I usually spend my Saturday mornings with a community of recovering people, and yesterday was no exception. As always happens, I came away from our discussions with new insights and perspectives. I don’t know about you, but my ‘forgetter’ works much more effectively than my ‘rememberer,’ so I need regular doses of reality to keep me from floating away mentally, emotionally, and spiritually into La-la Land. Somebody yesterday mentioned ‘evil’ and it got me to thinking. I have a particular approach to the topic of evil that I’ve developed over many years and many experiences, and I thought that my readers might gain some fresh insights if I were to take this opportunity to explore it a little: What is ‘evil’ and why do we seem to be battling it so fiercely, particularly as we transition to full maturity?

Any student of moral philosophy worth her/his salt should be able to explain to you that there are two types of evil: physical evil and moral evil. Looking at physical evil first will help us to put moral evil into much better perspective. Although we use the same word (‘evil’) to refer to physical and moral failure, the two are only analogous. In fact, physical ‘evil’ is not evil at all: it is simply a set of natural phenomena that cause us humans pain and suffering. Things like natural disasters, disease, and even death itself are only considered really ‘evil’ when they affect human lives. What distinguishes Hurricane Katrina from a similar nameless storm in the mid-Pacific Ocean is only its effect on humanity. But, neither of them in themselves are really ‘evil.’ They’re both just storms.

What we call ‘physical evil’ is simply a characteristic of the natural universe. If we could possibly imagine the universe before the Big Bang, we’d have to conjure up an undifferentiated flyspeck of matter/energy/space/time/consciousness with absolutely no distinction between ‘this’ and ‘that’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘now’ and ‘then’. What creation, expressed in the Big Bang, set in motion was a process of separation and distinction based on limitations. Follow me now: ‘this’ is limited because it’s not ‘that’; ‘here’ is limited because it’s not ‘there’; ‘now’ is limited because it’s not ‘then’; and, ultimately, ‘I’ am limited because I am not ‘you’. In spiritual terms, creation happened when a Higher Power allowed the ‘not’ — the limitation and separation of one entity from another — to intrude into the undifferentiated fabric of all that is.

What we call ‘physical evil’ is simply our human experience of the limitations inherent in the fabric of the universe of creation. No limitations: no universe! Yet, as soon as limitations and boundaries are introduced, simultaneously the reality of destruction and loss appears. Yet, (as far as we are aware) only human consciousness experiences physical limitations and boundaries that way. Only humanity sees limitation and judges it to be disaster and tragedy. From a purely physical (creational) perspective, Katrina was a very, very good hurricane! It expressed the functioning of the laws of the natural world perfectly.

What we call ‘physical evil’ intrudes into our human existence in a particularly emphatic way at midlife. It’s in grappling with the whole spectrum of our own limitations that we come, at long last, to a deeper and much more realistic appraisal of who we are in the context of our world than we had ever had before during our adult lives. We become aware of what happens when our personal beliefs meet life’s limitations head-on. Midlife is our time to grapple spiritually with our human limitations, and to overcome them not by denying them, nor by trying to conquer them, but by coming to terms with them. In the same way that we could never appreciate a red rose by wishing it was any other color, we are given the opportunity to find our own personal destiny by discovering the beauty and magnificence that is revealed only in and through our limitations. We learn (though hard experience) to love who we are, rather than who we wish we were.

