Richard Rohr, OFM

As Desmond Tutu once told me on a recent trip to Cape Town, ‘We are only the light bulbs, Richard, and our job is just to remain screwed in!’

One of the guiding principles of our Center for Action and Contemplation puts it this way: ‘The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.’

Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have—right now. This is a monumental change from the first half of life, so much so that it is almost the litmus test of whether you are in the second half of life at all.

Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.

Like skaters, we move forward by actually moving from side to side.

If you have forgiven yourself for being imperfect and falling, you can now do it for just about everybody else. If you have not done it for yourself, I am afraid you will likely pass on your sadness, absurdity, judgment, and futility to others.

The ancients rightly called this internal longing for wholeness ‘fate’ or ‘destiny,’ the ‘inner voice’ or the ‘call of the gods.’ It has an inevitability, authority, and finality to it, and was at the heart of almost all mythology. Almost all heroes heard an inner voice that spoke to them. In fact, their heroism was in their ability to hear that voice and to risk following it—wherever!

So our question now becomes, ‘How can I honor the legitimate needs of the first half of life, while creating space, vision, time, and grace for the second?’ The holding of this tension is the very shape of wisdom. ... The human art form is in uniting fruitful activity with a contemplative stance—not one or the other, but always both at the same time.

Carl Jung said that so much unnecessary suffering comes into the world because people will not accept the ‘legitimate suffering’ that comes from being human.