From Heart to Head and Back to Heart
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
March 31, 2019
“We were born with silence, and as we grew up, we lost the silence and were filled with words. We lived in our hearts, and as time passed, we moved into our heads…”
This passage from our reading this morning, from a Hindu holy man, reminds me of my early days of being a parent. How well I remember the excitement as a tiny person, in this case my son Andy, began to accumulate words, faster and faster. In my new parent zeal I started writing them all down as Andy learned to say them, to keep count of how many words he could say. What can I say? He was precocious, and I was a yuppie, and this was in the Boston suburbs.
And what I also realize, looking back on those days, was that as the gains in speech grew, and as Andy became more of a person, there was a loss of Mystery, a loss of a sense of him being somewhat apart. Of wondering what he was thinking or feeling. And of course, as many of you parents probably remember, before too long I wanted to get away from the flow of words; I began to fantasize about locking myself in the bathroom for the afternoon and pretending that there was no one around by the name of “Mommy.”
Life became more transactional, less based on sheer emotion, less precious. “I want this.” “You can’t have that.” “Why not?” “Because I said so.”
“We lost the silence, and were filled with words…”
This month we have been exploring the theme of Journey in a variety of ways. We talked about faith journeys – about growing out of childhood religion and into new understandings and practices. We learned about my journey to India and what it taught me. Last week we explored quests and myths and emotional journeys as expressed in poetry. And today it is left for us to consider a journey that covers no physical distance – the journey within ourselves as we grow and mature spiritually and come to new understanding about life.
Over the course of the 20th century, psychologists and psychiatrists from Jung to Erikson to Piaget created multiple theories of human development, setting out stages of cognitive and emotional growth that are typical among humans. These focused primarily on physical, intellectual and emotional growth through the ages: milestones, in other words.
The more interesting question for us today, though, is what sort of spiritual growth should we expect at different points in our lives, in our journeys? And so we turn to Father Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico.
Father Rohr believes that in fact we journey through two spiritual stages in our human lives, the two halves of life, as he named them. The first stage, or half, focuses on creating a foundation of knowledge, a container for the events of our lives. During this time we journey rapidly from our silent beginning, living in our hearts, to a life of the mind. We study, learn, develop our identities, lay the groundwork for our careers, and take our place in society. We might fall in love, marry, and begin raising children.
Rohr calls us ‘loyal soldiers’ during the phase of life; we are focusing on conforming, learning the rules, and upholding the institutions of society. We go, as Ravi Shankar put it, from living by heart to living in our heads.
And then, unless we are a very unusual person, something unravels in our lives. Perhaps a marriage fails, or there is a frightening diagnosis, or a beloved spouse or child dies. Perhaps the carefully planned career suddenly falls apart, the business goes bankrupt, or we find ourselves turning ever more frequently to alcohol or drugs to get through our days. Perhaps we can no longer fend off the darkness of despair or depression.
At that point, Father Rohr tells us that we prepare to enter the second half of our lives. It’s important to point out now that this has nothing to do with our chronological age. We are so used to thinking about milestones such as middle age, or retirement; moving from our economically productive years to what is euphemistically referred to as our ‘golden’ years. But Father Rohr isn’t talking about the march toward retirement. He explains that the journey into the second half of our lives can come at any age, when we have suddenly spiraled away from the heady, intellectual, striving part of our lives, when we have suddenly fallen, perhaps hit bottom, and are forced to begin a new journey, a journey toward spiritual growth, toward enlightenment. He calls this ‘falling down in order to go up.’
If we have studied any literature, we can instinctively sense the wisdom of this theory of the second half of life, of falling before we can rise. We humans have grappled with the fear of loss, of humiliation, of being lost in the wilderness, since the beginning of time. We can think of the recurring themes in literature – for example, the story told by Homer in The Odyssey. There was Odysseus, as described in the poem “Ithaka” last Sunday, trying for years to find his way home from the Trojan War. Odysseus was shipwrecked, blown off course, tempted by Sirenes, and the years went by while he feared that his wife would stop waiting for him and his son would no longer recognize him. The losses can mount when we are stuck in a downward spiral: loss of relationships, loss of home, loss of our very identity. Loss begets yet more loss, until we fear that we will be left with nothing.