When we are able to remember that ‘physical evil’ is simply our experience of the very warp and woof of creation, we can learn that our difficulties are not tragedies or disasters at all; they are opportunities for transcendence. They are invitations to correct our course, to rise to each new challenge, and to go beyond, not our limitations, but our beliefs about our limitations. The challenges of midlife force us to confront and either overcome or succumb to the unreality of our belief system. That is what happened to me 24 years ago. I did not realize that of which I was capable until I was forced by necessity to let go of my own limited worldview and adapt to the one that brought me to my knees (literally and figuratively). It began (but has not yet completed) my transition to full maturity as a “spiritual being having a human experience.”*

What about moral evil, then? How does that relate to the limitations inherent in the universe? Moral evil is simply our recognition that we as human beings are ultimately free. If we are free, then we have real, fundamental choices. At any juncture, we can choose to accept and live within the limitations of the physical world, or not. If we choose the latter, we choose to live in an insane world where our beliefs bear no resemblance to facts. We can choose to ignore our commitments, to disvalue ourselves and others, to deny our spiritual (or physical, for that matter) nature. We can run from and avoid life’s lessons and refuse to grow. We can jam our distorted and dysfunctional worldview into others’ reality by demanding our own way, by perpetrating injustice, by causing sadness, suffering and even death in our world. Moral evil is nothing more or less than our exercising our choice to say ‘no’ instead of ‘yes’ to our world and to our God.

What about moral evil in our world? What about the “inhumanity of man against man”? We human beings must confront the limitations of our universe on a daily, hourly, even minute-by-minute basis. We are never free from our responsibility to live life on life’s terms. A very real, although unfortunate, aspect of those terms is the fact that some of those limitations come at the hands of other humans. Yet, from our perspective, there is no more ‘blame’ to be placed on another human than there is on the limitations in the physical universe. Responsibility for moral evil (refusal to grow and mature) falls on the heads of the perpetrators. It falls on our own heads when we find ourselves as the perpetrators, and we need to go through the process of apology. Yet, our responsibility as the receivers of injustice is simply to grow beyond it. We are never ‘victims’ of injustice, any more than we are ‘victims’ of a hurricane or earthquake.

“Father,” Jesus prayed from his crucifixion, “forgive them. They know not what they do.” Our job as students of life’s lessons rests in asking, “What is my lesson in this?” and responding appropriately to our nature as spiritual beings. It is not to blame, punish, or exact retribution. Even those, like Viktor Frankl, who endured the Nazi death camps, had the choice to allow the holocaust to destroy their essential humanity or to rise to an incredible level of spiritual maturity. We’ll never know the heights and depths of spiritual experience that literally millions of people encountered during that war.

Was Nazi inhumanity therefore a good thing, because it deepened our spiritual awareness as individuals and as a human family? Of course not. War is always moral evil on stark and pointed display. Yet every time one woman or man confronts moral evil and accepts that experience as an opportunity to rise above it, s/he takes that opportunity to transform it into a moment of spiritual growth for our entire human family — and sadly, we have yet so far to grow.

Why do bad things happen to good people? Because we’re human and we live in a universe defined by its limitations. Without confronting the limitations imposed on us by the universe at large, we would never learn to cope with our own human limitations. We would never discover how powerfully we are led and guided by a Power Greater than ourselves. We would be incapable of ever fulfilling our destiny either as individuals or as a human species. Am I happy that my own limitations brought me down and laid me low 24 years ago today? Happy? No. Grateful? Yes. I had the opportunity to see where my dysfunctional beliefs were threatening me, and I had the opportunity to change my mind and, by the grace of God, I took the chance, rose to the occasion, and did what I had to do. Like the poet, Robert Frost, exclaimed,

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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What is the nature of these vitally important relationships. We live in a three-dimensional world, and our relationships, too, are three-dimensional (whether or not we are aware of them). Let’s take a brief look at what it means to be in relationship.

At the center of our relational awareness are all those other people who share our lives and/or our consciousness. Our significant other or spouse, our parents and/or children, our extended family, our ‘family of choice’ (our BFFs), our acquaintances (our fellow-workers, those we hire, those who serve our needs and wants). Then, there are those nameless faces who we encounter as we go about the work of living: the other Joes and Janes ‘on the bus’ (so to speak): the ‘extras’ who share the stage with us for a moment or two, interact with us (or not) and then depart, never to be seen again. They’re all there. But there are many more ‘out there’ — people who never even enter into our awareness or consideration. These are all the people who share a relationship with the people who interact with us.

