The Intimate Stranger

Psalm 77:5-6—“I consider the days of old, the years long ago. I said, ‘Let me remember my song in the night; let me meditate in my heart.’ Then my spirit made a diligent search:”

Either in national tragedy or personal disaster, the psalmist pondered what was going on and meditated contemplatively. It was at night. He couldn’t sleep. This Psalm paints a picture of solitude and silence. In the midst of it, we see the struggle of the psalmist. He struggled with God—“In the day of my trouble, I seek the Lord…my soul refuses to be comforted” (77:1-2). He also struggled with the inner person—“Let me meditate in my heart. Then my spirit made a diligent search” (77:6b).

Lauren F. Winner, assistant professor of Christian Spirituality at Duke Divinity School, wrote a book review on Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Richard Rohr (Jossey-Bass, 2011) in Christian Century (Vol. 128, No. 17, August 23, 2011).

An excerpt:

Rohr’s framework leans heavily on Carl Jung. The spiritual life has two stages. In the first half of life, you are devoted to establishing yourself; you focus on making a career and on finding friends and a partner; you are crafting your identity. Spiritually, people in the first half of life are often drawn to order, to religious routine. We are developing habits and letting ourselves be shaped by the norms and practices of our family and community.

Then—a crisis. “Some kind of falling,” Rohr says, is necessary for continued spiritual development. “Normally a job, fortune, or reputation has to be lost,” writes Rohr, “a death has to be suffered, a house has to be flooded, or a disease has to be endured.” The crisis can be devastating. The crisis undoes you. The flood doesn’t just flood your house—it washes out your spiritual life. What you thought you knew about living the spiritual life no longer suffices for the life you are living.

Rohr does not offer a syrupy evasion of this crisis. But he does underline two crucial points. First, God has not abandoned you, even if you are sure that God has…Second, “We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.” That may be cold comfort during the crisis—when your house has flooded, who wants to think about spiritual growth? But later you will notice. You will wonder how you possibly could have come to where you are without that flood.

As Rohr notes, it is written into the very life of Christ, how descended to the dead before he could be resurrected and ascent into heaven. The falling will happen—there is no way to avoid it. But the growth, the second half of life, doesn’t necessarily happen. You can stay stuck if you wish. You can refuse the second half.

If you welcome the second half of life, this is what you will find: you learn to hear “a deeper voice of God” than you heard before. “It will sound an awful lot like the voices of risk, of trust, of surrender, of soul, of ‘common sense,’ of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of your deepest self.” You can hear this voice in the second half of life precisely because of all the work you did in the first half; your very self is now a container strong enough to hold the call of the intimate stranger.” (p. 39)

In the second of life, the psalmist learned to hear “the call of the intimate stranger” at night.