Adult Christianity

I came across some meditations by Richard Rohr that I've pieced together here. Interesting overlay on top of this year's Old Testament reading - and in light of many discussions and interactions over the past several years. I encourage you to read and sift and ponder and let Rohr haver with you a bit...of course, this will only really make sense to those in "the second half of their lives"... :)
In the first half of life you have to build your container which includes structure, family and law. These are the only things that control hormones and egos. If there is no limitation on the ego it self-destructs. We need sacred space, sacred time, and boundaries. If you don’t get structure when you are young, then later you become obsessed with law and rules.

When I was a chaplain at the Albuquerque jail there was a lot of talk about religion. Most people there had wasted the first half of life on alcohol, promiscuous sex and drugs. Their life had been chaos. They had an immense need for emotional purity and ego structure. Usually their religion was considered the only true religion, and they would invariably become very morally rigid about one or two select issues.

In the second half of life, you move toward the contents themselves, and your religion becomes a much broader sense of both morality and belonging. You have created your ego container and you just want to get to the real thing, the “new wine” as Jesus says, and not just the wineskins.

You must live and to some degree succeed in the tasks of the first half of life. You cannot fast-forward to the second half of life, spiritually speaking. Ego development is your first task, and then this “grain of wheat must die, or it remains just a grain of wheat” (John 12:24). You start by telling your children they are the center of the world and they are the best. God did this for the Jewish people in the Hebrew Scriptures, and this is what Jesus built on and passed on to us. It is not objectively true that we are “the best,” but it is psychologically and spiritually necessary to experience your “election” somehow. You need to have an ego to die to it and move beyond it. It is quite a paradox.

The final purpose of any idea of being special or chosen is to have the courage and the experience to communicate that “chosenness” to everyone else. It’s not just to advertise how saved and superior you are—which tends to be the common mistake.

Religion in a mature second half of life is not a moral matter or a superiority contest. It is a mystical matter where all questions of specialness have been answered at the deepest and most radical level—by God. So it is no longer my concern.

Paul says in Galatians 3 that the law will kill you, that the law leads to death, and only an experience of the Spirit has any saving power. Jesus says much the same with his mantra, “The law says, but I say" (Matthew 5:20-45). This has had little effect on the church recently.

Many Christians and many clergy are still trapped under the law and remain in the first half of life, spiritually speaking. This is not the gospel, but its most common counterfeit. You always fail if you’re under the criteria of the law because you can never attain something that you already have—namely your daughterhood and sonship in God. The law will send you on a wild goose chase that never ends and usually makes you more and more legalistic. Religion at this level becomes an eternal carrot on a stick held out in front of you. Unfortunately, we see this in many rigid and unhappy Christians. Their disappointment with God and themselves is visible to all but themselves, I am afraid. We can do so much better.

For most of the people I meet, the only way to get over the hump to the second half of life is some kind of suffering. Nothing else is strong enough to force us to let go of our ego structures and our old wineskins. We’re not ready at age twenty, although there are exceptions (like kids with cancer).

Some of our private salvation project has to fall apart and disappoint us. At that point the temptation is to go back and do the tasks of the first half of life with even greater diligence.

Organized Christianity in its Sunday form tends to encourage people to do the tasks of the first half of life over and over again (firming up the container instead of getting to the contents). The clergy do not question this because the container is what gives us a job. But it is also why many people become disillusioned by midlife, and also why we have the constant phenomenon of groups emerging on the side, like religious orders, hermits, and prayer and service groups where people actually try to live the message.

Up to the point where you fall in love with God, you haven’t yet met God. Religion is almost entirely cultural conformity and fear based. But “perfect love casts out all fear (1 John 4:18). If your motivation is still fear or shame based, then you are still building your container, which is necessary, but it does not demand any real love of God or neighbor yet.

Most of us begin with creating the skeleton, but it takes years and usually some suffering to find the meat, the muscle, and the real message of the Gospel. It is probably easiest to begin conservative, since liberals do not tend to respect the basic skeleton of faith or any limits to their seeming freedom.

In the second half of life you might look a little more like a liberal, but the real difference is that you have been overtaken by love and let go of fear. That is the meat, the muscle, and the message.

So how can we get to the second half of our own lives? We all know uptight men and women at 60 who still cannot let go and trust God or themselves. The secular person has no one to surrender to, so we can understand them being control freaks.

Christians supposedly do know a loving and trustworthy God, but they still do not entrust themselves to this God or others who are not just like them. Rigid and controlling people are almost always fear-based people. Only love thaws such coldness.

We each must fall into the hands of a living and loving God, sooner or later. It comes down to interior journeys of prayer, and leaps of faith where we learn to actively test and trust whether God is really with us, and whether God really cares. Only then can we deeply know that God is truly faithful and forgiving love—for us.

Many people are still living in a first-stage “beat up on myself” mode, as if this is supposed to please God. Unfortunately when you hate or fear yourself, you usually do the same to others—wives, husbands, family, coworkers, and neighbors.

In the second half of our spiritual lives, we do not need to prove, assert, or punish ourselves. We can freely and lovingly say “I am who I am.” Of course this grace has been granted after much shadowboxing and recognizing of one’s own failures. Afterwards you know that you are the same as everybody else, and we are all on this human journey together.

What you hate in other people is usually unrecognized and hated in yourself first. The only place to start therefore is with utter honesty and humility about yourself, but do not waste any time punishing yourself. That is the work of ego that always wants to judge everything up or down.

The soul compassionately sees everything in its wholeness and says “It is what it is.” From that radical acceptance comes real and deep change.

Adapted from Adult Christianity and How to Get There