A new book by Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr has been on my wish list for a good while now and so I was delighted to find this link today that provides a few extracts and an up and coming interview with the man himself on Wednesday.
I was also saddened to hear that Rohr is retiring soon and began to realise that other people who have been my stalwart spiritual mentors for so large a part of my life are likely to disappear from the stage soon; e.g. Ron Rolheiser must be near retirement age too. Oh dear , who will replace them I wonder ?!
Extract from the book below :-
Rohr writes: In the second half of life, we can give our energy to making even the painful parts and the formally excluded parts belong to the now unified field—especially people who are different, and those who have never had a chance.
If you have forgiven yourself for being imperfect and falling, you can now do it for just about everybody else.
If you have not done it for yourself, I am afraid you will likely pass on your sadness, absurdity, judgment and futility to others. This is the tragic path of the many elderly people who have not become actual elders, probably because they were never eldered or mentored themselves.
Such people seem to have missed out on the joy and clarity of the first simplicity, perhaps avoided the interim complexity, and finally lost the great freedom and magnanimity of the second simplicity as well.
We need to hold together all of the stages of life, and for some strange, wonderful reason, it all becomes quite “simple” as we approach our later years.
In fact, if this book is not making it very simple for you, I am doing it wrong and you are hearing it wrong.
The great irony is that you must go through a necessary complexity (perhaps another word for necessary suffering) to return to any second simplicity.
There is no nonstop flight from first to second naiveté."
A Few Reflections
As for myself these days, I drift in and out of periods of acute awareness of time passing, suffering, ageing and all the time -worn sentiments and anxieties that brings with it.
Then interspersed with this is a sublime belief that all will be well... and sometimes the image below says it better than I can !
Anyone who is a regular reader of this blog will know of my affinity for liminal spaces and as I move along the great chain of being into the second half of my life it is a place which both pulls and upturns me at every juncture.
Several experiences on my holiday these last couple of weeks put me into a liminal space and some were almost surreal.
Colin and myself had struck up a friendship with people sitting next to us at the table for our evening meal and we were enjoying an easy rapport with much laughter.
Colin had loaned one of the guests Roger an umbrella when we arrived in a Cannes in a downpour of torrential rain and the night before we had endured a heavy storm with 30-40 feet waves, another supreme example of not being in control !
Roger had celebrated his 48th wedding anniversary with his wife Mary only a few nights before. Even though we had only met for a few days we felt we had known each other for much longer.
One afternoon we returned to our cabin to find a light flashing on the cabin phone and there was a recorded message from reception saying that Mary was sorry she would not be joining us that evening as her husband had passed away during the early morning.
Roger and Colin had hit it off straight away and were like a comedy double act and Mary remarked that Roger had said to her that evening that he only wished he had met Colin earlier. My prayers are with Mary and her family especially this week.
Roger was seventy years of age and he had undergone heart bypass about fifteen years ago and was also diabetic so in some ways you might say his death was not unexpected and his wife Mary said that she knew his time was always short but even so, death is always a shock.
Mary was just so amazingly strong for the last days of the cruise as she prepared for a what must have been a heart wrenching meeting with her family as we returned to Southampton.
Colin mentioned to me one evening that the number of passengers on the ship closely matched the number of funerals he had conducted in his lifetime as a funeral director : over three thousand and we learnt that Roger was not the only one to die on the cruise: two other deaths were added to his in the two weeks we had been at sea.
Again, not all that surprising in statistical terms but because we were on a ship it seemed all that much closer.
The experience of being on the ship this past two weeks has become for me a sharp metaphorical liminal space where I have seen up close what I cannot control in life and where the "betwixt and between" of life and its proximity to death have been uncomfortably close.
Richard Rohr writes well on the experience of liminal space.
“Limina” is the Latin word for threshold, the space betwixt and between. Liminal space, therefore, is a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be but where the biblical God is always leading them.
It is when you have left the “tried and true” but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are finally out of the way. It is when you are in between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. It is no fun.
Think of Israel in the desert, Joseph in the pit, Jonah in the belly, the three Marys tending the tomb…IF YOU ARE NOT trained in how to hold anxiety, how to live with ambiguity, how to entrust and wait-you will run-or more likely you will “explain.”
Not necessarily a true explanation, but any explanation is better than scary liminal space. Anything to flee from this terrible “cloud of unknowing.”
Those of a more fear-based nature will run back to the old explanations. Those who love risk or hate thought will often quickly construct a new explanation where they can feel special and again in control.
Few of us know how to stay on the threshold. You just feel stupid there-and we are all trying to say something profound these days…
Everything genuinely new emerges in some kind of liminal space.”
No comments:
Post a Comment