Our behavior not only affects those with whom we share a relationship, like ripples in a pond, what we think, say, and do has a very real affect on those unseen people in our world who are affected by those we affect. A parent becomes angry at a child because s/he has had a “hard day” because the boss was in a foul mood. The boss is in a foul mood because one of his customers pulled a dirty trick on him, and caused him to lose the business. The unreasonable customer is not even aware that the crying child exists, but you can trace the effects of her/his actions directly. As we shall see, there is no such thing as an ‘isolated’ incident: everything we do has consequences in the world of our relationships.

The second ‘dimension’ of our three-dimensional world of relationships refers to the connection that we maintain with our Higher Power (whom I shall refer to here as God). My personal experience has been that the Judeo-Christian belief system seems to bridge the chasm between the divine and the human better than any other system of which I am aware, and that is an absolutely essential connection for building and maintaining a vital spiritual life. The Judeo-Christian traditions insist on the fact that our relationship with God exists only in and through our relationship with our fellows. “Whatsoever you do to the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you do to me,” Jesus is quoted as saying. “Where two or more of you are gathered in my name, there am I within/among you (en humin).” Genuine spirituality discovers the divine within the human. Therefore, our relationship with God stands or falls as a direct consequence of how we interrelate with one another . . . particularly those whom we find most troublesome!

The third dimension of our three-dimensional world of relationships is the one that I fear we ignore and neglect the most: our relationship with ourselves. Most of us would break up with a partner who treated us the way we treat ourselves. We’re hard on ourselves, uncompromising, merciless, speak to ourselves rudely, punish ourselves, and, what’s perhaps worst of all, we withhold affection, kindness, and appreciation from ourselves. At the same time, we tend to be neglectful and ridiculously permissive. It would literally be a criminal offense if we raised a child the same way we tend to parent ourselves. At the same time, we seem to be unaware that we are responsible not only for living up to our social responsibilities, but we are also even more responsible for holding up our own side of those responsibilities. Every time we hurt or neglect our relationship with ourselves, we make ourselves less available to show up for all those relationships that we talked about with others.

There is no such thing as a ‘solitary sin.’ (We define ‘sin’ as a deliberate choice of an unworthy end, or unworthy means to attain an end, worthy or not. ‘Sin’ is distinguished from ‘mistake’ by the willful, conscious choice.) Every bad choice we make first of all damages our relationship with our (present and future) selves. Our choices can injure or even kill any possibility we may otherwise have had of reaching our God-given destiny. Whether or not we are aware of them, others (may hundreds or thousands of people) will be directly affected by our choices. People we don’t even know depend on us; and when we are not the people we could have been (and should have been), we let them down. Finally, God is manifest in and through these people. Your choices cannot ‘hurt’ God; but they can injure or destroy your relationship with God! We can only pray for forgiveness for those who turn their wrath on others in the name of God, because most truly, “they know not what they do.”

In the past two articles, I’ve discussed the first two approaches to cleaning up the wreckage that we’ve caused by our bad choices: first, by acknowledging our responsibility for our mess, then, by expressing genuine sorrow for what we’ve done. Now that we’ve taken a look at the far-reaching effects of our actions, we may want to deepen that acknowledgment, and expand our expressions of sorrow. After that, it’s time to take the third step: into action. It’s time to do the work necessary to heal all these injured and broken relationships. That starts with asking, “What can I do to make it up to you?” Then, it requires listening to the answer (not only from family, friends and acquaintances, but also from ourselves and from God) and then doing something to make amends.

