![]() Indeed, in mid-life, your soul no longer needs success it needs suffering. Try number 4: "Let suffering soften your heart rather than harden your soul." Every one of us gets kicked around, and these beatings should be opportunities for growth rather than grounds for festering resentment. Rolheiser cannot resist giving his Ten Commandments for the Long Haul, which are good basic Christian spirituality that we should all be trying to live. It does, however, mostly avoid that dumbed-down feeling that comes from the author serving up warmed-over bromides that state the obvious in peppy, but not-too-original ways. To a point, Sacred Fire is a self-help book. Moreover, his editor uses her or his blue pen more liberally than I do, cutting back those sentences that run on forever and eliminating those 25-cent words that are part of the professor's vocabulary, but not the vocabulary of many others. It is a book in its own right, with its own flow and its own logic. But this book is definitely not a collection of warmed-over columns. In Sacred Fire, one can occasionally hear hints of some of his columns. ![]() But given that he writes on a perennial topic – spirituality – as opposed to something newsy, it is surprising how rarely Rolheiser repeats himself. Oh yes, sometimes there are stories that have appeared previously, and he does walk over well-trod ground. Thirty-two years later, his writing is still amazing. Deciding to publish him was one of the easiest decisions of my journalistic career. "This is amazing stuff," I told one of my colleagues and she agreed. I remember the day the first one came in on speculation, the Newman College prof on sabbatical in Europe hoping that I would allow him to write for the paper. Since 1982, with a few years missing in the middle, I have been editing Rolheiser's columns for the WCR. "Reality has broken through and we see a very limited horizon at the end of the tunnel." Instead, one feels burdened, taken for granted. There is the death of the honeymoon – "one of the better foretastes of heaven." As the honeymoon turns into hard reality, love becomes a decision, not something that sweeps one away. They raise their head in workaholism where, the more one is drawn into one's work, the less meaning one finds in relationships. ![]() It is the seven deadly sins in a new guise. So, he turns his attention to the mid-life demons that stem from that sense of disappointment – pride, jealousy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony, lust. ![]() Rather than a medicine aiding our health, success is a narcotic that hinders our healthfulness. In mid-life, however, it is less a goal than a narcotic, Rolheiser writes. Success in the first part of life can help to establish one's sense of self-esteem. It is a book for those, Rolheiser says, whose questions have moved beyond "Who am I?" to "How can I give my life away more purely, and more meaningfully?" If Rolheiser's last major book, The Holy Longing (1999), focused on the energy and self-focused questions of youth, Sacred Fire takes us on a journey through the challenges of mid-life, on the search for maturity. "We become disappointed that there is not more, that we have not achieved more, and that we ourselves are not more, as we sense ourselves stuck with second best, reluctant to make our peace there." But as one makes or falls into serious commitments and one's energy begins to decline, it becomes clearer and clearer that the dream will not be realized. In the first part of life, one has the big dream. Where we learn as we mature is through our disappointments, boredom, resentment and frustration. ![]() Success, writes Ron Rolheiser in his new book Sacred Fire, has little to teach us in the second half of life. Crown Publishing Group (New York, 2014), 344 pages. Sacred Fire: A Vision for Deeper Human and Christian Maturity by Ronald Rolheiser. ![]()
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