The Dedalus Log

Whenever God shines his light on me
Opens up my eyes so I can see.
When I look up in the darkest night
And I know everything’s going to be alright.

In deep confusion, in great despair,
When I reach out for him, he is there.
When I am lonely as I can be,
And I know that God shines his light on me.

Reach out for him. He’ll be there.
With him your troubles you can share.
If you live, the life you love,
You get the blessing from above.

Heals the sick, and he heals the lame.
Says you can do it too, in Jesus’ name.
He’ll lift you up and turn you around,
And put your feet back, on higher ground.
(Whenever God Shines His Light: Van Morrison – 1995)

April has been a crazy month for me, especially coming right after all my thoughts, reflections, and essays about my Lenten retreat and the “mid life” crisis in 1997 that caused me to reassess my former and current self-image, and adopt healthier, and more creative and spiritual practices. Over a two-week span I met with Neal Siegel and Sue Harris, old friends and co-workers from our days at Van Nuys Middle School. It was quite a month – especially since my conversations with these two former comrades dealt with our retirements, and in some ways, coming to grips with what Father Richard Rohr calls, “the Second Half of Life”.

When I retired in 2009, I assumed my public life was over, and I was starting a new one. I had no idea what this new life would look like or be. I filled the first year with a renewal of old practices: I resumed daily mass, exchanged walking and going to the gym for jogging, started playing golf, writing personal essays, and volunteering at the county jail. It was a tranquil, soothing life made better with the birth of my first granddaughter. Caring for Sarah Kathleen two days a week gave me renewed purpose and new insights into the wonders of childhood, with its dawning awareness. I watched and photographed her every look and move as she gained mastery over her body and speech; and I marveled at how she was ecstatically captivated by every new sensory experience. Taking care of Sarah, and her sister Gracie three years later, kept me busy, occupied, and happy for six years – when suddenly they matriculated on to school and pre-school. Surprisingly I felt myself standing still. At first I was seduced by this newer sense of tranquility and calm that the absence of demanding activities brought me, but I soon began isolating and anesthetizing myself, doing and feeling less and less. I think the month-long illness and death of my mother jarred me awake, and I was further shaken emotionally upon learning of the death of my friend JoAnna Kunes, and the dying of my longtime friend and brother-in-law Danny Holiday. Yet it wasn’t until the weekend retreat, just before Easter, that I came to the realization that I was “stuck”, and had been for a long time prior to my mom’s illness, and I needed to find a way forward. So I started repeating old healthy practices that had helped me get through my first mid-life crisis, which included re-reading and listening to the books and lectures by two priests, a Franciscan, Fr. Richard Rohr, and a Jesuit, Fr. Anthony de Mello, both spiritual directors. One book I discovered was Rohr’s Falling Upward: Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, from which I extracted the following passages:

“Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is writing it and owning it. There are at least two major tasks to human life. The first task is to build a strong ‘container’ or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold. The first task we take for granted as the very purpose of life. The second task, I am told, is more encountered than sought. We all try to do what seems like the task that life first hands us: establishing an identity, a home, relationships, friends, community, security, and building a proper platform for our only life. But it takes us much longer to discover ‘the task within the task’, as I like to call it: what we are really doing, when we are doing what we are doing. It is when we begin to pay attention, and seek integrity precisely in the task within the task that we begin to move from the first to the second half of our lives. Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions and growing honestly about our actual motives. Most often we don’t pay attention to that inner task until we have had some kind of fall or failure in our outer tasks. Life, if we are honest about it, is made up of many failings and fallings, amidst all of our hopeful growing and achieving.

“Supposed achievements of the first half of life have to fall apart and show themselves to be wanting in some way, or we will not move further. A job, fortune, or reputation has to be lost, a death has to be suffered, a house has to be flooded, or a disease has to be endured. Everything winds down unless some outside force winds it back up. True spirituality could be called the ‘outside force’, although surprisingly it is found inside. Some kind of falling, what I call ‘necessary suffering’ is programmed into the journey. None of us go into spiritual maturity completely of our own accord, or by a totally free choice. We are led by Mystery, which religious people rightly call grace. Setting out is always a leap of faith, a risk in the deepest sense of the term, and an adventure too. The New is always by definition unfamiliar and untested, so God, life, destiny, suffering have to give us a push – usually a big one – or we will not go.

