SPCK (London 2012). Pbk. 198 pages. £10.99.
What is anyone doing, recommending such an inexplicable feat, you wonder: is he a clown, a trampoline fanatic or – what? But an important message he has, for anyone attempting spiritual progress, or perhaps frustrated by the demands being made on most twentieth century Christians.
I offer this summary: Retaining physicality and spirituality in balance at either end of life is crucial to growing up comfortably. Is this the book's other real sub-title?
However the actual sub-title indicates the need to transfer reliance onto life's second half, by which he expects people to grow up, yes, whatever their age and experience of life. That of many people is split, after schooling, into two phases. The first is a physically productive phase, but also emotionally turbulent. Only too late, then, does one recognise the failure of support that the two 'halves' should have been giving one another.
Typically, in any life the physical and the emotional/spiritual sides may have developed independently, which is why they fail to support one another. The likely outcome can often be a loss of capability that manifests itself in many deviant lives.
Richard Rohr is at pains to explain why people, as a result, malfunction when each aspect is out of balance with the other. He explains how this can be overcome: he refers largely to the crises he helped overcome among people who sought his advice as prison chaplain, or in reminding others of what they had often heard in the Bible, or not understood the significance of in New Testament extracts where Jesus' explanations are revealed to be an unsuspected corpus of real wisdom.
These reveal Fr Richard's exposures of the latent disharmony between outward and inner lives. So far I have not revealed much of the writer's background: a mature Franciscan religious, with twenty books to his credit. But it is his deep understanding of how Jesus was trying to get people to accept what was already part of their (perhaps forgotten) heritage – which applies to every reader once familiar with equally relevant Gospel passages.
I made a separate list of these passages, but when quoted out of context their selection would need explaining. I made a note of them when I began reading, marking them in the margin. Pointless: the gaps between marked passages grew ever smaller! So the worth of the book lies more in its stimulus than in exegesis.
The title 'God' occurs only twice (from memory), reflecting its essentially psychological and healing significance. Instead I add a few summaries selected from notes I made myself:
- Having myself found a still-point in life, I am much more able to agree with R.R. when he talks about an 'inner brightness' to the second half of life, more than once I ever would have.
- Proximity to the Light enhances your shadow-side (often confused with sin). When upset you notice it more yourself. And St Peter did, in practice, hear that cockerel crow!
- The depressed – and often angry too – are those who have never taken any risks or moved out of their 'comfort zone'.
- Jesus, the instinctive second-halfer, was never understood by the first-halfers.
- In the Gospels the problem lies in the solution, the falling in the standing.
- There is 'a great gaze', full of compassion and embrace in God with which to bypass disappointments. Pain is part of that deal.
Just as I have here discovered the fulfilled stage of my own life described in this book, I hope it will turn out to be so for other readers in their turn.
George Fryer is an Anglican priest now retired from ministry. He is a member of SOF.