But then there is this gnawing worry that I’ve got it wrong.
Why am I not more successful and driving a posh car rather than a mid-range
people carrier? Why am I living in a pokey, three-bedroom townhouse with a
postage stamp for a garden in a mouldy London exurb and not a big, five-bedroom detached house with a proper garden and my own study? And why am I
looking at maybe another twenty years working life at tops, to retire on a tiny
pension?
Well old Alighieri
Dante knew the human condition when he wrote to opening verse to the Divine
Comedy –
When half way through the journey of our life
I found that I was in a gloomy wood,
because the path which led aright was lost.
He was putting into poetic form this spiritual dark night that
we now call the ‘mid-life crisis’. He then takes his protagonist on an epic journey
through the realms of Limbo, Hell, Purgatory and Paradise to lead him back to
the ‘path which led aright’.
Actually, at this stage, I must hold my hands up and confess
that I have only read Inferno,
because I found both the purgatory and paradise bits rather dull by comparison,
and because I had been entranced by the 1989 Peter Greenway TV adaptation
of the first eight Cantos. But this opening stanza of Canto I of Inferno has stuck with me and grown in
relevance as I transitioned from youth to middle age and began to wonder
whether my life was ‘lost on in a gloomy wood’.
This summer, my better half and children and I decamped to
one of those huge summer, Christian festivals that involved lots of excessively loud worship
(this year’s styles verged between the traditional U2 and Coldplay rip-offs,
and (new this year) Clean Bandit),
lots of meetings and seminars and prayer ministry. And camping. In lots and
lots of rain and mud. And dirty, smelly loos and showers. And lots of BO.
We
loved it!
The highlight this year (and there were several standout
moments, including the aforementioned Clean
Bandit style worship rave on the last evening – more in the watching and
joining in for me) was Nick Page’s ‘Dark
Night of the Shed’ seminar. With much humour and honesty, he began to
explore the male mid-life crisis, dissecting its roots mercilessly, cataloguing
its symptoms hilariously, and soberly beginning to re-look at how we transform
the narrative of our lives.
In short, Page argues, the mid-life crisis is caused when we
realise that our false gods are letting us down. Be they the worship of money
and consumerism, our long-lost youth, power and status or sex, these false gods
all promise us much in our youth, but are revealed by middle age as worthless
idols.
You can see where this is going, can’t you?
The way through the mid-life
crisis is to re-engage with an authentic, Christ-centred spirituality. To recognise
it is not our power that achieves anything, but His. To recognise what the
Bible says about our senior years and not what our current cultural obsession
with youth says.
This is really what Dante was writing about seven hundred
years ago. He understood that the mid-life crisis is a spiritual crisis. For
me, to discover that there are other men (and women) who feel the same as me has been truly liberating.
Even more encouraging has been to realise that they have found a way through it to a richer way of being in
the second half of life.
When I started this blog in 2006, I was hoping to write about life and
faith and my experiences along the way. Over the years, this has slowed down to
a dribble of posts and has been more a cultural commentary than a personal reflection. I’m not ruling out such commentary in the future, but think that there is a more interesting journey to start recording
here.
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