There is always something you can do. You can start by changing your mind and working to renew and repair your attitudes. Then you can renew your commitment to pay more and better attention to the most important relationships in your life. You can work to heal yourself. What’s that going to take? Look at yourself as if you were a third person and ask yourself what this person needs; then do something to provide that. Get help! One of the most powerful (and under-used) tools for positive change that you possess is accountability. Use a trusted friend, a coach, a mentor, a therapist, etc. to provide you with that accountability. It can work magic! Then work to appreciate better the relationships that you have. Each one takes time and effort. Do whatever is necessary to repair, heal, and strengthen each one (regardless of how unimportant you may think some to be).

One final caveat: don’t think that just because you’ve prayed, “Oh, God, I’ve sinned and I’m sorry!” that you’ve done anything significant. What happens when you get to stage three and pray, “What can I do to make it up to you?” God is going to say (and has already told you) what needs to be done: “Heal your relationships with one another.” So long as any relationship in your life (including your relationship with yourself) remains unhealed, your relationship with God remains injured or broken. Reality doesn’t respect doctrine: whatever your personal beliefs may be, spirituality demands that your relationship with your Higher Power be healed in and through your other relationships. “Whatsoever you do to the least of my sisters and brothers, you do to me.”

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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Think, if you will, about the RMS Titanic, resting on the bottom of the deep Atlantic Ocean since its spectacular sinking one cold April night in 1914. I’m sure you’re familiar with the photos and videos that have been published over the years since the wreck was finally discovered by Robert Ballard in 1977. The great ship, weighing in at 46,326 tons when she left the shipyards in Belfast, is now festooned with ugly growths called ‘rusticles.’ Gradually, the iron ship’s massive hull is being consumed – eaten actually – by iron-eating bacteria. Before too very long, the great ship’s entire structure will disappear into virtual puddles of bacterial excretions. The pile of refuse that remains after the bacteria have done their work will be unrecognizable.

The Jeep, the Titanic, and your most intimate relationships may have a great deal in common. We humans are subject to a corrosion that beats out the destruction caused by oxidation and bacteria hands-down. I am convinced that fear causes more destruction in the lives of men and women than any other single agent. We all have it; yet, when the bravado of self-assured adulthood begins to yield to the deeper questioning that comes with midlife, fear emerges with a ferocity seldom experienced at any other period of life.

When I was considering the subject of this article over the past week, I was troubled and questioning my own understanding and appreciation of this universal phenomenon. “If fear is so corrosive and damaging to life and to relationships,” I wondered, “why is it so universal? Why is it there at all?” I’ve often heard that a little fear is a good thing. The more I think about it, the more I am certain that fear provides us with the necessary protection that we need to avoid getting into life-threatening trouble. There definitely is such a thing as a ‘healthy’ fear. We all need it to keep us from getting too irresponsibly cocky and making rash and self-destructive decisions. A little fear is a very good thing, I concluded. “So,” I asked myself, “is a little fear like a little rust?”

I have come to believe that there are actually two types of fear. The one – healthy caution – provides us with the protection that we need against rash decision-making. There is another type of fear, however, that arises from insecurity and self-doubt. This kind of fear, like the iron-eating bacteria in the hull of the Titanic, slowly but consumes its host. Psychologist Carl Jung located the core of self-doubt in what he called the ‘ego,’ while the true personality he identified as the ‘Self.’ In this sense, your ego, convinced of your fundamental vulnerability, lives in mortal terror. While the Self continues to try to convince you that you’re fundamentally OK – regardless of what’s happening within or around you – the ego drowns out that more rational voice with its own terrified screaming.

At midlife especially, when the Self finds itself beset with radical changes on all fronts, the Ego’s constant doubts have a chance to erode not only your self-confidence, but also, at the same time, your capacity for acceptance, trust, and engagement. Under the fearful influence of your ego, your willingness to accept life on life’s terms (and your most significant relationships on their own terms), to trust in your own judgment and others’ good will, and to engage yourself unreservedly in the work of giving of yourself begins to collapse. Self-preservation begins to assume a priority beyond anything you’d previously experience. Your choices no longer to accept, no longer to trust, and no longer to engage begin to take their toll. Fear begins its corrosive corruption of your quality of life.

