As of today, we are writing October of 2011, I am entering what one may call the second half of my life. And this is not necessarily because of age or that I am approaching the magic Five-Oh in a couple of months. It is because my first life became too small, too constraining, too unfulfilling - and yet, it is so hard to simply let go.

Thank God, I came across Richard Rohr’s book “Falling Upward, A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life” to help me verbalize what I intrinsically know to be the truth. Actually, I didn’t come across his book, as it were, it was recommended to me by Br. Andrew, OSB from Christ the King Priory in Schuyler, Nebraska. But that is a different story all together and I am getting ahead of myself.

Let us talk about Fr. Richard’s book, where he writes that “Sooner or later, if you are on any classic “spiritual schedule,” some event, person, death, idea, or relationship will enter your life that you simply cannot deal with, using your present skill set, your acquired knowledge, or your strong willpower. Spiritually speaking, you will be, you must be, led to the edge of your own private resources. At that point you will stumble over a necessary stumbling stone, as Isaiah calls it; or to state it in our language here, you will and you must “lose” at something. This is the only way that Life-Fate-God-Grace-Mystery can get you to change, let go of your egocentric preoccupations, and go on the further and larger journey. I wish I could say this was not true, but it is darn near absolute in the spiritual literature of the world.” (p.66)

From my own experience, let me tell you that this will invariably be a painful process. He calls it “a living crucible of necessary suffering. A crucible, as you know, is a vessel that holds molten metal in one place long enough to be purified and clarified.”

It takes a lot of heat to melt metal.

One can only try to imagine how much heart-wrenching, soul-searching and self-questioning it must have taken before Fr. Richard was able to make some of the following statements about the church and his Christian faith:

“So the church is both my greatest intellectual and moral problem and my most consoling home. She is both pathetic whore and frequent bride. There is still a marvelous marriage with such a bride, and many whores do occasionally become brides too. In a certain but real sense, the church itself is the first cross that Jesus is crucified on, as we limit, mangle, and try to control the always too big message. All the churches seem to crucify Jesus again and again by their inability to receive his whole body, but they often resurrect him too. I am without doubt a microcosm of this universal church.”

“For some of you, my quoting Jesus is the only way you will trust me; for others, it gives you more reasons to mistrust me, but I have to take both risks. If I dared to present all of these ideas simply as my ideas, or because they match modern psychology or old mythology, I would be dishonest. Jesus for me always clinches the deal, and I sometimes wonder why I did not listen to him in the first place.”

“God, you were here all along, and I never knew it” (Genesis 28:16)

Trust me, dear friend, I myself was not always in a position to openly talk or even think about God. As a matter of fact, and throughout most of my first half of life, I was not even aware of HIS existence, even though I now know that he was always there for me, and with me. I just had to watch my “Footprints in the Sand”:

One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord. Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.

In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand. Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, other times there was one only.

This bothered me because I noticed that during the low periods of my life, when I was suffering from anguish, sorrow or defeat, I could see only one set of footprints, so I said to the Lord,

“You promised me Lord,
that if I followed you, you would walk with me always. But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life there has only been one set of footprints in the sand. Why, when I needed you most, have you not been there for me?”

The Lord replied, “The years when you have seen only one set of footprints, my child, is when I carried you.”

This poem is attributed to Mary Stevenson, 1936, but there is an unfortunate and controversial story behind it (Who is the real author?).

Speaking of poetry, here is another one of my favorite poems. I first came across it in a German translation, and fell in love with it. I now learned that it is actually a poem by the American poet, Samuel Ullman (1840-1924). It is called “Youth” and can be found inscribed on The Stone of Eternal Youth (La Pietra della Giovinezza) in the Parco Giardino Sigurtà near Peschièra, Lago di Garda:

Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.

Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of sixty more than a boy of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being’s heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what’s next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the Infinite, so long are you young.

When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.

And here is the German translation:

Die Jugend ist nicht ein Abschnitt des Lebens,

sie ist ein Zustand der Seele,

der in einer bestimmten Form des Willens besteht,

in einer Bereitschaft zur Phantasie,

in einer gefühlsmässigen Kraft;

im Überwiegen des Mutes über die Zaghaftigkeit

und der Abenteuerlust über die Liebe zur Bequemlichkeit.

Man wird nicht alt wegen der einfachen Tatsache,

dass man eine bestimmte Zahl von Jahren gelebt hat,

sondern nur, wenn man sein eigenes Ideal aufgibt.

Wie die Jahre ihre Spuren auf den Körper zeichnen,

so zeichnet der Verzicht auf die Begeisterung sie auf die Seele.

Jung sein bedeutet, mit sechzig oder siebzig Jahren

die Liebe zum Wunderbaren zu bewahren,

das Erstaunen für die leuchtenden Dinge

und die strahlenden Gedanken;

den kühnen Glauben, den man den Ereignissen entgegenbringt,

den unstillbaren Wunsch des Kindes für alles, was neu ist,

den Sinn für die angenehmen und fröhlichen Seiten des Daseins.

Ihr werdet so lange jung sein, wie euer Herz die Botschaft

der Schönheit, der Kühnheit, und des Mutes aufnehmen wird;

die Botschaft der Grösse und der Stärke,

die euch von der Welt, von einem Menschen

oder von der Unendlichkeit geschenkt werden.

Wenn alle Fasern eures Herzens zerrissen sein werden,

und wenn sich auf ihnen der Schnee des Pessimismus

und das Eis des Zynismus gehäuft haben werden,

erst dann werdet ihr alt sein,

und dann möge sich Gott eurer Seele erbarmen.