Sense and Sensibility : Letting go
Bambi Harper
Inquirer News Service
(With all the gloom and doom hanging over us like the pollution over Makati City, I thought I'd make your day by writing something to tickle your funny bone. Actually I did write something, but for some reason it didn't ring true. Instead I remembered that Junior's wife, Nancy, had asked when I intended to write another piece on "Centering Prayer." Anyone under 40 may not necessarily identify with what it has to say, but anyone in mid-life will recognize certain truisms. I have to thank my friend Cris for sharing the following article with me. I hope that it touches the right chords in you. Unfortunately the name of the author was not indicated.)
WHEN Nikos Kazantsakis was a young man, he interviewed an old monk on Mount Athos. At one stage, he asked him, "Do you skill struggle with the devil?"
"No," the monk replied. "I used to, but I've grown old and tired and the devil has grown old and tired with me. Now I leave him alone and he leaves me alone!"
"So your life is easy then," Kazantsakis asked. "No more struggles?"
"Ah, no," replied the monk, "its worse. Now I struggle with God!"
Someone once quipped that we spend the first half of our lives struggling with the devil and the second half of our lives struggling with God. While that captures something, it is too simple, unless we define "the devil" more widely to mean our struggles with the untamed energies of youth: eros, restlessness, sexuality, the ache for intimacy, the push for achievement, the search for moral cause, the hunger for roots, and the longing for companionship and a place that feels like home.
Its not easy, especially when we're young, to make peace with the fires inside us. We need to establish our own identity and find, for ourselves, intimacy, meaning, self-worth, quiet from the restlessness, and a place that feels like home. We can spend 50 years, after we've first left home, finding our way back there again.
But the good news is that generally we do get there. In midlife, perhaps only in late mid-life, we achieve something the mystics call "proficiency," a state wherein we have achieved an essential maturity -- basic peace, a sexuality integrated enough to let us sleep at night and keep commitments during the day, a sense of self-worth, and an essential unselfishness. We've found our way home. And there, as once before the onset of puberty, we're relatively comfortable again, content enough to recognize that our youthful journeyings, while exciting, were also full of restlessness. We'd like to be young again, but we don't want all that disquiet the second time. Like Kazantsakis' old monk, we've grown tired of wrestling with the devil and he with us. We now leave each other alone.
So where do we go from there, from home? The second half of life, just like the first, demands a journey. While the first half of life, as we saw, is very much consumed with the search for identity, meaning, self-worth, intimacy, rootedness, and making peace with our sexuality, the second half has another purpose, as expressed in the famous epigram of Job: "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I go back."
Where do we go from home? To an eternal home with God. But to do that, we have first to shed many of the things that we legitimately acquired and attached ourselves to during the first half of life. The spiritual task of the second half of life, so different from the first, is to let go, to move to the nakedness that Job describes.
What does that entail? From what do we need to detach ourselves? First and most importantly, from our wounds and anger. The foremost spiritual task of the second half of life is to forgive -- others, ourselves, life, God. We all arrive at mid-life wounded and not having had exactly the life of which we dreamed. There's a disappointment and anger inside every one of us and unless we find it in ourselves to forgive, we will die bitter, unready for the heavenly banquet.
Second, we need to detach ourselves from the need to possess, to achieve, and to be the center of attention. The task of the second half of life is to become the quiet, blessing grandparent who no longer needs to be the center of attention but is happy simply watching the young grow and enjoy themselves.
Third, we need to learn how to say goodbye to the earth and our loved ones so that, just as in the strength of our youth we once gave our lives for those we love, we can now give our deaths to them, too, as a final gift.
Finally, we need more and more to immerse ourselves in the language of silence, the language of heaven. Meister Eckhard once said: "Nothing so much resembles God as silence." The task of mid-life is to begin to understand that and enter into that language.
And it's a painful process. Purgatory's not some exotic, Catholic doctrine that believes that there is some place in the next life outside of heaven and hell. It's a central piece within any mature spirituality that, like Job, tells us that God's eternal embrace can become fully ecstatic only when we've learned to let go.
(Practitioners of Centering Prayer believe that it is through the practice that we learn to let go.)