My wife and I saw Selma last night – powerful. Tears and weeping at times. The courage of people to stand up for dignity, freedom, equality. Many of you marched, rode busses, preached, demonstrated – God Bless You!
Dear friends on the journey with, in and to the Eternal Now we call God. Let me say at the beginning that I hope you will read this and I would love to hear from any and all of you who find that you relate to this which I now call “Learnings in the afternoon of your life.”
I woke up thinking about learning, education, school – life-long learning. They say that the first six years of your life are the most critical years for learning. I can’t argue with the experts. Most of you reading this have gone on to a great academic education. This is the way the culture, your family of origin, the church, other spiritual institutions, the Boy/Girl Scouts, the colleges, universities, seminaries, pour all of their content and concepts forming and informing our being.
But then there comes a time in the words of Carl Jung:
“Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was a great morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.”
You and I know that there is so much more in the afternoon of life. While I am most grateful for all the education of my youth, it comes to me that I have learned more in my years 35-74 than I learned in those early years. That which worked in the morning of my life did not work in the afternoon of my life.
There have been shifts, breakthroughs, journeys to far countries, transitions, painful times, joyful times – deaths and resurrections – and I expect that you too have in your own fashion been acquainted with all the ways that life is a’learning you.
I am writing this to invite you to reflect upon your own life journey and to remember your stepping stones, your times of deep insight and transformation, deaths and resurrections, moving in new directions, of making necessary changes, of beginnings without end. Those times when you may have said along with May Sarton:
Now I become myself.
It’s taken Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces.
Our life story, our journey to authenticity, freedom and wholeness, is of vital importance. We are not birthed, created to live a life that adapts and conforms to the expectations of others or of our culture. Each human life is an experiment of one. We are here for an original experience of Life and of freedom. It is never too late to learn this.
The choice is always ours.
What new life is seeking to break through to you?
Neil Diamond sings: “Some people they never wake – until the day they die.”
“In the world to come I shall not be asked, ‘Why were you not Moses?’
I shall be asked, ‘Why were you not Zusya?'”
-Rabbi Zusya
With you in awakening to who God is in us and to who we are in God here and now.
We are all sparks of the Divine flame
Blessed Be
Compassionate Be
Boldly Be
Soul Nugget 