“The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo, even when it is not working. It attaches to past and present, and fears the future. When you are in the first half of life, you cannot see any kind of failing or dying as even possible, much less necessary or good. God mercifully hides thoughts of dying from the young, but unfortunately we then hide it from ourselves till the later years finally force it into our consciousness. It is done unto us. You will not know for sure that this message is true until you are on the ‘up’ side. You will never imagine it to be true until you have gone through the ‘down’ yourself and come out on the other side in larger form. You must be pressured ‘from on high’, by fate, circumstance, love, or God, because nothing in you wants to believe it, or wants to go through with it.”

I was still mulling over all the things Rohr described in this book, when I agreed to accompany Neal Siegel to a dinner with a group of other retired teachers and an assistant principal from Van Nuys Middle School. It was during our car ride to the restaurant that Neal began describing many of the symptoms I had been reading about, and experiencing for myself. He told me that he had always identified himself through his work as a teacher, dean, assistant principal, and finally middle school principal. He loved the work and its challenges, and his ability to master the many skills they required. But now, he was having difficulties adjusting to his second year of retirement. These difficulties were manifesting themselves in anxiety during the day and difficulty sleeping. Speaking to a friend and counselor about these symptoms had led him to conclude that he was at a crisis point in his life that required him to redefine himself anew, and only new activities and practices would help. He then described some of the things he was doing now – exercise, spiritual reading, meditation, and volunteer work. Sadly, the ride ended before I could share my own experiences and thoughts about this “change of life” process, but the things Neal shared rumbled around in my head for days after. The following week I had lunch with Sue Harris.

Sue was my assistant principal at Van Nuys Middle School for 10 years. I always valued and appreciated her ideas, insights, and recommendations – even though I didn’t always act on her advice. She had retired a few years before me, and was adjusting well to her new life. When we would get together for lunch and conversation, we discussed a wide range of topics, some of them stemming from travels and classes she had taken, or blogs I had written about golf, death, and dying. On this afternoon, when we finally got around to the subject of our retirements and how we were adjusting, I mentioned the importance of “service”, while admitting that I had taken a temporary leave from my volunteer work at the county jail. Sue acknowledged the need to serve, and shared stories of her own work of visiting the sick and dying in a hospice program. However, she added, she was now beginning to believe that it was more important to be a thoughtful and compassionate person who acts unconsciously in the right ways all the time, than to work at being a doer of good works. She illustrated this point by telling me of her latest visit with her accountant to file this year’s income tax return. Even though she only sees him once a year, she considered him a friend, and always looked forward to these enjoyable, annual encounters. A week after this hour-or-so long visit with her accountant-friend, she received a letter from him, thanking her for her friendship, and citing those qualities and actions he valued in her. The thoughtfulness of the letter astounded her, because she had been totally unaware of these qualities and actions, and their effect on him.

At that moment it hit me that this startling concept – that it was more important to be a thoughtful and compassionate person who acts unconsciously in the right ways, than being a doer of good works – echoed in my head. I had heard it before. It had been expounded upon in another book I was reading called, Awareness: Conversations with the Masters by Fr. Anthony de Mello. In a chapter titled, The Masquerade of Charity, de Mello said:

“Charity is really self-interest masquerading under the form of altruism. I give something – I get something. That isn’t charity, that’s enlightened self-interest. I will say this of the gospel of Jesus about achieving eternal life by acts of charity. The part that goes, ‘Come blest of my Father, when I was hungry, you gave me to eat’ and so on. I will complicate that story a bit: ‘I was hungry, and you gave me to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink’, and what do the people reply? ‘When? When did we do it? We didn’t know it.’ They were unconscious of doing anything good! I sometimes have a horrid fantasy where the king in this gospel is talking to people on his left and right, and he says, ‘I was hungry and you gave me to eat,’ and the people on the right side say, ‘That’s right, Lord, we know.’
‘I wasn’t talking to you’, the king corrects the people on his right, ‘It doesn’t follow that script; you’re not supposed to have known.’ The people on the left had no notion they were doing anything good. ‘My left hand had no idea what my right hand was doing.’ You know, a good is never so good as when you have no awareness that you’re doing good. You are never so good as when you have no consciousness that you’re good. Or as the great Sufi would say, “A saint is one, until he or she knows it”.

I shared this passage with Sue, and we talked more about it before the end of our afternoon, but the idea of unconscious charitable acts stayed with me for days. Both Sue and Neal had touched on aspects of a topic that I was experiencing, reading about, and trying to resolve – coming to grips with the “Second Half of Life”. But could the “the task within the task” cited above by Rohr also be the unconscious charitable acts mentioned by de Mello? If so, the second half of life is going to be a much more difficult journey than I expected. It would seem that the joy of life doesn’t get easier, so I suppose we need to find old or better methods and practices to experience grace, and learn to be aware of what happiness really is. We are still works in progress.