There is new air in the second half of our spiritual journey, or perhaps better stated, we have access to this air we didn't even know existed before.
To me, this air is an embrace and acceptance in two major areas: God and self.
God is ever larger, ever more mysterious, and I have less need to understand. I don't try to shut Him down when He appears in other cultures in a God-pursuit I do not recognize. He knows if His heart is pleased with their journey; it is not mine to judge.
Only God has it right. My rightness is an illusion that propped me up through my first half of life journey--useful then, unnecessary now--and becomes in my second half a shadow that must be relinquished.
Rohr states in Chapter 11:
Your shadow is what you refuse to see about yourself, and what you do not want others to see.The peculiar strand of my study in spiritual endeavors has been to try and decipher evil and the way it plagues our everyday life--how we can recognize it and join forces with God to do battle.
In my first half of life, I saw it through rule-laden eyes, and applied this and that to defeat it. God graciously allowed a measure of understanding, and even success, though I was far from understanding our greatest weapon of all.
Now, in the second half of my journey, I see that forgiveness is the centerpiece of all of our efforts in this life. When we get forgiveness right by giving it fully, without qualifiers, we get Jesus, even if we don't have His name yet. And when we get Jesus by giving full forgiveness, we trump evil.
Jesus, named Forgiveness, neutralizes every evil force that comes our way.
How easy it is to breathe new air, found in the places I denied myself access to before, just by holding a grudge or a hard feeling or a your-way-is-not-my-way stumbling block.
If we have found Jesus without granting forgiveness to those we hold hostage, we have only found a shadow that we call Jesus.
Funny that God would hide Jesus in forgiveness.
