Our Appointment With Life

Our Appointment With Life

I’m a huge fan of James Hollis. He speaks well to the second passage of life. So often midlife is characterized as a humiliating attempt to hang onto our fleeing youth. James Hollis sees this time as a great spiritual awakening:

Finding a mature spirituality will only occur when we internalize the fact that our egos are only a small part of a larger mystery…. We are called to ask serious, more courageous questions of ourselves, for without these probing questions, we will simply fall back into the old patterns, which work neither for us nor for our culture.

We realize we are going to have to become psychological by scrutinizing the world around us, and the world within, with greater depth and focused awareness. We have to see the religiosity that is present in virtually all things in our world, and then ask ourselves if we find such forms worthy of the soul or not.

We are going to have to risk attending to this liberating principle of resonance. If something resonates within, it is somehow about us, and for us, and if it does not, it will only betray the soul in the long run, no matter how much ego wills or tradition venerates.

A mature spirituality already lies within each of us, in our potential to take on the mystery as it comes to us, to query it, to risk change and growth, and to continue the revisioning of our journey for so long as we live. It remains to be seen how ready we are to take the step toward this responsibility for personal authority.

That is an appointment that each of us is called to keep.

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