The popular spiritual work, A Course in Miracles, defines the ego as “a fearful thought.” I completely agree. The ego is convinced (and is determined to convince you) that you are in mortal danger and that only you can save yourself by withdrawing from intimacy. Ironically, under the guise of self-preservation, your ego infects you with the fear of being killed, while, at the same time, it’s in love with death. Its strangling fear begins by cutting off your vital connection with the divine Spirit by convincing you that your Higher Power, or God, cannot and will not save you from death and destruction: that the only Savior you can count on is yourself.

Next, its corrosive influence extends to your most intimate relationships, seeding doubts and watering them with imagined faults and failings in the other that “threaten” your security and well-being. It convinces you that, once again, only you can “protect” yourself from ruin. Finally, as its work runs its course, it not only cuts off your capacity for unconditional and unqualified love of others, it locks you into a kind of imagined self-protective mode where not even the grace of God can reach you. Ego-driven fear, left to run its course, will eventually succeed in causing you to forget, at the deepest level of your being, who you are.

Who are you? You are the beloved Child of a Power greater than yourself Who called you into being from the origins of the universe and who sustains and protects you in all your ways, regardless of any detours your fallible human consciousness my send you on along your way. All your Higher Power or God requires of you are the ‘virtues’ that I wrote about in my last article: acceptance, trust, and engagement (or ‘faith,’ ‘hope,’ and ‘love’). If only you would choose to ignore the fearful screaming of your ego and focus on the invulnerability of your Self and your connection with your Higher Power, you can be set free from fear to choose to respond to that Power with unconditional Faith, unconditional Hope and unconditional Love. Only then, in truth, can you accept, trust, and love yourself or anyone else.

Do your choices show that you actually believe that you are who you are? As a Child of your Higher Power, do you exercise unconditional acceptance of life on life’s terms and of the others with whom you share the gift of intimacy in this life? Do you trust that, no matter what happens to you or to others, you will always be cared and provided for? Are you willing to accept that your life depends on the quality of the commitments that you’re prepared to make on a daily basis?

“What about getting hurt?” “What about betrayal?” you may ask. In return, I want to ask you, “What is your circle of influence, and what is your circle of concern?” You may well be concerned about other peoples’ ideas or behaviors, but you have no control over them! You have control only over your own attitudes and choices. Your decisions to accept, trust, and be committed never depend on what the other person says or does. They depend wholly and exclusively on you and your willingness to love regardless of the cost. That’s the way your Higher Power loves you; that, in a nutshell describes the essence of Love itself. Love doesn’t necessarily involve intimacy; love doesn’t necessarily involve intimacy (those things require two committed people). But love does require you to choose commitment over fear, and forgiveness over anger and resentment. Can you handle it?

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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Must couples in trouble necessarily fail? No, not necessarily: no healthy couple is doomed to failure. In fact, the only ‘doomed’ relationships are those where one or both partners are unapologetically physically or emotionally abusive . Without a doubt, the only realistic option for someone who finds her- or himself in a fundamentally abusive or exploitative relationship is to exit immediately. Apart from that, I believe that many (if not all) relationships “on the rocks” could be healed under the right circumstances. From my perspective, the fact that this healing so often fails to take place could be an indication that one or both of the partners have stopped listening. Additionally, ceasing to listen indicates a spiritual problem. Let me explain.

It would seem that the  person who hears another’s voice, but is no longer committed to listening to what the other has to say has given up on her or his partner, as well as their relationship together. If you look more closely, however, it soon becomes clear that the person has actually given up on him- or herself. Empathetic listening and appreciative inquiry represent a three-fold choice: 1) to accept the other, 2) to trust the other, and 3) to engage with the other. Closing off the lines of communication also represents a choice: to cease accepting, trusting and engaging with one’s partner. Before I relate this to fundamental spiritual principles, let’s look briefly at each choice.

