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Midlife Spirituality
 

by Richard Johnson

It's in midlife when we, quite unintentionally and unwillingly, are drawn inward to our interior as never before. We can resist the process, we can try to push it away, postpone it, or even forestall it, but we can't deny it without dire consequences to our soul development. Midlife is a spiritual transition unlike any other. Midlife has been called the foundation of the second half of life.

Our path to God, our spiritual growth, is a continuous unfolding of our authentic self...an ongoing expression of the full measure of our unique spiritual potential. Each of us is endowed by God with a particular grace, unlike any other, call it a cluster of spiritual DNA, if you will, that defines our unique spiritual potential as distinct from all others. Just as our material DNA is unique, and is the biological code that determines our physical attributes, so too our spiritual DNA determines even a broader array of spiritual potentials in us.

This spiritual DNA provides the raw material as well as the direction of our authentic spiritual growth. Exactly the mechanisms that determine our spiritual potential and the code that sets out the progression of our development, we don't know. What we do know is that our spiritual maturation requires our active and continuous participation. There is never a time in our lives, there is no stage when we can ever stop our volitional involvement in our ongoing spiritual growth.

We need to perform work, spiritual work so we can spiritually thrive. We call this work our spiritual developmental tasks. My research into our spiritual transition needs in midlife tells me that there are at least ten unique spiritual developmental tasks, or interior transitions, that we are called to address. I'll be describing each of these ten in future articles on this site.

For more on midlife spiritual development, log onto: http://www.senioradultministry.com/ProductInfo.aspx?productid=COURSE109