Continuing to ponder my dying well plan, I recently re-read “Falling Upward” by Richard Rohr. It is the resource for much of this post. I highly recommend it, whether or not you are working on a dying well plan.
The first task of dying well is living well.
Most living happens in the first half of life.
Richard Rohr and Brian McLearn comment on the first half of life:
…my layperson’s interpretation of Carl Jung—he would say that the first half of life is the task that we think is our primary task. The second half of life is really the task within the task that a lot of people never get to because they’re so preoccupied with the first task, which is all about making money, getting an education, raising children, and paying a mortgage. It’s about tradition, law, structure, authority, and identity. It’s about why I’m significant, why I’m important, why I matter, why I’m good.
Most of us are so invested in these first-half-of-life tasks by the age of forty that we can’t imagine there’s anything more to life. But if we stay there, it remains all about me. How can I be important? How can I be safe? How can I be significant? How can I make money? How can I look good? And how can I die a happy death and go to heaven? Religion itself becomes an evacuation plan for the next life, as my friend and colleague Brian McLaren says, because we don’t see much happening of depth or significance in this world. It largely remains a matter of survival.
I’m sad to say, after fifty-five years as a priest, I think a lot of Christians have never moved beyond survival questions, security questions, even securing their future in eternity. First-half-of-life religion is an insurance plan to ensure that future. In this stage, any sense of being a part of a cosmos, of being part of a historical sweep, that God is doing something bigger and better and larger than simply saving individual souls (and my own soul in particular) is largely of no interest to us. I don’t think I’m exaggerating. That’s all the first half of life can do.Brian McLaren charts growth in the spiritual life as coming to greater fullness when we move beyond the simplicity of that first season:
Just as all higher mathematics depends on learning basic arithmetic, and just as all more sophisticated music depends on mastering the basics of tempo, melody, and harmony, the spiritual life depends on learning well the essential lessons of this first season, Simplicity.
If these lessons aren’t learned well, practitioners will struggle in later seasons. But if in due time this season doesn’t give way to the next, the spiritual life can grow stagnant and even toxic. Nearly all of us in this dynamic season of Simplicity tend to share a number of characteristics. We see the world in simple dualist terms: we are the good guys who follow the good authority figures and we have the right answers; they are the bad guys who consciously or unconsciously fight on the wrong side of the cosmic struggle between good and evil. We feel a deep sense of identity and belonging in our in-group…. This simple, dualist faith gives us great confidence.
This confidence, of course, has a danger, as the old Bob Dylan classic “With God on Our Side” makes clear: “You don’t count the dead when God’s on your side.” The same sense of identification with an in-group that generates a warm glow of belonging and motivates sacrificial action for us can sour into intolerance, hatred, and even violence toward them. And the same easy, black-and-white answers that comfort and reassure us now may later seem arrogant, naive, ignorant, and harmful, if we don’t move beyond Simplicity in the fullness of time.
The following is an introduction to my spiritual journey shared in 2008. Written prior to an awareness of first half/second half of life concepts, I was surprised how it aligned with Rohr’s and McLaren’s descriptions.
Time will not permit me to retrace all the steps of my journey over the past decades, but I will share this with you. We are on a never-ending journey. When I reach heaven, I won’t suddenly “know God” and “know the whole story”. We’ll always be learning—even in heaven.
I believed, (until the past 5 or so years) that life was “getting things together”. I lived to get control – manage my work life, my family life, my Christianity Stability
– manage my finances, be stable in my work and get ahead Predictability
– God would be pleased with me.
If I achieved this, I would be successful “Financially, in my work life, in my family or home life, and in my religious life.” I believed that I had to:
1) decide what I want out of life, and
2) decide how to get it done
If I did this, I was successful.
There are only two ways to look at life:
Decide what you want and get it done or
Live each day in search of God 1 Larry Crabb
I went with the first philosophy. I believed it to be true even in my religious life— “Decide what God wanted of you and get it done.”
But I learned that it doesn’t work that way.
Developing a dying well plan, has been frustrated by “..dying well starts with the art of living well.”2 The Lost Art of Dying – Dugdale Either or/ black and white thinking misconstrued first half living. Rather than seeing my first half experience as bad or at least an impediment to dying well, “Falling Upward” offered a new and helpful perspective. Consider the following:
…the two halves are cumulative and sequential, and both are very necessary. We cannot do a nonstop flight to the second half of life by reading lots of books about it. Grace must and will edge us forward. “God has no grandchildren. God only has children,” as some have said. Each generation has to make its own discoveries of Spirit for itself.
I made a fundamental mistake in thinking of first and second half as sequential, independent and unique to each other. They are unique but both are necessary. Despite my misguided first half, it was not a disaster, it was life lived; complete with flaws, success, pain, grief, love and joy.
Moments of transcendence in the first half of life , plants seeds in your soul; dropping breadcrumbs to follow in the second half.
I am reminded of how I thought of the Bible in much the same way. – Old Testament — New Testament.
One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening become a lie. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning. C. G. Jung
The first half is essential, its role in our life cannot overlooked. Establishing an identity, a home, relationships, friends, community, and security, and building a proper platform for our only life. Our institutions and our expectations, including our churches, are almost entirely configured to encourage, support, reward, and validate the tasks of the first half of life.
We can choose to stay in the fist half but… for most people will the second half of life begins after a “fall” that forces a person to move beyond their ego and established patterns. This “fall” is often a crisis or significant life event, like a loss, illness, or failure, that destabilizes the individual and allows them to move towards a more authentic self. It’s not tied to a specific age but rather to a process of individuation and a shift in focus from external achievements to inner growth and generativity.
As Rohr puts it, remaining in the first half is survival, we never get to join the “sacred dance”. Second half is about thriving, becoming fully human.
Most of us tend to think of the second half of life as largely about getting old, dealing with health issues, and letting go of our physical life, but the whole thesis of this book is exactly the opposite. What looks like falling can largely be experienced as falling upward and onward, into a broader and deeper world where the soul has found its fullness, is finally connected to the whole, and lives inside the Big Picture... a time to discover the meaning of life and to live in the present moment. It’s a time to let go of the ego and to find a deeper sense of self. It is primarily a call to being rather than a call to action. You move from the driver’s seat to being a happy passenger, one who is still allowed to make helpful suggestions to the Driver.
I am confident the second half is where being fully human, joining the sacred dance, is possible; an essential trait of dying well. “Dying well is meeting death fully human.“
There is no question in my mind — I am in the second half. Succeeding posts will attempt to address what that means for day to day life.
STILL ON THE JOURNEY
- 1Larry Crabb
- 2The Lost Art of Dying – Dugdale