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On the second half of life: celebrating plans B-Z.


On the second half of life: celebrating plans B-Z
Audio file:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZvWSGLMo7m1vhtQitY4ftbats7cbgYSc/view?usp=drivesdk  

I’m writing this on my 53rd birthday and while I’m not assuming I’ll make it to 106 I’d like to reflect a little on the second half of life. I’m not sure if Richard Rohr came up with this phrase, but he has certainly popularised it and has made the point that it can start for some folk in their late twenties and for others much, much later, if at all.   Without unpacking what this means for him I thought I’d take this chance to think a wee bit about what the view from here looks like for me.

A brief vignette of this precise time on Thursday morning gives a few of the themes of the second half of my life.   I’ve celebrated our mid-week Eucharist with a group of church friends, sharing my birthday cake with them afterwards.  I spent time printing a number of articles in the church office on current research on leadership and somewhere in the darkened church I dropped the sole remaining piece of chocolate cake.   After writing the first draft of this blog, I wait the visit of a new friend whose wife just died of cancer at 50.   On this 4th July:

I have a growing appreciation of more intimate moments of worship and of taking part in the deep rhythms of church life.  What Peterson calls ‘spiritual junk food’(Isaiah 55)doesn’t satisfy and God is both more real and more elusive than he’s ever been.    Jesus continues to intrigue and inspire me and seriously unsettle me sometimes.

I have new friends who are much older than me and I love the diversity they bring into my life.   My friends are no longer just those who are my age or share my interests and viewpoints.    Family grows in richness and numbers in the second half of life and I find my heart beats to the different beats of my loved ones.

I am more and more aware of what I know that I don’t know and find in myself an endless curiosity about the sheer vastness of the natural world and of human knowledge and experience.   Hence the continual reading of articles, books, hanging out with new conversation partners, investing in the big questions even though I’ll never get satisfactory answers.  

This is because I no longer need the promise of arrival to set out on a journey, the hope of a reward for the shedding of blood,sweat and tears, the guarantee of success to put my shoulder to some endeavour.   Plans B-Z are full of the rich surprises that plan A never is and part of that is the realisation that so much of what life brings us is in the taking part, not in particular outcomes.  One of the gifts of the second half of life is a caution about our own Plan A’s for any given situation.  These are predicated on our very limited view of this vast and great cosmos, so let’s hold to them loosely.

And of course I drop pieces of cake in the dark as my mental retention of anything remotely practical is similar to that of a hamster.   Carrying an armload of papers with a piece of cake balanced on top only works if you remember the cake, but of course my brain is already starting on this blog on my way over from church and the cake slips onto the floor in church where it is still lying.  The stickiness of mundane matters seems to have gone and the image of the absent minded old vicar starts to resonate more and more.

And finally, in the second half of life we get used to living with sadness, sometimes our own but often of others.   Sadness no longer seems the interloper that shouldn’t be there.  We help our parents plan for their funeral, we discover the gift of silent companionship in the face of tragic loss. We learn to live through profound disappointments into the new dawn of a life we hadn’t planned which has within it the seeds of a rich harvest of that which we didn’t know we didn’t know.  

The second half of life lifts our eyes from our own affairs and perspectives to the sheer majesty and and wonder of this world we live in, even in it’s shadow places, so that we find ourselves once again learning not to be afraid and discovering the child within us that was forgotten in the high noon of our lives.   In the words of Julian of Norwich, ‘all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.’  

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