Insane for the Light

Part One

The Seasons of Our Lives

That is why I have decided to stand up and open my eyes. I have decided to eat and drink in moderation, to sleep as necessary, to write only what contributes toward improving those who read me, to abstain from greed, and never compare myself to my fellows. I have also decided to water my plants and care for an animal. I will visit the sick, I will converse with the lonely, and I will not let much time go by before playing with a child. . . .

I will live for those things according to an ethics of attention and care. And this is how I will arrive at a happy old age, when I will contemplate, humble and proud at the same time, the small but grand orchard that I have cultivated. Life as cult, culture, and cultivation.

One

Spirituality and the Seasons of Our Lives

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

Life has its seasons. So do we. We cry as infants, stagger as toddlers, soak up learning from kindergarten to puberty, become painfully restless as our hormones awaken in adolescence, make choices and settle into life as young adults, carry the burdens of duty and mortgages as we mature, retire in late midlife, and then, finally mature, face diminishment and death.

All of this, of course, has been endlessly diagnosed, analyzed, and studied from medical, psychological, sociological, mythical, and religious perspectives. As well, artists, poets, photographers, and biographers have created an aesthetics around it through pictures and stories that highlight the joy, the pathos, and sometimes the mind-numbing ordinariness of the different seasons of our lives. And all of this is helpful. The studies feed the intellect; the aesthetics touch the heart. A healthy Christian discipleship.

Leaning on both the intellect and the heart, we ask this question: How might we distinguish, define, and understand the various seasons of our lives in a way that helps us grow in self-understanding and Christian discipleship?

Following the renowned Spanish mystic John of the Cross, it can be helpful to distinguish three major seasons or stages within our lives. John of the Cross, using medieval and mystical terminology, calls these three seasons the dark night of the senses, proficiency, and the dark night of the spirit. In today’s language, we might more aptly call them the struggle to get our lives together, the struggle to give our lives away, and the struggle to age with grace and give our deaths away.

Admittedly, these stages or seasons of life are fairly obvious. Unless one dies young, everyone has to undergo these three struggles. Each of these struggles involves our whole person: Our spiritual struggle is not separate from our human struggle. Our faith journey and our human journey are one and the same, even if they may seem separate. For all of us, the deeper truth is that the anthropological, the spiritual, the psychological, the emotional, the moral, the sexual, the vocational, and the physical are all part of one and the same person, struggle, and journey. We struggle as human beings, pure and simple. Hence, everyone who reaches full adulthood undergoes these struggles, regardless of whether she senses them as a spiritual struggle.

The First Season: The Struggle to Get Our Lives Together

The struggle to get our lives together might be best illustrated by the commonplace journey most of us make from youth to adulthood, from immaturity to initial maturity. What, in essence, is this initial struggle?

Home is where we start from. We are either born in a home or taken home soon afterward. Then, unless we are scarred by some trauma in our childhood, the next ten to twelve years are normally good, stabilizing, happy, comfortable years. We are at home, content enough with being children, eager to experience things, alert and attentive to most everything, quick to learn, and hopefully comfortable being with our families. But then puberty hits us with a violence powerful enough to rearrange our bodies and emotions quickly and fundamentally. This is not an anomaly but nature’s way. Puberty is designed by God and nature to drive us out of our home so that we have to seek a new home, one that we choose and build.

This journey that puberty puts us on is really our first truly personal struggle for individuation. Admittedly, we struggled before that and had to assert ourselves right from the moment of birth to find a place in this world and claim our individuality, but we were able to do this in the protective safety of a cocoon, a home. Puberty sends us packing our bags and setting out along a road on which we must find a new home. It drives us out of our initial home to begin the first major personal struggle in our lives, the struggle to find out who we are and, in that, to find a vocation, a mate, a community, a support system, a maturity, and a meaning for our lives.

In Sacred Fire, I highlighted how during that season of our lives, we struggle with some very powerful fires that fill the body, the mind, and the heart so as to make this journey one that is filled with deep restlessness, deep heartache, deep insecurity, and deep danger.

These powerful energies deeply root themselves in one energy that undergirds and fuels all the others—namely, in something the ancient Greeks called “Eros.” What is this? The word takes its root from the Greek god of love and sex, Eros, who was the child of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, passion, and procreation. Hence, for the ancient Greeks and for the Neoplatonic philosophers who followed them (and deeply influenced Christian theology), the word “Eros” took on the connotation of all the energies we feel inside us that are connected to love, sex, beauty, pleasure, passion, and creativity.

Eros is more than sex. It is the sheer pulse for life that is at the root of every energy inside us, physical and spiritual. In our younger years, particularly in the years from puberty to early midlife, this sheer pulse for life, Eros, is very strong. We see this in the bubbly, lively, noisy, endless energy of young people who, at this stage of their lives, can carry deep wounds and still be bouncy cheerleaders. We see it in the laughter and partying of youth, and we see it as well in their grandiose hopes and dreams. Of itself, it is a beautiful energy, a God-given one. It does make the world go round.

But, like all things powerful, it is not always easy to handle. We also see its gripping power in the struggle of youth to channel sexuality properly; in their pathological restlessness; in their sulky loneliness; in their struggle to sort out its moral energies; in their struggle for meaning, personal identity, significance, and self-worth; and (not least) in their inchoate nostalgia to “come home,” to find roots, moral companionship, a soulmate.

A lot can be understood about the energies that drive us from the onset of puberty until midlife by more closely examining the concept of inchoate nostalgia, the desire in us to come home. My younger brother shares this story: In his fifties, he was working in an office with colleagues who were in their twenties and thirties. One Friday afternoon during break, a number of them were sharing their plans for the weekend. Some were planning to hit the city’s nightclubs and restaurants. Others were planning trips to the mountains. Everyone, it seemed, was planning something exciting. When it was my brother’s turn, he shared rather sheepishly that on Friday evenings he and his wife (happily married for more than thirty years) usually ordered pizza and watched a movie. “That must sound pretty boring to you,” he added. “Not at all,” a twentysomething woman said. “You know, we do all the things that we are doing, all the clubs and socials, so that when we are your age, we can be content at home with a pizza and a movie on a Friday night!”

She is right, and her insight can be taken as a summary statement of our struggle to get our lives together. Puberty awakens some very powerful energies inside us, energies that have us deeply restless, struggling with sexuality, dreaming great dreams, and wrestling with great temptations; but, in the end, the intent of all those energies is to bring us home again, to a family, to a vocation, to meaning, to moral companionship, to a soulmate, to pizza and a movie on a Friday night.

This journey to find our way back home again can take ten to twenty years, especially today when it can take a long time to prepare for a career. It also does not come with any guarantees; some people never find their way home again but still at age forty or fifty are struggling with the question, Where am I going with my life? As well, the journey is not without its dangers, particularly given that in most cultures today, we do not have effective initiation rites to turn boys into men and girls into women.