The choice to accept another human being is foundational. True acceptance represents a fundamental option to see in the other person another self, with exactly the same sorts of strengths and weaknesses that we ourselves possess. This choice to acknowledge the other person as another self  has two destructive opposites. The first perversion of acceptance we call ‘exploitation‘. Philosopher Martin Buber contrasts these approaches with the terms I-Thou (for true acceptance of the other), and I-It (for exploitation). To see your partner merely in terms of his or her usefulness (like a tool or a piece of furniture) or her or his capacity to satisfy you represents a fundamental denial of humanity on your part. The second perversion of the choice to accept your partner shows itself as conditional acceptance. In brief, “I’ll accept you if you do such-and-such or so-and-so.” Conditional acceptance of another puts you in the position of being their judge, jury and executioner. In fact, it represents nothing less than your attempt to usurp the position in your partner’s life properly held by God alone.

Next, let’s look at the choice not to trust your partner. Why don’t you trust her or him? Because you’ve been hurt before? The refusal to trust your partner goes way beyond self-preservation. Once again, it is passing a judgment of condemnation on another person — another self — who exhibits the same sorts of faults and failings that you yourself exhibit. In fact, if the truth were known, the faults and failings that you find most easy to condemn and most difficult to forgive in others are the very ones that you exhibit most strongly yourself. In fact, the two keys that are absolutely essential to unlocking both acceptance and trust are these: first, to acknowledge an identical humanity in both yourself and the other, and, second, to commit yourself to the path of unconditional forgiveness. Who cannot look at the plight of even the most desperate of people around us and not be able truthfully to say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I?” The greatest message of Christianity — and also, I’m afraid,  its most forgotten and neglected — is simply this: unconditional, unlimited forgiveness. If you cannot forgive unconditionally, you cannot trust for very long.

The final choice is the choice to engage with your partner. If you refuse to engage with her or him, you thereby give credence to the (Jungian) ego’s false belief that you are vulnerable and need protection. It’s the same force that drives people’s frantic searching for that illusive (and illusory) ‘security’ that they believe will fix everything and protect them from danger. Once again, it would be foolish to put ourselves in harm’s way by engaging with an abusive partner. We owe it to ourselves and to them to take the necessary precautions so as not to allow ourselves to become victims of deliberate abuse. However, if you imagine that refusing to engage with your well-intentioned partner will grant you some sort of immunity from harm and from hurt, you are mistaken. Do you believe that spiritually you are invulnerable and that nothing outside of yourself — not even death — can destroy the essence of you? “Greater love has no one,” we have heard, “than to lay down his life for another.” Oddly, dieing for someone can actually be a whole lot easier than living for them.

Finally, what does the choice not to listen say about that person’s spiritual condition? The testimony it gives is nothing short of damning. Personally, I would liken it to what Christians refer to as the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ or the ‘unforgivable sin.’ Here’s what I mean. Whenever I write, I use the terms ‘acceptance,’  ‘trust’ and ‘engagement’ as  synonyms for what are called the ‘theological virtues’, namely: faith, hope , and love. The ‘sin’ against faith is the decision not to accept the will of God exactly as we encounter it in our world. The ‘sin’ against hope is the choice not to trust that our only Source of genuine security is divine providence. The ‘sin’ against love is the refusal to become meaningfully engaged with those we were sent to serve: our fellow creatures who, along with us, share the “image and likeness of God.” If the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ is a refusal to believe that the love of God is powerful enough to forgive us (and so we refuse to ask for forgiveness, and therefore refuse to accept it), then turning a deaf ear to someone we once claimed to love is a ‘sin against love’, for, as we know, the opposite of love is not hate, but deliberate indifference.

