The Second Half of Life
Beacon Worship Script
October 14, 2012
Let’s imagine that a person’s life is lived in one year.
You would be born on January 1st and die on
December 31st. The second half of life would begin on
July 1st. The current life expectancy in the United
States is eighty years of age. Where do you think that
you are on that calendar? In my life, I think that I’m
somewhere around October 14th, but you never know
when it’s actually December 31st.
One of my heroes in psychology is Carl Jung, which is
spelled JUNG and often mispronounced as Young.
He was a Swiss physician. His father was a pastor.
Throughout his life, Jung struggled with the issue of
faith in God, probably in rebellion to his father’s
insistence on faith.
Jung began his career doing empirical research on
schizophrenia. Then he became excited about the
pioneering work on the unconscious being done by
Sigmund Freud. A close father-son relationship
developed between Freud and Jung. They were both
fascinated by the interpretation of dreams, and each
contributed a huge amount to current approaches to
dream interpretation.
At one point Jung was the heir apparent of the
psychoanalytic movement. But just as Jung rebelled
from his own father, he eventually rebelled from
Freud’s insistence that sexuality and aggression were
the primary unconscious motives behind most human
behavior.
Jung argued that people are motivated by many
positive and negative unconscious forces. He created
his theory of archetypes, which asserts that there are
unconscious symbols, images, and themes that
underlie all cultures. That evolved into his theory of
the collective unconscious. His mistress, Toni Wolfe,
got him interested in astrology, Tarot, and
extrasensory perception. He did some interesting
empirical research on the astrology of marital
compatibility. Near the end of his life he developed
the term synchronicity, which means things that move
together in time but have no apparent physical
causality. That was a catch-all concept that meant
that events can be psychologically and spiritually
significant but have no physical explanation. It bridged
scientific psychology with mysticism.
His mystical concepts got him marginalized by
psychology in America, even though he was one of
the pioneers of psychoanalysis and added ideas like
introversion and extroversion to the language of
psychology.
Jung’s ideas of archetypes and the collective
unconscious have had greater influence in religion
and art. When George Lucas came up The Force for
the Star Wars movies, it was based on Jung’s
collective unconscious. With his interest in the
convergence of science and mysticism, Carl Jung
probably would have liked Unitarian-Universalism.
Carl Jung agreed with Freud that the first half of life is
about the development of the ego, which is the sense
of self. During childhood, adolescence, and young
adulthood, we individuate from our parents. Over
time, we create our own independent relationships,
and hopefully establish our own marriages and
families. We develop are our own career paths. Eric
Erickson reformulated Freud and Alfred Adler and
began modern developmental psychology. For those
of you who teach at NAU, student development theory
is an offspring of the concepts of psychosocial
development and individuation.
But Jung was more interested in the second half of
life than the first half of life. For Jung, psychological
life starts to get really exciting after July 1st.
Jung asserted that individuation never stops. If the
first half of life is about acquiring an ego so that we fit
into society, then he second half of life is about letting
go of our egos. It is about letting go of our parental,
social, and vocational identities. We become stripped
bare of the social constraints that define us.
The second half of life is the time of the soul. The
original definition of psychology was not the study of
behavior. Psyche-ology was the study of the soul.
Jung believed that we all have an innate personality
inside of us, which is consistent with his knowledge of
astrology. There is an inner “Self” that is present at
the moment of birth. Then we learn to adapt and
mask that “Self” to fit into the social and economic
realities of the world. During the second half of life,
that sense of “Me” begins to express itself.
For example, someone who is pressured into being
extroverted to make friends in high school may
become more introverted. Someone may discover
suppressed artistic talents that they never thought
that they had. We individuate from society just like we
individuate from our parents. We stop caring so much
about what other people think of us and let our true
Selves come to the surface.
One of the ways that the concept of the second half of
life has meaning to us as Unitarian-Universalists is
the expression of spirituality in the second half of life.
During the first half of life, people naturally want to fit
into a spiritual community. They want certainty and
identity. For example, I was raised a Methodist but
experimented with being a Lutheran because I had
friends who were Lutherans. I went to an Episcopal
church once because a girl that I had a crush on was
an Episcopalian. Of course, I don’t think that she ever
knew I had a crush on her because I was too nerdy to
tell her.
I probably abandoned religion when I went to college
because it wasn’t cool and intellectual to believe in
Jesus. I’m sure that I explored Eastern religions
because that was cool in the 1960’s and 1970’s. I
believed more in the Beatles than I did in God. I found
my spiritual identity in mysticism rather than
organized religion. That describes the spiritual path of
many people of my generation.
During the second half of my life, my inner “Self” has
started to express itself. One part of that inner “Self” is
being a spiritual person. As many of you know, I
joined the Beacon Unitarian-Universalist
Congregation because I had a dream that I was
supposed to join a church. I trusted that my dream
came from my connection to the collective
unconscious, which is my understanding of this thing
we call God. The inner “Self” in all of us is often
expressed through dreams. My dream led me here.
I think that I was ready to join a church because I
didn’t really care if other people thought that I was
cool or not. I knew that I was too nerdy to ever really
be cool anyway. Instead I followed that quiet inner
voice that gets louder in the second half of life. I soon
learned that spiritual development occurs best in
community. Carl Jung would have approved of a
community that blends science, mysticism, and
compassion.
The second half of life is a time of psychological
freedom. We are called to be our true Selves. I can’t
imagine anything that is more spiritual than becoming
our true Selves. That is the gift of the second half of
life.