"Walking Through Walls"

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The Rev. Suzelle Lynch
September 26, 2004

"Midlife," said Joseph Campbell, "is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was leaning against the wrong wall." Bob Hope once said, "Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle." The proverb says midlife is the old age of youth and the youth of old age. And humorist Robert Quillen defined midlife as the time when you'll do anything to feel better, except give up what is hurting you.

Ah, midlife. My colleague the Rev. Roger Fritts compiled a description of it after reading a number of books on midlife crisis. I like this description because it works for both men and women, and for people of all sexual orientations: He writes,

“People at midlife often …. have a feeling of being caught in an empty, dull, flat life. They begin to feel like trapped animals.’

“People at midlife are often ‘afraid of approaching death. … A feeling of unease sets in with the realization that this is the end of growing up and the beginning of growing old. ….

“People at midlife have ‘a heightened awareness of health problems. …. Weight is easier to put on and harder to take off. .. Hair starts to thin, gray, (recede) and grow brittle....’

“People at midlife begin to experience ‘irreversible changes in the brain resulting from cell death, oxygen deprivation, and chemical changes... This causes a reduction in the efficiency of the brain's functioning.’

“People at midlife must deal with ‘career dissatisfaction. Conscious that their career may have reached a plateau, they experience the anxiety that younger persons will challenge their position. …’

“People at midlife ‘daydream about romantic affairs with a younger partner. Frightened by signs of aging, they … seek through an orgy of self-indulgence… to prolong their youth.’

“In summary,” says Fritts, “people at midlife are faced with a body growing larger year by year; with brain cells disappearing month by month; with their career having reached its peak. They are running after younger sexual partners on weak knees, with a mind so weak they would not know what to do with them, if they caught them!” (From “Van Gogh, Creativity and the Midlife Crisis,” a sermon by Roger Fritts, November 15, 1998.)

These are caricatures, of course, but if the images make us laugh perhaps because we see something of ourselves in them. And even if we don’t, many of us do find ourselves nodding at the opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy, “Midway upon the journey of my life I found myself in a dark wood, having lost the way.”

The midlife experience is profoundly human and normal. And it is humbling. Questions of personal identity arise. We find ourselves asking, “When you take away my job or my kids or my family history, who am I, really?” or “I've achieved some things. I'm a competent adult. Now what do I do with the rest of my life?” We find ourselves debating with ourselves over values and goals that we’ve never before doubted. We may feel depressed, or a little cynical, like Charles Bukowski in our reading:

"nobody is exceptional or wonderful or magic, they only seem to be. it’s all a trick, an in, a con, don’t buy it, don’t believe it. the world is packed with billions of people whose lives and deaths are useless…"

The world sometimes looks this way to us, and the idea that our lives are useless is both unbearable and sounds suspiciously true. Spiritual issues and questions bubble up uninvited.

Midlife is a time when deep unconscious issues within us strain to emerge, a time when we find ourselves searching for deeper meaning and moving, whether we like it or not, toward wholeness.

When does midlife begin? Psychologists say the lower age limit is around 35. Most of us hit midlife somewhere between the ages of 40 and 50. "Then there are those over 50," says psychologist Dan Johnston (www.lessons4living.com) "When this group is asked about midlife they state, 'Oh, I've already been through it long ago.' Frequently this is not the case. (As poet) T.S. Eliot says, 'we had the experience but missed the meaning.' … Luckily it is never too late to 'get the meaning.'"

The concept of midlife crisis is relatively new. It was only about two hundred years ago when the average lifespan was thirty-five years that we even began to think of childhood as a separate phase of life. The 19th century's average lifespan of fifty years brought the idea of adolescence as a discrete life stage. When the average life expectancy in the western world hit seventy-five years, talk of midlife began.

I decided to preach about midlife when I was in my late thirties. But when the time came to schedule my sermon topics that year, I found I just couldn’t relate to that one. This year, it feels not only personally relevant, but I have noticed that lots of the people I talk with here at church and elsewhere seem to be struggling with the concerns of midlife.

But that makes sense. Though the oldest members of the Baby Boom generation are closer now to 60 than to 50, there are still something like 60 million people in this country between the ages of 35 and 55 – and the average age of the adults in our church is right in there somewhere. Our church itself, having been chartered in 1962, also is midlife age, as is the Unitarian Universalist Association. It is interesting to muse on what the effects of midlife might be on institutions, as well as about what the collective effect of so many midlife people might be on our shared American culture.

If you are thinking that this sermon can’t possibly have much to say to you because you are either too young or too old to qualify as a “midlifer,” think again. Midlife is not an event in time in the sense of the Greek word “chronos,” or sequential, linear time, but begins when a person is awakened, or even stunned into consciousness – in the sense of the Greek word “kairos.” Some people are flung headlong into midlife by events beyond their control: death of a loved one, loss of a job, the breakup of a primary relationship, the time when children have grown up and leave home. Somehow the familiar flow of our everyday lives is sliced open, and everything we know about ourselves is thrown into relief by those liberating, frightening questions: “Who am I and where now, must I go?”