What can you do if you find yourself failing to listen? Remember the futility of protecting yourself. What can you protect yourself from? Even more importantly, what are you protecting yourself for? After all, your mission here in this world is not to try (futilely) to keep yourself safe. It’s to share with your fellows (and especially those in relationship with you) the same kind of acceptance, trust, and engagement that your God has shown to you. God hears his people’s cry . . . can you do any less?

And what about you who find yourself ‘learning to love one another’ and your words keep falling on deaf ears? You, too, have the opportunity to pass on the love of God. Your acceptance of the other can be renewed continually. Your trust of the other need never fail or fade. You may stand ever at the ready to engage. However, engagement (love) requires reciprocity. God does not condemn, so how could you? God does not constrain, either (because love can never be forced), but rather waits for all eternity for the other to emerge from his or her isolation and re-engage. You can have the willingness to re-engage, whether or not the other ever seeks it. You may never re-engage as you once did: time and the world goes on while the other chooses to isolate, stagnate, or (what’s worse) repeat the same self-defeating choices and behaviors with other partners. You, on the other hand, have the opportunity to accept and trust and engage with people at every stage and every condition of your life: people who, like you, have chosen to listen not only with their ears, but with their hearts.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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Today, I’d like to share with you the (always-tentative) response that I seem to be getting from my six decades of  reflexively auto-dialing a universal ’411′. It seems — to the best of my ability to understand the answer — that the universe and all it contains is nothing but a mega-University that’s only function is to educate Consciousness (in all its known and unknown iterations) in just two interrelated subjects: what I’m calling the Two Great Lessons of Life. I won’t keep you hanging there in anticipation. The First Great Lesson of Life comes down to this: learning how to love. The Second Great Lesson of Life is its complement: learning how to let go. That’s it. That’s all there is. Once you’ve mastered both subjects, you’re ready to graduate. If it were only that easy.

We were all born selfish. You may know that in biology there’s what they call the ‘recapitulation theory’ that suggests that every life form goes through all the stages of evolution on its journey from fertilized egg to viable organism. I have no idea whether or not that’s exactly accurate, although there does seem to be a general pattern observable across all forms of life. It seems clear to me that at least human consciousness in its earliest stages develops along the lines of how consciousness emerged on this planet. At birth, our consciousness makes a giant leap forward that takes the developing distinction between “me’ and ‘mine’ to a whole new level. Birth can be seen simply asa quantum leap in the ever-increasing viability and independence of the organism. Early life outside the womb closely parallels life inside: the infant remains totally dependent on its care-givers for all the conditions necessary for its survival. From that point on, the nascent person must assume ever-greater responsibility for his or her own independent existence. Life begins with the understanding that I must get what what I need in order to survive. I learn to value who I am and what I have been given. ‘Love’ and ‘need’ start out life as synonyms.

As I lead you through this ‘recapitulation theory’ of mine, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to reflect back on your own life’s experiences to see where the crises you’ve encountered indicated ‘sticking points’ in your own evolution. If you try, you can see how they imitate the earth’s plate tectonics: the plates in the earth’s crust push against each other and their energy imperceptibly builds until, at one random moment, they suddenly become unstuck and shift — sometimes with catastrophic seismic results. Each of the crises in your own life represents a seismic shift across every aspect of your life: physical, mental, emotional, relational, economic and spiritual.

If childhood can be defined as that epoch of life during which we learn to take care of ourselves and to become increasingly self-reliant and responsible (we gradually take on the responsibility of  providing for our own survival) then that life transition stage that we identify as ‘adolescence’ must be that period where we are forced by nature and culture to confront our own self-centered self-interest and begin very tentatively to open ourselves to others as well as to the Other. It’s the time when we learn to both value and care for others above and beyond our own selfish needs, even our own need to survive. Love and need split apart in adolescence’s tumultuous soul-quakes. The adolescent transition from childhood to adulthood takes on the features of a transformation.

