how often history has recognized that there are at least two
major movements in the spiritual journey. I call them the path of ascent
and the path of descent. Jesus speaks clearly to Peter of first
"dressing yourself," and when you are older "letting others dress
you" (John 21:18). Psychologists speak of having an ego before you
let go of your ego. C.G. Jung speaks of the task of the first half of life
as being "individuation" and the second half being
"transcendence." The wisdom of India tells a man that he is
first a student and householder, and later a "forest dweller" and a
wise man. They all intuited something that we are beginning to see was
crucial for cultural survival and personal transformation, and yet modern
humanism has largely forgotten it and even denies it. We treat the young
as if they were adults, and then we resent the old because they seem so
childish. Maybe there is a connection.
I am convinced that untold failure and distortion have entered the worlds of
psychological development and transformative spirituality because we have not
honored these two stages in proper sequence, and therefore have not honored them
at all. The tasks, the appropriate energies, and the goals themselves end up
being jumbled and confused. When we don't recognize that there are two
major life tasks, we usually produce rigid personality structures in the second
half of life because they are still idealizing the containment rules for the
first half of life. We also produce false surety and grandiosity in young men in
the first half of life because they take their petty ego concerns to be final or
significant goals. In Jesus words, the elderly keep building "bigger
barns" and becoming "fools" (Luke 12:18) when they should be
generative mentors for the next generation. While the rich young men
reject the initiating challenge: "Sell all that you own and give it
away" (Luke 18:22). It seems like pure idiocy to a young careerist
who thinks that life is all about upward mobility.
Basically, we have the whole thing backward. We raise children as
"liberals" to freely figure out and fend for themselves, and then they
rightly seek boundaries, overdo it to contain themselves in mid life, and end up
materialists, nationalists, militarists, and "power conservatives" by
the end of life. As educators have been telling us for most of the last
century, the natural movement of the developmental psyche is exactly the
opposite. We need to begin "conservative" with clear boundaries,
identity, a sense of "chosenness," and even a kind of specialness and
inherent dignity. I like to call it the narcissistic fix that good parents
give their children, and good religion gives its adherents. It is surely
the best way to start, but it is not a good way to continue and certainly not
where the wise man must be and will be at the end of life.
Then as we grow older "in wisdom, age, and grace" (Luke 2:40) we
should move toward more compassionate, tolerant, and forgiving world views, what
some people associate with more "bleeding heart liberal" thinking. The
dualistic mind breaks down in the presence of Divine Mystery and human failure,
or at least it should break down. Instead, we largely produce mere
ideologues and fundamentalists in the second half of life, who have sadly not
done "the fundamentals" of human and spiritual growth. Or we produce a
kind of intellectual with-heldness and skepticism that looks like liberal
humanism, but is far indeed from any real compassion or generativity toward the
world. True holiness and true wisdom are much deeper and broader than mere
liberal thinking, however, so do not think I am trying to equate them at all.
Our deconstructed Western culture is so backwards that we have actually turned
around the classic patterns of human growth. No wonder we have so many
suicidal and depressed teenagers, and so many unhappy and bitter old men.
We are supposed to move from a healthy conservatism to a healthy liberation from
the same, but we start with an utterly false and unwarranted liberalism, and end
up with self-addicted and stuck people by the age of 50. This is not
working.
We need instead, as the Dalai Lama says, to "learn the law very well, so we
will know how to disobey it properly." Paul makes the same point with
different metaphors: "Through the Law I am dead to the Law, so that
now I can live for God" (Galatians 2:18). Augustine is even more
daring, "Love God, and do what you want!" Such "free
thinking" from the very people that we are supposed to admire, shows how
unlike them we really are. In fact, such language even sounds dangerous,
antinomian, and libertine instead of religious. But that is only to people
who have still not completed the tasks of the first half of life! To them
it sounds like heresy, and in fact it is -- for them. But for mature men,
who have internalized the values of containment and law, "The human one is
master even of the Sabbath." (Luke 6:5.) Or "it matters not at
all whether one is circumcised [or its baptismal counterpart] or not, all that
matters is that one becomes an altogether new creation" (Galatians 5:15).
Sounds like Jesus and Paul are two dangerous heretics to me!
When the second half of life is put at the beginning of life, we have old men
and women still asking egocentric questions about their own significance and
superiority because they did not have the containment to test their own mettle
and find their inherent value when they were young. We also have young
people speaking with an arrogance and a self assuredness that is totally
undeserved. (This has always been true, I am sure, but at least we once
had elders who tempered and tested such flights of fancy instead of empowering
them.)
When the needed clarity of the first half of life is put off until the second,
it merely becomes strong opinions, absolutes, jingoism, and militarism among
older people whom we need at that age for integrity, broad mindedness, true
leadership, and the "reign of God." We have very few real
statesmen in the world today because most are still operating from a teenage
psyche of win/lose and more is better. We are all losers as a result.
They do not grow up because they refuse to first "grow down," and we
do not grow up because we have no models or true elders.
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