pastor Carl Jung
Raise your hand if you are in the second half of life. What? Is this about turning 50, which may have replaced 40 as the crest of the hill? Or is it more about life stage? I check Erik Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial development, where navigating central conflicts result in a sense of mastery or inadequacy. According to the chart, I am clearly in Middle Adulthood, Stage 7: Generativity vs. Stagnation.
Fascinating. But it is Richard Rohr’s concept of the Two Halves of Life that has caught my attention and seems the most personally and pastorally relevant.
According to Rohr, the purpose of the first half of life is to build a strong ‘container’ or identity for ourselves. It is about making our way in the world by becoming a responsible citizen, and finding meaningful work based on our talents…. In this half of life we tend to be preoccupied with our reputation, both at work and in the community. Financial security and establishing a place we call home are also important goals of the first half of life. In this stage of life there is often a strong attachment to rules and procedures and a tendency to be critical of those who don’t conform.- Dominic Cogan
Hm, ok. Responsibility, mortgages, meaningful work. That makes sense. Being critical of others for their differences. There certainly is no shortage of judgmentalism in our culture. My way is right, so if your way is different, you must be wrong. So what about the second half of life? What is the task that I need to move into? Rohr’s description of Shadow Work challenges me.
The more we are attached to and unaware of such a protected self-image, the more shadow self we will likely have. This is especially dangerous for a “spiritual leader” or “professional religious person” because it involves such an ego-inflating self-image…. The movement to second-half-of-life wisdom has much to do with necessary shadow work and the emergence of healthy self-critical thinking, which alone allows us to see beyond our own shadow and disguise and to find who we are, “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3)—Richard Rohr, 6/18/23 Meditation
I realize I need to spend more time on this. What are the things I am hiding from myself, and from others, that will come back to bite me if I ignore them? I don’t want to be one of the many pastors whose downfall is the gap between their external righteousness and their secret lives. When I first began to contemplate the possibility of leaving my counseling career to serve NCF, I began alternating sessions with a spiritual director and a fellow social worker. Ongoing meetings with wisdom external to our fellowship help me reflect authentically on this journey. Shadow work is our new task.
Is our Fellowship in the second half of life? What might that mean? I am intrigued by the part of shadow work that is about culture and groups and church.
On a cultural level, shadow means what our group, our tribe, our religion, our political party deems negative, out of bounds, to be shunned, to be improved, or to be punished. Behind every social oppression lurks a piece of group shadow whose members are exporting it onto others who are not of their tribe. When the shadow part is not faced, it goes unconscious and lives there. -Ann Belford Ulanov
This is where I started checking footnotes and ordering books. I have now twice read the Prologue to The Living God and Our Living Psyche: What Christians Can Learn from Carl Jung, by Ann Belford Ulanov and Alvin Dueck, underlining as I go. The writers suggest that
Jung engaged in a pastoral attempt to counter the personally debilitating effects of modernity…. Like a pastor, Jung reflected on the psychological condition of the modern individual from a cultural perspective, and also on the state of European civilization with a concern for its healing. (p. 8)
As a pastor embedded in this fellowship, I too am concerned about what faith has become in our current world:
…faith has been rendered largely an individual and private experience, with more concern to actualize innate personal potential than to advocate publicly for social justice or environmental protection. (7-8)
So- as a cultural anthropologist, a clinical social worker, a pastor, and a person engaged in the second half of life shadow work for individuals and our collective- I look forward to learning and sharing and delving deeper into the mysteries of our lives in the presence of the Living God. May we ever more fully love God with all of our minds, our hearts, our strength, and our resources and may we engage more fully in loving our neighbors as ourselves. -Renée