Your second half of life
Occasionally, some friends and acquaintances ask, ‘Are you religious?’ Here's my answer.
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Occasionally, some friends and acquaintances ask, ‘Are you religious?’
The answer is yes. Because it’s impossible not to be.
Here’s why.
The etymology of religion comes from the Latin religiō. The Latin word derives either from religare or relegere. Religare means to re-bind or re-connect something. And relegere means to re-read or re-consider something.
Both point to returning to something—re-reading or re-connecting. That’s the hint.
This is because religion is the uniting of opposites: Light and dark, birth and death, loss and renewal, despair and hope, heaven and hell, consciousness and unconsciousness, fate and free will, good and evil, yin and yang.
This is how I understand religion and why we are compelled as humans to become religious in the second half of our lives.
Richard Rohr in Falling Upwards says the second half isn’t just aging but entering into profound unity:
Most of us tend to think of the second half of life as largely about getting old, dealing with health issues, and letting go of our physical life, but the whole thesis of this book is exactly the opposite. What looks like falling can largely be experienced as falling upward and onward, into a broader and deeper world, where the soul has found its fullness, is finally connected to the whole, and lives inside the Big Picture.1
If we’re truly seeking wisdom, we’ll begin to see the interconnectedness of all things. Observing and contemplating the tension and co-existence of seeming opposites.
We immediately grasp that we must descend into hell before we can ascend into heaven.
Ah, we realize why Odysseus left Ithaca for a second time to journey into the mainland where people didn’t know the sea. Because he was compelled to bind the parts to the whole.
Yet, often for us, the second half kicks in with a terrible punch—a cataclysmic event like a child’s death, a spouse loss, a job gone, a home flooded, a terminal illness diagnosis.
Something like that catapults us into this new stage: Into the unknown.
We remain stubborn, clinging on to worldliness. Because the ego is in control. The ego is caught up in seeking recognition from colleagues, lusting after power, attaining social status among friends, and bragging about our kids.
The ego is the obese man blocking heaven’s door, waving cheeseburgers to disincentivise us from entering.
But your true self isn’t captured by your career, by what your colleagues think of you, or even by your kids. When we shed all these facades, there we still are. The conscious thinking being that captivated Descartes. This true self—the one hidden and buried by the first half in our pursuit of worldliness—is patiently waiting in our second half.
So, in the first half, we are the foolish learned men Heraclitus spoke of:
Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand that night and day are one.2
What is the second half of life then? It’s confronting and uniting paradoxes.
Religion is precisely this harmony of opposites.
It’s the bowl that contains the paradoxes without breaking: God becomes man so that man can become God. Nirvana becomes samsara so that samsara can become nirvana. Three persons, one God. Nirguna Brahman and Saguna Brahman.
As Aruni taught his son, Svetaketu:
Believe me, my son, an invisible and subtle essence is the Spirit of the whole universe. That is Reality. That is Atman. Tat Tvam Asi.3
This is the not-so-secret secret known by the Great Traditions.
When we read the wisdom tradition from Lao Tse to Heraclitus to Buddha to Plato to Plotinus to Pseudo-Dionysius to Adi Shankara to Rumi to Francis of Assisi to Thomas Aquinas, it becomes strikingly evident that our whole existence and that of the cosmos is a paradox. The intermingling of the infinite with the finite and vice versa.
We are the finite dreaming of the infinite. We are mortals, yet we house the immortal within our souls.
Like Dante, we only enter Paradise through Beatrice—the beatific love, the embodiment of wisdom—who pulls us into this beautiful swirling paradox. And it’s where we find our rest. Peace that surpasses understanding.
This is why we cannot be but religious.
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Richard Rohr, Falling Upward.
Heraclitus, The Fragments.
Unknown, Chandogya Upanisad.
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