LIFE TASKS-- ESPECIALLY TAXES-- WEAR US DOWN

It took me a week to prepare my tax return and another three days to recover. 

WHY DOES TAX PREPARATION MAKE ME SO NERVOUS? 

I am afraid that  I am making a mistake--and I am right to worry because I do make mistakes.  I am frantically searching for receipts and cancelled checks and old Visa statements. I am collecting the evidence.  AND that takes  days and then I am told at the end by TURBOTAX that  I should take the standard deductions because they are greater than mine.  That  absurdity  just  finishes me off. 

 Richard Rohr has been writing about what he defines as our life tasks, he reminds us:

"Religion and various models of human development seem to suggest there are two major tasks for each human life. The first task is to build a strong “container” or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold. The first task we take for granted as the very purpose of life. This does not mean we do it well, but because we’re so focused on it we may not even attempt the second task.

Western society is a “first-half-of-life” culture, largely concerned about surviving successfully. Most cultures and individuals across history were likely situated in the first half of their own development until recent times; it may have been all they had time for because of shorter life expectancy. The first task life hands us has to do with establishing an identity, a home, relationships, friends, community, security, and building a proper platform for our only life.

But it takes much longer to discover “the task within the task,” as I like to call it: what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing. Two people can have the same job description, and one is holding a subtle or not-so-subtle life energy (eros) in doing his or her job, while another is holding a subtle or not-so-subtle negative energy (thanatos) while doing the exact same job.

We respond to one another’s energy more than to people’s exact words or actions. In any situation, the taking or giving of energy is what we are actually doing. What we all desire and need from one another, of course, is that life energy called eros! It always draws, creates, and connects things."

 EROS Is the LIFE FORCE and it  burns in all of us

"It is when we begin to pay attention, and to seek integrity in the task within the task, that we begin to move from the first to the second half of our own lives. Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions and being honest about our motives. It is hard work. Most often we don’t pay attention to that inner task until we have had some kind of fall or failure in our outer tasks.

SO WE RETURN TO THE NECESSITY  OF FAILURE.

During the first half of life we invest so much of our blood and sweat, eggs and sperm, tears and years that we often cannot imagine there is a second task, or that anything more could be expected of us. “The old wineskins are good enough” (Luke 5:39), we say, even though according to Jesus they often cannot hold the new wine. If we do not get some new wineskins, “the wine and the wineskin will both be lost” (Luke 5:37). The second half of life can hold some new wine because by then there should be some tested ways of holding our lives together. But that usually means the container itself must stretch or die in its present form and be replaced with something better.

WHAT ARE THE NEW WINESKINS? AND HOW DO WE FIND THEM?

One of the only ways God can get us to let go of our private salvation project is some kind of suffering. This is why Christians hang the cross at the center of our churches, why we kiss the cross, and why we say we’re “saved” by the cross. Yet for all this ritualization, it seems we don’t really believe what the cross teaches us—that the pattern of death and resurrection is true for us, too, that we must die in a foundational way or any talk of “rebirth” makes no sense."

YESTERDAY  NOTRE DAME CATHEDRAL WENT UP IN FLAMES. TODAY PICTURES OF THE INTERIOR SHOW THE CROSS, THE PEWS AND THE ROSE STAINED GLASS WINDOW REMAIN. 

WHAT MORE DOES A  CATHEDRAL NEED?

I don’t know anything else that’s strong enough to force you and me to let go of our ego. However we’ve defined ourselves as successful, moral, better than, right, good, on top of it, number one . . . has to fail 

This is the point when we don’t feel holy or worthy. We feel like a failure. When this experience of the “noonday devil” shows itself, the ego’s normal temptation is to be even stricter about following the first half of life’s rules. We think more is better, when in fact, less is more. We go back to laws and rituals instead of the always-risky fall into the ocean of mercy.

Yet that is the only path toward our larger and True Self, ... where we know, as Thomas Merton (1915–1968) put it, it’s all “mercy within mercy within mercy.”

  It’s not what we do for God; it’s what God has done for us. We switch from trying to love God to just letting God love us. And it’s at that point we fall in love with God. Up to now, we haven’t really loved God; we’ve largely been afraid of God. Finally, perfect love casts out all fear. As John says, “In love there can be no fear. Fear is driven out by perfect love. To fear is to still expect punishment. Anyone who is still afraid is still imperfect in the ways of love” (see 1 John 4:18).

I remember Sister Michaeleen gave me a holy card for Easter in the 8th grade at Saint Joseph's School in Pawtucket  and on the back she had written one sentence--

"If you would  be risen with Christ, seek the  things that are above."