Sense of Heaven

During the second half of my life, I am learning to grow by subtraction.  These are the decades of the inner work.  We move into another place, the afternoon of our life, which cannot be lived by the drives and energies of life’s morning. ‘What is a normal goal to a young person, becomes a neurotic hindrance in old age,’ wrote Carl Jung.

At this time of life, one learns that to be transparent and honest is more important than to be successful or respected; that it is more blessed to be truly human and spiritual than religious or clerical.

I’m learning that one can become old without becoming aged.  Libby Purves wrote about an aged agelessness. ‘There can be a sort of lightness, a sense of having seen and suffered much, but accepting that you can be rich in what you have lost.’

Bette Davis reminded us that, ‘old age is not for sissies.’  She was right. Without a certain discipline and purpose of mind, the shadows of bitterness, cynicism or despair can easily begin their deadly work in us.  We are right to be concerned about poverty and pensions, about dementia and care. But we must also, from time to time sit back in wonder at our lives, savour the flavour of many graced experiences, of those unexpected moments of love that still fill us with gratitude and hope.

Part of that wonder, for me, is the reassurance that the complexities of my life are not mine alone; that in spite of peculiarities, extremes and failures, I am no different from others in their eccentricities, pathological desires and secrets. I am not out of step with other normal human beings, walking around inside their own human skin.  Everyone is wounded; everyone is hurting; everyone is imperfect. All are sinners.

‘The Scriptures are filled with stories of people close to God, even as their own lives are often fraught with mess, confusion, frustration, betrayal, infidelity and sin,’ writer and theologian Ronald Rolheiser reminds us. ‘There are no simple human beings, immune to the psychological, sexual and relational complexities that beset us all.’

Also, during these later years, if we are lucky, a clearer self-awareness of our place in the grand scheme of things may be revealed.  After many decades, a pattern of our persistent contribution emerges, the abiding melody that runs through the mix and mess of our life’s decisions and choices.

Blessed John Henry Newman wrote about the importance of being able, one day, to name and nourish that incarnate gift, that enduring song, entrusted to us – and to nobody else.

Irish Novelist Colm Tóibín wrote about his transition into the second half of life.  He does not think at all about his many literary achievements but he does reflect on the parable of the talents. ‘I think I was given one talent,’ he wrote, ‘as minor as it may be and I just work hard at it and try to be as truthful to it as I can.’

The gradual harvesting of our lives brings many revelations. I have noticed, for instance, how often our pet beliefs, our commitment to rules and rubrics, to this or that certainty, seem to lose their influence over us. This usually happens when we finally surrender to the embrace of a God who is utterly different form anything we ever imagined. Once you have experienced even a hint of such a beautiful lover, there is no going back.

These contemplative years, then, are never meant to be a slow and slumbering slide into terminal places. They may, in fact, contain epiphanies of a vital presence, when we hold ourselves still, ‘quivering with each moment,’ as the mystic Rumi wrote, ‘like a drop of mercury.’ Such vibrant attentiveness, uniquely in later life, is what the mystics call ‘the sense of heaven.’

Treasured and Transformed