When I woke up this morning, I was surprised to find that it was an hour later than I thought it was. Of course, I forgot to turn my clocks ahead last night before I went to bed. But life is all about waking up to surprises, isn’t it? Nothing turns out the way you anticipate that it will. The challenge that each one of us faces — and that challenge that erupts in the midlife transition — is to see the way things turn out as better than what we had expected. That’s not as simple and straight-forward as simply walking around the house, re-setting the clocks to daylight saving time. No, indeed!
Today marks the end of my life. That’s right: my life as I’ve known it for over six years ends today. Tomorrow, I get dressed in a suit, tuck my brand new organizer under my arm, and head off to take the Metro to work. As of tomorrow (Monday morning), I am a Federal bureaucrat, and my time — my life — is no longer my own. What happened to all the exciting plans that I had, following my passion to provide life coaching services to people in transition, building my own business,creating inspirational online content, offering life-altering content of tremendous value? It appears on the surface that all that collapsed into the quicksand of market disinterest. At first I saw it as the end of a dream. Then, once again, I woke up. Let me explain.
The essence of life can only be discovered in a spiritual awakening. Last night, we went to the movies and saw A Single Man with Colin Firth and Julianne Moore. It is the story of a man who rediscovers meaning in his life after the death of his life partner. He finds, just when he least expects it, a “moment of clarity” that makes all the difference. It was his spiritual awakening. All of my favorite authors talk about a ‘spiritual awakening’ as the core of the midlife transition, whether or not they use those exact words. It’s the ‘moment of clarity’ that separates adulthood from maturity. Like Firth’s character in A Single Man, we don’t get to chose when that moment comes, nor what it will look like when it arrives. The only thing that I can say for certain about it is that you will not recognize it before it hits.
I had two amazing interviews last week, both with women who have had their own moments of clarity and have, as a result, experienced their own spiritual awakenings. The first was during last week’s Midlife Matters internet radio program with my guest, life coach, author, and spiritual thought leader, Anita Pathik Law. She told her story of how chronic illness drove her into a corner until she surrendered to a Power greater than herself that not only brought her physical healing, but gave her the clarity to see her life’s purpose. A couple of days later, I interviewed Amona Maa Jeevan from the U.K. for a recorded segment of next week’s edition of the same program. We talked about her encounter with the Dark Night (as defined by the 16th century Spanish writer, Saint John of the Cross and other mystics), and the spiritual clarity that she received on emerging from it. Between those two conversations, I was powerfully reminded of how “God writes straight with crooked lines.”
Awakening to spiritual clarity and emerging from the midlife transition (which are really equivalent events in a person’s life) generally involves considerable pain of one or more types: spiritual, emotional, mental, and even physical. In every case, it’s pain born of a fear of letting go. The ‘dark night’ experience leads us to the brink of a seemingly-unbridgeable chasm. It’s the moment when we realize that life as we’ve defined it for ourselves is no longer working. There’s no going back and there’s no way forward (or so it seems). Perhaps we’ve experienced the loss of everything we valued: relationships, career, possessions, health, or even our own capacity to control our own behavior. At that point, we may be left with nowhere to turn but to our faith. We may find great comfort in our belief in a Power greater than ourselves. This is what John of the Cross described as the “dark night of the senses.” It’s quite awful, and the inspiration for many a ‘prison’ conversion or ‘death-bed’ conversion. This may be enough to create a kind of spiritual awakening in anyone.
It’s not the end of the story, however. There’s a ‘dark night’ that goes even deeper. John of the Cross called it the ‘dark night of the soul.’ People often use this term too loosely, confusing it with the dark night of the senses. The dark night of the soul does not necessarily involve the loss of any of the trappings of life. One can pass through it surrounded by loving spouse and friends, successful career, a multitude of possessions, exceptional health, etc. All these things simply make the experience that much more painful, as one experiences the complete and total loss of direction, meaning, purpose, and faith in God. Not everyone experiences this kind of dark night; it seems to be reserved for those who will be called upon to become a source of hope and inspiration to others. It is the ultimate challenge of a lifetime: to go forward boldly without any possible hope for success.
What arises on the other side of a ‘dark night’ is simple to describe but seemingly impossible to live. It is the experience of grace. The term ‘grace’ comes from the Latin gratia, meaning ‘gift.’ It also forms the root of our word ‘gratitude’ — our response to the gift. The meaning and purpose of our lives, and therefore, our destiny, is pure gift, and our authentic response to it can ultimately only be gratitude, pure and simple. Spiritual awakening only happens once we come to terms with certain fundamental truths. Our plans, our choices, our decisions all have an incredible impact not only on our own evolution, but, because we (collectively) form the decision-making organ for the universe itself, they also help to determine how the universe itself evolves. Nevertheless, whatever our plans, choices, and decisions may be, they are ultimately the gift of the inscrutable will of God.
Passage through the dark nights (of the senses as well as of the soul) are not, strictly speaking, the will of God. They are, like those animals whose insides outgrow their outsides, the result of our resisting having a spiritual awakening. We enjoy sleeping and dreaming the illusion of our own self-will. We even go so far as to convince ourselves that what we see and what we want is, in fact, our purpose and destiny (leaving no room to expand beyond the limits we impose upon ourselves this way). Thus, spiritual awakenings can be very painful because they demand that we puncture right through our comfort zone and right into the heart of the Unknown. We don’t want to wake up. We don’t want to climb out of our comfortable beds into the cold reality of the life that we are meant to live. It’s a fearful life, because it necessarily goes beyond what we know or can even imagine.
If you’re at midlife, or if you’re facing seemingly-catastrophic loss, if you’re feeling lost, purposeless, directionless and completely bereft of any semblance of spirituality, rejoice! Your spiritual awakening is here! You’ve received an engraved invitation from your God to enter into the life you were meant to live, no matter how different it may seem from the one you thought you were having. Your response to this invitation — this grace that I mentioned — is, as I said, easy to understand but hard to live. Can you bring yourself to pray this simple prayer composed by the second Secretary General of the United Nations and modern mystic, Dag Hammarskjöld: “For all that has been, thanks. For all that will be, yes“? Can you pray that prayer today without reservation?
Regardless of your age, if you’re struggling, a spiritual awakening awaits you. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous spells out the hope of a spiritual awakening that sustains every one of us in this process we call ‘life’: “Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us — sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them” [emphasis added].
H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown
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March 15th, 2010 at 9:56 pm
I just wanted to say good luck with your new job. I remember I wrote you a few years back. Time does fly. Just want to say I deeply appreciate your journal and mid-life musings. They hit a place in me as I move through unemployment and the question, what direction do I go? I began my career in state government then left for private industry. Irony have it that I am now looking again at the public sector. It is confusing, challenging and life. Thanks again for your personal insight.