Mid-Lent and Midlife

I turned 45 this year, just a few days after Ash Wednesday. Here in the Northeast, it had been an especially grueling winter for me: taxing on the mental health front, forlorn feelings of monotony and seemingly never-ending days of cold winds and gray skies. Celebrative holidays had come and gone, and I was perversely looking forward to the start of Lent to help kick things in gear.  

Ascetic practices are nothing new for me. I have been taking cold showers every morning for the past few years, both for the penance and the benefits of cold exposure, and doing periodic extended fasts. This past summer, I quit a pernicious 25-year nicotine habit cold turkey, mostly because I was sick and tired of being a slave. As if that wasn’t punishment enough, I also quit caffeine cold turkey a few months later—to try to get my blood pressure down but also to eschew the dependency I had developed on the drug. 

Cutting out those two things has brought benefits but not without some cost either. In the absence of those two stimulants, I found my mood depressed and that I would sleep much more than usual. My writing suffered, since both nicotine and caffeine can aid focus. And there was some chemical pleasure that I was now missing, of course. By the time Lent rolled around early in March, I had been suffering prematurely for the better half of a year. 

There was a deeper malaise, however, than this flat period of dopamine deprivation; I was coming to terms with not only my finitude but also latent feelings of mediocrity, a lack of meaning, and creeping feelings of doubt as I became officially ensconced in middle age. Having come into the Church at the ripe age of 18, I’ve been Catholic longer than I haven’t been. My 15th wedding anniversary is around the corner, and those have been a mostly happy 15 years with three great kids to boot. I’m not shopping for young secretaries or Camaros, and neither Atheism nor Evangelicalism holds any allure for me either.

The problem isn’t that I’ve made any knee-jerk changes because of the so-called “mid-life crisis” many men go through. It’s that I haven’t found any answers to what is causing the malaise in the first place.

Is it hormones? I’ve heard men can go through a kind of male-menopause where testosterone levels drop and calories stick to the midsection more stubbornly. I biked across the United States in my 20s and could eat footlong hoagies and cheesecakes to fuel the endeavor without gaining a pound. Now cleaning up the junk in the backyard for an hour has me needing a two-hour nap, and I’m silently praising the invention of elastic waistbands. 

Or is the mid-life problem more existential? My middle-management job is neither overly demanding nor especially satisfying, but I’m grateful to have a job that pays the bills and provides for family life. I’ve been at it for over a decade with still a long way to go until retirement. I never excelled in any one thing, but even if I had been a star high school athlete or best-selling author, the words of the Sage still ring true: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity;” “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:2; 1:9). 

I’ve heard it said that King Solomon wrote Song of Songs in his youth, Proverbs in his middle years, and Ecclesiastes near the end of his life. This makes sense. Song of Songs is passionate, poetic, erotic, full of youth and vigor. Proverbs is a solid compilation of practical wisdom concerned with the nuts and bolts of living. And Ecclesiastes is the legacy capstone of the wisest man who ever lived, who experienced everything life had to offer and realized in the end that it was all completely meaningless. 

Maybe the problem of my middle-age plateau is spiritual, then? But I’m doing all the “right” things—praying, weekly Mass and Holy Hours, daily Rosary, almsgiving, giving God His due—and still not progressing in any discernable degree of holiness. Shouldn’t I have learned to love better by now? Become less of a judgmental and catty person? Been transformed into a discernable light on a hill that people see and say, “now this is a Christian”? Coming to terms with marrying the wrong person or choosing the wrong career is one thing; realizing you’re probably never going to join the ranks of the canonized saints despite all your hopes and best efforts is another.  Realizing you’re probably never going to join the ranks of the canonized saints despite all your hopes and best efforts…Tweet This

When I start to despair of this, however, I like to remember the story of Servant of God Walter Ciszek. Despite his strength, discipline, and habit of prayer, Ciszek’s story of signing a false confession under duress while in a Siberian labor camp is a good reminder that all of us are “nowhere near the man we thought we were” and that joining the ranks of the saints is more about trust and surrender than our own efforts:

“I had asked for God’s help but had really believed in my ability to avoid evil and to meet every challenge. . . . I had been thanking God all the while that I was not like the rest of men. . . . I had relied almost completely on myself in this most critical test—and I had failed.”

The interrogations continued, and Ciszek fell into black despair. Terrified, he threw himself on God, pleading his utter helplessness. Then, in a moment of blinding light, he was able to see “the grace God had been offering me all my life.”

We misunderstand the Lenten season when we regard it as a suffer-fest or a test of self-will. If anything, the 40-day period of Lent is a micro-climate of our lives as Christians. We fall for Him—“O Lord, you have deceived me, and I was deceived” (Jeremiah 20:7)—and experience the exuberance of honeymoon love. We learn and we grind and we fall and we get up and fall and grind and get up again. We are buoyed by friends in the Faith and crestfallen when they are overcome by sleep in our hour of need. 

And ultimately, kneeling alone in the garden, we are all put to the test. We vow to be good and find ourselves at 2 a.m. eating half a birthday cake left unguarded in the fridge, wondering how we got here and how we stooped so low. And the answer is that we are human. We need to forgive and be forgiven. And we cannot live without love.

Whether we are 20, 30, 45, or 80 years old, the Lord has us right where we are supposed to be. We can’t pass from one stage without going through the previous one; no one on the Ladder of Divine Ascent gets to skip rungs. And none of us are near the man we thought we were. And that’s okay. We’re not at the end yet.