And there is a quality of "must," a quality of being called or commanded that comes at midlife. But what we are called to is usually patently unclear, and can even be devastatingly confusing.

Why is this? It's because at midlife we must give up who we think we are so that we can become who we are meant to be. (Dan Johnston) It's because midlife represents a diametric turn in our life’s direction.

The central project of the first half of life is to build an outer identity. We start out along life's path, we grow up, go to school and learn. At adolescence, it's as though our path is blocked by a great big wall, but with the energy of our youth, we climb over the wall, conquering the first identity crisis. And this becomes our metaphor for all obstacles or challenges that we encounter on our life's path – we climb over them, master them, conquer them. We go on, we take jobs, build careers, marry or form committed love partnerships, and perhaps even have children. As psychologist James Hollis says, we “say to the world: ‘Hire me. Marry me. Trust me.’ And then (we) prove (ourselves) worthy.” (p. 24) We become capable, competent adults.

At midlife, the outer identity we spent so many years building and polishing is somehow no longer enough. Another wall appears, blocking our path, and this one, to quote an old song, is "so high, can't get over it; so low, can't get under it; so wide, can't get around it; Oh, rock-a my soul…." And it is as though our souls have been rocked… right to their roots.

We must learn to walk through this wall, as Louis Jenkins described in the reading. Oh, we can try other methods. We can take many steps back, run, and throw ourselves at the wall, hoping to knock it down or get a foothold to climb over it. We can pull out a sledgehammer, or a jackhammer or climb into a bulldozer and whack away at the wall. We can pull out our shovels and try to tunnel under it. My own personal approach has been the pogo stick – bouncing, boing, boing, boing – trying to bounce high enough to get over the wall or at least catch a glimpse of what’s on the other side! At midlife, we try all of these things and more, and we suffer. But ultimately there is no other way past this wall than through …. As Jenkins says, "it’s a matter of concentration and just the right pressure. You will feel the dry, cool inner wall with your fingers, then there is a moment of total darkness before you step through on the other side."

But it is not that easy, of course. Therapist Kathleen Brehony writes, “At midlife we are deeply involved in a drama between opposites of profound proportions…. We are struggling to acknowledge parts of ourselves that have been ignored for thirty, forty, fifty years or more…. But in order to move toward who we are becoming, we have to let go… of who we have been.

There’s a story I like very much that captures the essence of this. It’s a Hassidic story, from Rabbi Nachman of Breslov.

There once was a poor Jewish man who lived in Prague. One night he dreamed that there was a great treasure buried under a bridge in Vienna, and that he should journey there to find this treasure. Night after night the dream recurred, until finally the man left his family behind and traveled to Vienna to claim his fortune.

When he arrived there, however, he found the bridge heavily guarded, and the watchful eyes of the King’s soldiers afforded him little opportunity to dig up the treasure. Every day, he paced back and forth across the bridge for hours, trying to figure out what to do, until one day, one of the soldiers grabbed him by the lapels of his coat and demanded, “Jew! Why do you return to this place day after day? What are you plotting?” Frustrated and anxious, the man blurted out the story of his dream. Much to his surprise, the soldier burst into uncontrollable laughter. When he finally caught his breath, the soldier said, “What a fool you are, believing in dreams. Why, if I let my life be guided by such visions, I would be well on my way to Prague today. For just last night I dreamed that a poor man in that city has a treasure buried in his cellar.”

The Jewish man returned home. He dug in his cellar, and there he found the treasure. (Adapted from story found at www.hasidicstories.com)

On the surface, the meaning in this story looks obvious, but it isn't. The poor Jewish man in this story is haunted by his dream of a fortune – something, surely, that could help him support his family, and even redeem his sense of failure. And so he goes to Vienna – a great distance from his home in Prague – because he still believes that fortune, treasure, are in the outer world. He will be the hero, he will save his family from poverty.

But he is blocked from fulfilling his quest by the King’s soldiers.

Let's think about those soldiers for a moment. Psychiatrist Allan Chinen, in his book “Once Upon a Midlife,” says that soldiers are closely tied to the archetypal image of the Hero, but that they also symbolize several tasks of the middle years for both men and women. He writes, “They slog through mud, polish shoes, and stand guard for hours on end. Like beasts of burden, soldiers are expected to work without complaint. They offer a poignant metaphor for the toil of the middle years…” (p. 135)

In his role as hero, as guardian of the king, one of the soldiers seizes the man, demands to know what he is doing, and then laughs in his face. Not a pleasant awakening, of course, but better than if the soldier had killed him or thrown him off the bridge…. And in the soldier’s humor is the key – for he reveals his own dream.