Learning to love . . . learning to accept unconditionally, to trust unconditionally, to become fully engaged with another . . . committed to another. These lessons of love take a long, hard time to learn because the real lesson (that love is a choice, a decision) only begins when the ‘other’ love — the emotional surrogate of love — starts to fade away. Love is what’s left after all the needing and wanting has dissipated, been satisfied or disappointed.

My first prayer as a young man entering the chapel on my first day in the major seminary was: “Lord, teach me to love.” That was the prayer of a foolish youth who didn’t understand that the prayer to learn to love, like the prayer for patience, is one that’s always answered and always in startlingly unexpected ways. “Greater love has no one, than to lay down life itself for another.” What they don’t tell you is that it’s much more difficult to live for others than it is to die for them.

Just as some people never quite learn the ‘independence’ lesson from childhood, others never quite get what it means to love selflessly. There’s a type of grieving involved in every act of true love, because it means letting go of all of our expectations. We want to be loved back, to be unconditionally accepted and trusted, to have someone somewhere somehow commit unconditionally to us. We feel as though we need that affirmation of self: if we don’t receive it, we’ll just die.
But, we don’t fully receive it — we don’t fully give it either — and we don’t die. Instead, we learn life’s Great Lesson number one.

Then comes midlife. Just when we think we’ve gotten our Master’s degree in loving, life turns the tables on us. We positively freak out when we first turn to that page in the book of life’s instructions that our parents and our whole culture and upbringing gave us for guidance and we read, “Everything in this book may be wrong.” Here begins life’s Great Lesson number two: letting go.

Letting go begins with relaxing our death-grip on our opinions, starting, of course, with everything we were once so certain and sure of. Today, on the other side of the midlife divide, I am certain of very few things. As certain as I am that there exists a universal Truth, I am equally certain that I will never fully know or understand it. And, as far as God is concerned, the God of my understanding has been replaced with the God of my lack-of-understanding. In fact, all that I really need to know about my God is that I am not he. Everything else is open to interpretation. In life, as both Martin Buber and Karl Jung so clearly saw, there is an I (a Self) in constant dialogue with a Thou (an Other) and, as with all true dialogues, meaning is always given by the receiver, not the giver. Contrary to popular belief, what God said is relevant only in regard to what we actually heard and understood.

The crises of midlife arise from the difficulty that each individual has letting go of the certitude that we hold with regard to our beliefs and opinions. At midlife, we are brought face-to-face with the great transcendental ideals that Plato and Aristotle proposed: absolute Goodness, Truth, Beauty, and Unity, and we begin to recognize that we in this world enjoy only their analogates: relative goodness, truth, beauty, and unity. We will never know (nor can we as humans really adequately even understand) such things as Life, Love, Security, Health, Peace and Freedom. The famous midlife crisis is the struggle that we wage against having to give up our pretensions to these Divine attributes. When the crisis is over, we find that we have let go a little bit more of our pretensions to the divine. The answer to the great question, “Why me?” (as though we had some divine right to Life,  Love, Security, Health, Peace and Freedom) is always the humiliating, “Why not you?”

Our topic today of the Two Great Lessons of Life has brought us to the understanding that all of life is, in fact, one great process in two distinct stages: learning to let go of self (what we call love), then learning to let go of everything else (what we call death). It makes me think of the Jewish proverb that says: Shrouds have no pockets. All of this lifetime of learning to let go is just preparation for the Great Letting Go that silently awaits each of us. Like all lettings-go, life’s Great Lessons involve grief in (at least) five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. How you think about death and how you feel about the lessons that life is handing you right now, today can be very good indicators of where you are in the learning process. The more you learn to let go, the more grieving there is. The more grieving you do, the farther along you progress toward acceptance. So, where are you?

And, just a final word to the wise, if the Roman poet Horace was right when he wrote, “Non omnis moriar” (“I shall not wholly die”) — and I believe he was — then whatever letting go and whatever grieving you don’t get done in this life, you will carry with you into the next. That’s just something to about it.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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