patterns embedded in my personality that had influenced my way of living in the world.
Referring to the multiplicity of our inner selves that inhabit each one of us, Elizabeth O’Connor wrote, “it was during a time of painful conflict that I first began to experience myself as more than one. It was as though I sat in the midst of many selves.”3
I reflected on my many selves. The Pleaser, Performer, and Perfectionist—my trinity of P’s. I was learning how closely these old roles were connected to another powerful role that I played out: the Good Little Boy. He was that part of me that possessed little self-validation or autonomy. He was that part of me that tended to define life by others and their expectations. As a man, I sometimes felt that I had been scripted to be all things to all people. But when I tried, I usually ended up forfeiting my deepest identity, my own uniqueness as a child of God.
My Good Little Boy endured everything with a smile on his face. He feared coloring outside of the traditional lines, and frequently cut himself off from his real thoughts and feelings. He was well adapted to thinking other people’s thoughts and following the path of least resistance.
Now, oddly, I could feel the movements of an unknown person locked away inside of me who wanted life and breath, who wanted to shed what wasn’t real and vital and recover my own uniqueness. I felt the vibrations of a deeper, authentic self who wanted to live out his own unique vision of being an individual and embrace his own mystery. Who was this self inside of me who cried out to be?
During the previous four months, I had been reading the poetry of T.S. Eliot, who at times seemed like a soulmate to me. In his “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” I found my story, the quiet agony of someone who came upon an unsuspecting darkness buried in midlife and met the overwhelming question: “Do I dare/ Disturb the universe? . . . I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;/ I know the voices dying with a dying fall/ Beneath the music from a farther room.”4 In my life, there seemed to be some kind of music coming from a distant room that I couldn’t find. Voices dying to be heard. Did I dare disturb the universe within myself?
Believe me, when I say I wanted to shove all this away and pretend it didn’t exist. In fact, I had actually done that for a long time. But I couldn’t do that any more. My life had become too painful. At times, I found myself shut in a closet of pain, unable to find the door. In my blackest moments, I actually fantasized about running away to find the vital part of me that I had lost.
B. Embracing the Confusion
As I sat on that bench that autumn day beneath a beautiful, crisp blue sky, I felt like everything inside me was churning, trying to find a way out. And suddenly, at the height of my chaos, I began to entertain the overwhelming question confronting me. Actually, I had been circling it for a long time, but now, at last, I walked right into the center of it. In a sense, it was a dangerous thing to do because those who enter the heart of a sacred question and feel the searing heat it gives off are usually compelled to live on into the answer.
Is it possible, I asked myself, that I am being summoned from some deep and holy place within? Am I being asked to enter a new passage in the spiritual life—the journey from false self to true self? Am I being asked to dismantle old masks and patterns and unfold a deeper, more authentic self—the one God created me to be? Am I being invited to disturb my inner universe in quest of the undiscovered person who clamors from within?
Unfortunately, there has been little emphasis on this summons within Christian circles. And, when it comes, we don’t understand that we are being thrust into personal transformation. Most of us tend to write it off as just another predicament or plight—perhaps the result of burnout or our dissatisfaction with life.
I believe, however, that in such a summons we are actually being presented with a spiritual developmental task. We are being asked to unfold a deeper self—what we might call the life of Christ within us.
As I reflected on my struggle that afternoon, I remembered the discoveries I had made in the writings of the famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. I had been studying his works over the past several years, trying to understand his approach to how we grow psychologically as we age. When I told a friend that I was doing this, he reminded me that I was looking for truth in rather unorthodox places. However, I told him that this was like what Abraham Heschel said in his book I Asked for Wonder, “God is hiding in the world. Our task is to let the divine emerge from our deeds.”5
Moreover, for the past six years, I had been teaching theology in the Washington Theological Union. My area of concentration was teaching courses in Christian spirituality. During the years when I was working on my doctoral degree in theology from Catholic University, I had studied the classic Western spiritual writers like St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, and especially the contemporary Cistercian monk and spiritual writer Thomas Merton. In fact, I had been teaching a course on Merton, entitled The Theology and Spirituality of Thomas Merton. Since Merton had recently died in 1968, there always seemed to be a lot of interest in him and his understanding of how we grow spiritually. In trying to comprehend Merton’s understanding of the contemplative journey, I discovered that Merton believed that the spiritual life always involved entering the depths of oneself. Later, when I began to study Jung, I was amazed at how much of his work in depth psychology paralleled the spirituality of Thomas Merton that I had come to know, and how they enriched one another.
Jung believed that “every midlife crisis is a spiritual crisis, that invites us to die to the old self, the fruit of the first half of life and liberate the new man or woman within us.” I recalled Jung’s words in Stages of Life:
Wholly unprepared, they embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world and of life? No, there are none. 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 ideas will serve as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning—for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.6
Jung divided life into two major phases. The first phase, or “morning,” is reserved for relating and orienting to the outer world by developing the ego. The second half, or “afternoon,” is for adapting to the inner world by developing our true self. The midlife transition between these two, Jung likened to a difficult birth. This was certainly what I had been experiencing.
This transition is always very difficult, Jung believed, because it involves a real breakdown of our old spiritual and psychic structures—the old masks and personas that have served us well in the past but that no longer fit. The overarching roles that created the theme song for my life—Perfectionist, Performer, Pleaser, Good Little Boy, began to lose their music. It’s agonizing to come to that place in life where you know all the words but none of the music.
In our youth, we set up inner myths and stories to live by, but around the midlife juncture these patterns begin to crumble. It feels like an inner collapsing of everything inside of us. This is why it is so painful and confusing. As John Shea writes, “when order crumbles, mystery rises.”7
One of my favorite passages in Scripture comes from the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes. “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted” (Eccles. 3:1–2).
Most of us need reassurance that it’s okay to let the old masks die, and to “pluck up” what was planted long ago. And as I was struggling with whether to embrace this experience or run away from it, a friend said to me “if you think God always leads you only beside