The poor man, laughed at by the Hero-image he no longer can achieve, must change direction. He must go home and work like a soldier, to dig in his own cellar. By giving up who he has been, by digging in his own depths, he will find the treasure.

This digging, the central task of midlife, refers to the fact that the solution to our pain and loss and disorientation is not necessarily to divert ourselves with something new, but to “soldier along." At midlife, we learn by going through the pain and the process, and if we can hold on to it, our sense of humor will help us.

Digging in the cellar also reminds us of other stories. Of descent and passage through a dark, threatening threshold into the sphere of rebirth and change. We think of Dante’s travels through the circles of hell, Jonah in the belly of the whale, Persephone’s journey to the underworld…. At midlife these tales describe how we feel, where we are when all our past strategies for solving problems, making decisions and pursuing goals prove inadequate to manage the unconscious forces within us that are seeking expression. Carl Jung wrote of his own midlife transition, “I frequently imagined a steep descent…. I found myself at the edge of a cosmic abyss. It was like a voyage to the moon… I had the feeling that I was in the land of the dead.” (Brehony, pp. 60-61) At midlife we learn again that there is no rebirth, no growth, without death.

Digging up the fortune in the cellar has another significance as well. Remember Antonio Machado's words:

Don’t trace out your profile –
forget your side view –
all that is outer stuff.
Look for your other half
who walks always next to you
and tends to be who you aren’t …

Look for your other half, the one who tends to be who you aren't. This is the treasure we are seeking.

Digging for this treasure may have us encounter those things about us that we have repressed – not only difficult things like anger, selfishness, and jealousy but also things about us that we might have felt were too good to be true – our creativity or joy, or the hopes we held when we were children – the ideas or activities we were passionate about.

Digging in our own depths also means removing from one’s partner or spouse the expectation that they will save us or take care of us or somehow complete us. At midlife, our primary relationship is with ourselves, but paradoxically, not selfishly. And when we accept responsibility for ourselves at midlife, we are freed to appreciate the mystery and uniqueness of our partner in a way never before possible. This is not easy, of course – and thus many committed relationships and marriages fail at midlife.

Turning within also means paying attention to those parts of ourselves that are less developed, less fluent. It means integrating the opposites within ourselves. An important part of this is the call women often feel at midlife to integrate masculine energies into themselves, and the call men feel to integrate feminine energies. As Psychologist Don Johnston says, "At the most basic … level what happens is that men begin to develop their capacity for relationship and must come to terms with emotions, vulnerability, and needs while women begin to become more decision and action oriented and in the process claim their independence, courage, power and wisdom."

And it isn't just masculine and feminine energies that we need to begin to balance at midlife. Our task is to move toward those areas of life with which we are less familiar, in which we are less competent. People like my father, an electrical engineer who spent his career thinking up solutions to energy issues and then marketing them to industry, find themselves balancing all this mental, people-centered fluency with quiet time in the concrete world of the five senses. My father took up small-boat sailing at midlife, and it sustains him still. Carl Jung cut and shaped stones with his hands and built a tower on the shore of Lake Zurich during his midlife transition. In my own people-centered, feeling-oriented life, balance comes when I am alone, using my senses and my hands to make artwork – or even through something as simple as scrubbing the bathroom floor, or as nourishing as going out to our beautiful church meditation garden and enjoying the colors and scents without thinking of how I’ll fit it into a sermon…..

The process of midlife is not brief. It may go on for years – unfolding and leading us to growth as we continue doing all the things our outer life calls for. It helps to find supportive guides – therapists and coaches, spiritual leaders who will listen to us and encourage us to listen to ourselves with attention and compassion.

There is one question I posed earlier that remains unanswered – and that is, if making this midlife transition is so painful, why do it?

The easy answer is that we really have no choice. It’s either grow up, or grow stagnant. And as long as we have to do it, we might as well do it well. As James Hollis writes, “Those who travel the passage consciously render their lives more meaningful. Those who do not, remain prisoners of childhood, no matter how successful they may appear in outer life.” (p. 7)

But I believe there’s another, more powerful answer to this question. Carl Jung wrote that the purpose of life is the unfolding of the unique, individual inner core or “capital S” Self that is inherent in every person. In so doing, we transcend ourselves, we die to ourselves, and become able to move in ways that truly make a difference in our world. This is the way in which we advance the consciousness of the larger Whole of which we are a part.

Thus the process of midlife transition becomes deeply spiritual, and our question about what to do with the rest of our lives is answered by the paradox of loving our neighbor as ourselves. For when we have finally found our way toward wholeness, so we are called to help our world toward wholeness as well.

Ah, midlife. Remember, it is normal. It is an inescapable, internal task that asks us to be present to and patient with the suffering of letting go, changing and growing. And if we are open to the spiritual awakening and challenge it brings, soon we will find ourselves exerting just the right pressure, finding just the right level of concentration, feeling the dry, cool inner wall with our fingers, and entering the moment of total darkness.

Then we will step through on the other side.

Amen.