Mystery and Transformation

There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life. It will sound an awful lot like the voices of risk, of trust, of surrender, of soul, of “common sense,” of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of your deepest self, of soulful “Beatrice.” The true faith journey only begins at this point. Up to now everything is mere preparation. Finally, we leave a container strong enough to hold the contents of our real life, which is always filled with contradictions and adventures and immense challenges. Psychological wholeness and spiritual holiness never exclude the problem from the solution. If it is wholeness, then it is always paradoxical, and holds both the dark and light sides of things. Wholeness and holiness will always stretch us beyond our small comfort zone. How could they not?    

...it will feel like a loss of faith or loss of self. But it is only the death of the false self, and is very often the very birth of the soul. Instead of being ego driven, you will begin to be soul drawn…  

St. John of the Cross taught that God has to work in the soul in secret and in darkness, because if we fully knew what was happening, and what Mystery/transformation/God/grace will eventually ask of us, we would either try to take charge or stop the whole process. No one oversees his or her own demise willingly, even when it is the false self that is dying.

FALLING UPWARD, Richard Rohr  

I began reading this book last week and it has stirred many questions in me. Am I still in the first half of life? Have the essential questions, "What makes me significant?" "How can I support myself?" and "Who will go with me?" been answered enough to create a proper container in which to start living the second half? It doesn't feel like they have been.

I wonder if I have more of a container than I can see, if believing I don't have the answers to these questions is really a lie? If that is why it feels full of risk, of trust, of surrender?

When I think of it as "falling upward," it feels much more about the "very birth of the soul," and that really challenges my dread and my fear in some of the choices that I need to be making in the near future.