We remember the story of the Buddha: of Siddhartha Gautama, wandering in search of enlightenment. Over the years he gave up everything: home, family, even adequate nourishment. He almost died of starvation, reduced to being carried by his few disciples toward a river in which he could bathe and drink.
These stories are handed down over the course of many generations. They continue to fascinate us because they help us to work through the fundamental fear of loss, of losing all we have.
What else can help us?
Interestingly, traditional religious beliefs aren’t always that helpful. Even Father Rohr, a devout Catholic, readily admits this. Traditional religions tend to be an important part of the first half of life, the period that focuses on strength of institutions, on the foundational beliefs that we are taught and are taught to uphold. But when the foundation shakes, and the walls crumble, we find that we likely need more than the same practices and rituals that we were taught in the first half of life.
I stopped believing in my childhood religion at a young age – as a young teenager. And it was many years before I discovered Unitarian Universalism, as a parent looking for something for the children. As I have considered Richard Rohr’s two halves of life, I see that Unitarian Universalism actually provides wisdom for both halves.
Let’s take a moment right now to think for a second about the affirmation we recite together every Sunday: it begins, “In the light of truth, and the warmth of love…”
The light of truth. We UU’s put great importance on what we call our search for truth and meaning. We seek to know the facts about religion, about what is true, what will happen when we die, for example. We demand certainty. This is first half of life religion; creating the container for our spiritual selves. To the extent that we are focused on religion during the formative first half of life, we UU’s are likely to see it as more of an intellectual exercise, part of the development of our identity. What do I think? What do we believe? Of what are we certain?
But does this seeking after truth hold us when we begin to fall? Or does there need to be more?
And so we turn to the second half of our affirmation, the affirmation for the second half of our lives: the warmth of love.
As people in the striving phase of the journey, the first half, we seek the love of other humans and are satisfied with that. People often don’t need a religious home during this stage, when all is going according to plan, the possibilities are endless, and the future is bright.
And then we fall. What catches us?
The warmth of love.
In the freefall that can take place between the two halves of our journeys, our heads, our intellects, really can’t rescue us. For after all, we are spiraling downward, we are suffering, despite what we already attained with our heads: our successes, our careers, our nice houses and cars.
The second half of life is about letting go, about finding new ways forward on our spiritual journeys, about transformation. The second half is about gaining humility, about recognizing that we can fail. Learning we can, and will, fail, is a most unwelcome lesson. But within that is a great gift: in failure, we are given the opportunity to grow in compassion – first for ourselves, and then for others. If we can find a way to love ourselves through our failures, then we journey back to our hearts. We transform: we learn again to live from our hearts, broken though they are, hearts with new cracks that allow them to grow, to expand. We learn to hold more in our hearts and to see others with love and compassion.
The journey into the second half of life is a paring down of what we thought was important, of reducing life to its essence. In falling down, as Father Rohr tells us, we grow upward. It becomes easier for us to focus on our inner lives: our hearts, or our souls. Father Rohr offers us a few ways for us to think about the soul. It is our Inner Blueprint, he says, or our inner self. Regardless of the name for our essence, the spiritual journey of the second half of life enables us to reach deep within the container that we created during the first half, to finally encounter and to listen to this self, to give it room to grow and guide us in new ways.
My friends, we begin our lives in silence, and our first lessons are to love and to be loved. But from the time we are infants, the pressure grows to attain knowledge, as I saw with my children. We begin early to learn words and to fill the silence with speech. As we continue along our spiritual journeys, we create a life that moves us away from our hearts and emphasizes the life of the mind, of our heads. And then we enter the second half of life, at any age, in which we fail, we suffer, and we find that whatever knowledge in our heads that we were relying on during our journeys was simply not adequate.
Life offers us many paradoxes. It is one of life’s greatest paradoxes that it is in failure that we find ways to grow spiritually. This possibility of growth through failure is one of the great gifts of life, once we are ready to receive it. There are many names for this gift: love, perhaps, the warmth of love, or grace. Goodness, perhaps, or God. There are many names, but one love: holding us, sustaining us, giving us room to fail and then to grow from the failure.
May you have the faith to sense the love, and the grace that surrounds us and holds us, even as we falter.
Blessed Be.
Amen.
This sermon was informed by Father Richard Rohr’s book, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,2011.
