CHAPTER 1
THE TWO HALVES OF LIFE

As I began to explore in the Introduction, the task of the first half of life is to create a proper container for one's life and answer the first essential questions: “What makes me significant?” “How can I support myself?” and “Who will go with me?” The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver. As Mary Oliver (1935–2019) put it, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”1 In other words, the container is not an end in itself, but exists for the sake of our deeper and fullest life, which we largely do not know about ourselves. Far too many people just keep doing repair work on the container itself and never “throw their nets into the deep” (Luke 5:4) to bring in the huge catch that awaits them.

Problematically, the first task invests so much of our blood, sweat, eggs and sperm, tears and years that we often cannot imagine there is a second task or that anything more could be expected of us. “The old wineskins are good enough,” we say (see Luke 5:37–39), even though, according to Jesus, they often cannot hold the new wine. As Jesus assures us, if we do not get some new wineskins, the wine and the wineskin will both be lost. The second half of life can hold some new wine because, by then, there should be some strong wineskins, some tested ways of holding our lives together. But that normally means that the container itself has to stretch, die in its present form, or even replace itself with something better. This is the big “rub,” as they say, but also the very source of our midlife excitement and discovery.

Various traditions have used many metaphors to make this differentiation clear: beginners and proficients, novices and initiated, milk and meat, letter and spirit, juniors and seniors, baptized and confirmed, apprentice and master, morning and evening, “Peter, when you were young…Peter, when you are old” (see John 21:18). Only when we have begun to live in the second half of life can we see the difference between the two. Yet the two halves are cumulative and sequential, and both are very necessary. We cannot do a nonstop flight to the second half of life by reading lots of books about it, including this one. Grace must and will edge us forward. “God has no grandchildren. God only has children,” as some have said. Each generation has to make its own discoveries of Spirit for itself. If not, we just react to the previous generation—and often overreact. Or we conform and often overconform. Neither is a positive or creative way to move forward.

No pope, Bible quote, psychological technique, religious formula, book, or guru can do your journey for you. If you try to skip the first journey, you will never see its real necessity and also its limitations. You will never know why this first container must fail you, experience the wonderful fullness of the second half of the journey, and discover the relationship between the two. Such is the unreality of many people who “never grow up” or who remain narcissistic into their old age. This is not a small number of people in our world today.

“Juniors” on the first part of the journey invariably think that true elders are naïve, simplistic, “out of it,” or just superfluous. They cannot understand what they have not yet experienced. They are totally involved in their first task and cannot see beyond it. Conversely, if a person has transcended and included the previous stages, they will always have a patient understanding of the juniors and can be patient and helpful to them somewhat naturally (although not without trial and effort). That is precisely what makes such people elders! Higher stages always empathetically include the lower, or they are not higher stages.

Almost all cultures, and even most of religious history, have been invested in the creation and maintenance of first-half-of-life issues: the big three concerns of identity, security, and sexuality and gender. They don't just preoccupy us; they totally take over. That is where history has focused up to now. In fact, most generations have seen boundary marking and protecting those boundaries as their primary and sometimes only tasks in life. Most of history has been about the forging of structures of security and appropriate loyalty symbols to announce and defend one's personal identity, one's group, and one's gender issues and identity. Now, we seem to live in a time when more and more people are asking, “Is that all there is?”

In our formative years, we are so self-preoccupied that we are both overly defensive and overly offensive at the same time, with little time left for simply living, pure friendship, useless beauty, or moments of communion with nature or anything else. Yet that kind of ego structuring is exactly what a young person needs, by and large, to get through the first twenty years or so. It's also what tribes need to survive. Maybe it is what humanity needed to get started. “Good fences make good neighbors,”2 Robert Frost (1874–1963) wrote, but he also presumed that we don't just build fences. We eventually need to cross beyond them as well to actually meet the neighbor.

So, we need boundaries, identity, safety, and some degree of order and consistency to get started, personally and culturally. We also need to feel “special”; we need our “narcissistic fix.” By that, I mean we all need some successes, response, and positive feedback early in life, or we will spend the rest of our lives demanding it, or bemoaning its lack, from others. There is a good and needed “narcissism,” if you want to call it that. We have to first have an ego structure to then let go of it and move beyond it. Responding to John the Baptist's hard-line approach, Jesus maintains both sides of this equation when he says, “No man born of woman is greater than John the Baptizer, yet the least who enters the reign of heaven is greater than he is” (Matthew 11:11). Is that double-talk? No, it is second-half-of-life talk.

Basically, if you get mirrored well early in life, you do not have to spend the rest of your life looking in Narcissus' mirror or begging for the attention of others. You have already been “attended to” and now feel basically good—and always will. If you were properly mirrored when you were young, you are now free to mirror others and see yourself—honestly and helpfully. I can see why a number of saints spoke of prayer itself as simply receiving the ever-benevolent gaze of God, returning it in kind, mutually gazing, and finally recognizing that it is one single gaze received and bounced back. The Hindus call this exciting mutual beholding darshan. I will say more about this mirroring toward the end of the book.

Once you have your narcissistic fix, you have no real need to protect your identity, defend it, prove it, or assert it. It just is, and it is more than enough. This is what we actually mean by “salvation,” especially when we get our narcissistic fix all the way from the Top. When we get our “Who am I?” question right, all the “What should I do?” questions tend to take care of themselves. The very fact that so many religious people have to so vigorously prove and defend their salvation theories makes me seriously doubt whether they have experienced divine mirroring at any great depth.

In the first half of life, success, security, and containment—“looking good” to ourselves and others—are almost the only questions. They are the early stages in Maslow's “hierarchy of needs.”3 In a culture like ours that is still preoccupied with security issues, enormously high military budgets are never seriously questioned by Congress or the people, while appropriations reflecting later stages in the hierarchy of needs—like those for education, health care for the poor, and the arts—are quickly cut, if even considered. The message is clear: We are largely an adolescent culture. Religions, similarly, need to make truth claims that are absolutely absolute, and we want them for just that—because they are absolute! This feels right and necessary at this early stage, despite any talk of biblical “faith” or trust, which can only be comprehended later.

We all want and need various certitudes, constants, and insurance policies at every stage of life. But we have to be careful, or they totally take over and become all-controlling needs, keeping us from further growth. Thus the most common one-liner in the Bible is, “Do not be afraid”; in fact, someone counted and found that it occurs 365 times—once for each day of the year! If we do not move beyond our early motivations of personal security, reproduction, and survival (the fear-based preoccupations of the “lizard brain”), we will never proceed beyond the lower stages of human or spiritual development. Many church sermons I have heard never seem to...