Turning 50

This year, the Space Needle and I turned 50.   I tried to sleep through the Space Needle’s birthday celebration on New Year’s Eve until I was awakened shortly before midnight with chanting outside my bedroom window, “10!  9!  8!  7!…”  and then heard what I understand to have been a particularly beautiful fireworks display.

I marked my birthday with much less fanfare on a weeklong meditation training with my Zen Buddhist community.  The first week of January is our “rohatsu sesshin”, an eight day silent meditation training, and the most rigorous of four such weeklong practice trainings we have throughout the year.

I love rohatsu.  At Camp Indianola on the Kitsap Penninsula it’s dark and cold.  We listen to the rain and wind, the roar of the waves, crows chasing eagles across the grey skies.  Long days of sitting, breathing, listening beginning at 4:30 in the morning and ending progressively later in the evening, until the final night when we sit until midnight.  For my birthday, my sister had sent 50 chocolates and I shared them with our group for tea on the third day.  Nothing better for an ascetic’s heart on a day like that than the gift of a delicious chocolate!

I realized again how essential the practice of Zen is to my life.  For me, the simple practice of sitting, breathing, listening, helps me live deeper into everything we talk about in Christianity – letting go, death and resurrection, the gift of being, truth and peace. In the face of just sitting you have to hear all the noise rumbling around in your head, your fears, anxieties, joy, restlessness, boredom.  All you are including who you are becoming.  We block it out all the time – ignore our hearts, feelings, longings.  We are better off when we don’t.

I had been looking forward to turning 50 and living into what this new decade will be about.  But right before the day came, the old dread hit.   50?  I can’t believe it!  How did that happen?  And so fast!   I’m not sure I’m ready for that…

My colleague Catherine began her ministry here at 50 as did my former colleague Don Mackenzie.  And here I am at 50 and feeling like I too am just beginning, just beginning to live into something that my life before now has been preparing me for.  How can that be?  There is a phrase in Zen Buddhism called “beginner’s mind” and it is the reminder that we are always just beginning.  And so we do, right here, right now, we begin again.  Practicing sitting, breathing, listening, being.

And so at 50 I feel like I am just beginning to learn to live into this “me” of who I am and was created to be.   A friend gave me Richard Rohr’s new book, Falling Upward:  A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life as a Christmas gift.  I feel that for this past decade I have been just beginning to live into something of what this second half of life is all about.  I like how Rohr puts it,

“The tasks of the first half of life are about ‘surviving successfully’.  We all try to do what seems like the task 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 a lot longer to discover ‘the task within the task’….to find the contents that the container was meant to hold.” (p. xiii-xiv)

Rohr notes that few of us arrive at the work of this second half of life with much preplanning, purpose or passion.  It happens to us, in us, and often through the loss and death of some of the very things we spent the first half of our lives creating.  From the losses that are life, some remain stuck, and some move forward and are transformed into people they never imagined themselves to be.  Truer, more authentic, more of the utterly unique selves we were created to be. Rohr notes that none of us would choose such upheaval consciously but that we somehow “fall” into it.  I know this:

“By denying their pain, avoiding the necessary falling, many have kept themselves from their own spiritual depths – and therefore been kept from their own spiritual heights.”  (p. xxiii).

I know this as well:  that there are some young people who have learned from early suffering who are already here in this second journey of life, and some older folks who are still quite childish. It’s true that in the first half of life you can’t see any kind of falling or dying as necessary or good.  It takes great trust, great faith, to fall or to fail and not fall apart.  To trust the work of death and resurrection – that even in and through this dying to what has been – we are already being fashioned into who we are meant to be.

This is the season of Epiphany and of light, the season we are called to live into truth.  And yes, like it or not, truth and authenticity don’t seem to come without loss and pain before there is new life and joy.  I hope for all of us this season that we might support each other to live into our dying so we might as well live into our rising.  The new being, new beginning, God is calling forth in you and in the God’s world right here, right now, within and between us today.

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