A New Awakening, Part 13

I have in this ongoing series been investigating the wisdom of myth as it informs what I call a potential "new awakening" of spirituality in our society. I take as one of my main reference points the book and PBS television series The Power of Myth, in which, during the mid-1980s, Bill Moyers interviewed at great length the scholar of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell.

Gay marriage flag

In my previous post in this series, I talked about the touchy subject of moral issues that vex Catholics today. I mentioned abortion on demand, gay marriage, birth control paid for by universal health coverage, and in vitro fertilization. These are just a few of many such areas of concern, and their moral implications trouble serious non-Catholics as well as Catholics. Since I wrote that last post, I have found myself bothered by the question of just how the "new awakening" of myth-aware spirituality that I am recommending ought to deal with such issues of morality.

Birth control pills

Certainly, much of the discourse about religion we encounter in the media today tends to characterize religion as first and foremost a fount of moral teaching. Thus, if the Catholic Church objects to birth control mandatorily paid for by universal health insurance, and if such a policy on the part of the U.S. government appears to a majority of Americans to be right and proper, so much the worse for that church and for religion in general. Ergo, since I personally support birth control paid for by universal health coverage, my vaunted "new awakening" would seem to be injurious to my own Catholic Church and to religion in general.

That is not, however, what I really would like to happen.

What I have in mind is the hope that a boost to publicly visible, mythology-aware spirituality in our society would tend to keep people on track morally. Spiritual people, if their spirituality is properly grounded in the wisdom encoded in myth, are, I would hope, less prone to sin.

Yet that notion itself needs hasty qualification. Manifestly, people who remain immature and unformed morally are not likely to make that come true in their lives. Moreover, even relatively mature young adults are often subject to temptations that can swamp their moral inclinations and that older people are not as beset by or are more able to resist.

My belief is that there is a qualitative difference in what both mythology and religion can tell us about the two halves of a human lifetime. Setting aside our childhoods per se, our lives today split into, first, a period of years in which we are establishing our identity as independent adults, pursuing an education and gaining a livelihood, finding a marriage partner, producing our children, and so on. Then comes the second half of life, which begins sometime after the children have grown up and left the nest.

Fr. Richard Rohr
and his book

These ideas were crystallized for me, by the way, by reading Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, by Fr. Richard Rohr. Rohr is a Franciscan friar and priest who has written a number of books of spiritual advice. I find his thinking to be pleasantly compatible with the insights of Joseph Campbell about the wisdom of myth.

Rohr's discussion of the two halves of life focuses, at least in the book's early going, mainly on life's second half. The reason is that institutional religion — my own Catholic Church and most other faiths — principally addresses the needs of those in life's first half. And, says Rohr, strong moral instruction and encouragement are clearly requisite for the younger faithful.

Rohr says that, spiritually if not practically, the first half of life is mainly for building a structure: specifically, creating a "container" for the aspect of the human psyche that psychologists label our ego. The second half of life is for "filling" that ego-container, once it has been set up. Rohr uses, from the teachings of Jesus, the analogy of the old wineskin that is expected to hold new wine.

Things change radically for us, Rohr says, as we enter life's second half, so radically that Jesus said our old wineskins will — quite shockingly — not suffice to hold our new wine. New wine, Jesus said, needs new wineskins. Rohr interprets this as meaning:

“The second half of life can hold some new wine because by then there should be some strong wineskins, some tested ways of holding our lives together. But that normally means that the container itself has to stretch, die in its present form, or even replace itself with something better. This is the big rub, as they say, but also the very source of our midlife excitement and discovery.”

There is, of course, a big paradox in the notion that the old container has to "replace itself with something better." (Myths and metaphors are good at presenting us with paradoxes.) Our “tested ways of holding our lives together” — the moral precepts we have incorporated into our original wineskins  — seem now to have to dissolve. Something else, some other force, has to step in to keep our new wine from spilling on the ground. That something else is represented, Rohr says, by the mature version of our human spiritual potential.

Rohr's book is to me as a 65-year-old a convincing argument that:

“ ... the task of the first half of life is to create a proper container for one's life and answer the first essential questions: 'What makes me significant?' 'How can I support myself?' and 'Who will go with me?' The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver.”

What in religion facilitates life's first-half task? One of the facets which does so is an absolutist approach to moral issues. For instance, it becomes that much harder for us to find the one who will "go with us" down the path of marriage and family if our church or society equivocates about sexuality. Moral rules against greed and thievery are needed to constrain our choices as to how we may support ourselves. Like teachings insist that we never inflate our own significance at the expense of other individuals, or of society at large.

Even so, says Rohr, when we get to life's second half we find — and here's where the big paradox comes in — that moral absolutism turns out to have its limits:

“We all want and need various certitudes, constants, and insurance policies at every stage of life. But we have to be careful, or they totally take over and become all-controlling needs, keeping us from further growth.”

"Metamorphoses of Amymone,"
scene from Greek mythology
(painting by Andrea Mantegna)

So when I say that a boost to publicly visible, myth-aware spirituality would tend automatically to keep people on track morally in our society, I have to quickly qualify it by adding that I'm referring generally to the mature, second-half-of-life version of our human spiritual potential.

Society's myths and spiritual metaphors, with all their attendant paradoxes, are of course shared by young and old alike. We can't conceal from the young the seeming contradiction that "growing up spiritually," as Rohr calls it, entails setting aside the rock-solid moral absolutism which youth quite properly hears from church pulpits. At the same time, the possibility of attaining spiritual maturity — constructing a new wineskin — depends crucially on our first having made and properly utilized the old, absolutist wineskin. And we can't do that without accepting the moral teaching appropriate to the first half of life, prior to the time when our human nature begins inexorably to fashion for us a whole new container for our spiritual wine.