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Long before the idea of “mid-life crises” became part of our modern nomenclature, there have been men and women throughout the ages who have undergone some tough, emotional and psychological—and spiritual—crises. Sixteenth-Century Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross, called this period “the dark night of the soul.” Evelyn Underhill, in her 1911 book, Mysticism, said this period of time “is a deeply human process.” In this passage, Underhill describes the process.

The self, in its necessary movement towards higher levels of reality, loses and leaves behind certain elements of its world, long loved but now outgrown: as children must make the hard transition from nursery to school. Destruction and construction here go together: the exhaustion and ruin of the illuminated consciousness is the signal for the onward movement of the self towards other centres: the feeling of deprivation and inadequacy which comes from the loss of that consciousness is an indirect stimulus to new growth. The self is being pushed into a new world where it does not feel at home; has not yet reached the point at which it enters into conscious possession of its second or adult life.

For further exploration: Mysticism

Irish poet and author, John O’Donohue, died in his sleep January 3. 2008. He was 54. He taught at Omega several times, offering workshops on his many books that reflected on such things as beauty, the restlessness of the human heart, and love. In this passage from his 1999 book, Eternal Echoes, he speaks to the ancient longing for prayer.

Prayer is an ancient longing; it has a special light, hunger, and energy. Our earliest ancestors knew and felt how the invisible, eternal world enveloped every breath and gesture. They recognized that the visible world was merely a threshold. Their very first representations on the walls of caves expressed the desire to name, beseech, and praise. To the ancient eye, the world was a mystery independent in its own rhythm and poise. Nature was a primal mother with an unfathomable mind; she could be tender or cruel. The force and surface of Nature were merely the exterior visage that concealed a wild, yet subtle mind. For the ancients, prayer was an attempt to enter into harmony with the deeper rhythm of life. Prayer tempered human arrogance; it became the disclosure point of the deeper, eternal order. In post-modern society, the isolated individual has become the measure of all things. It is no surprise that in our loss of connection with Nature, we have forgotten how to pray. We even believe that we do no need to pray.

For further exploration: Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong

Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement contains a richly textured narrative about the brutalities of World War II in Europe. Here he describes how the love of a woman at home sustained a soldier through it all, and fed his effort to return to her.

Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on. In one pan of the scales, his wound, thirst, the blister, tiredness, the heat, the aching in his feet and legs, the Stukas, the distance, the Channel; in the other, I’ll wait for you, and the memory of when she had said it, which he had come to treat like a sacred site. Also, the fear of capture. His most sensual memories — their few minutes in the library, the kiss in Whitehall — were bleached colorless through overuse. He knew by heart certain passages from her letters, he had revisited their tussle with the vase by the fountain, he remembered the warmth of her arm at the dinner when the twins went missing. These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.

For further exploration: Atonement

Chögyam Trungpa was a renowned Tibetan Buddhist of the Shambhala tradition, which believes, he wrote, “that in this world, as it is, we can find a good and meaningful human life that will also serve others.” In one of his first books, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, he writes of how the essence of fearlessness is not in denying that fear exists but in going beyond fear.

Going beyond fear begins when we examine our fear: our anxiety, nervousness, concern, and restlessness. If we look into our fear, if we look beneath its veneer, the first thing we find is sadness, beneath the nervousness. Nervousness is cranking up, vibrating, all the time. When we slow down, when we relax with our fear, we find sadness, which is calm and gentle. Sadness hits you in your heart, and your body produces a tear. Before you cry, there is a feeling in your chest and then, after that, you produce tears in your eyes. You are about to produce rain or a waterfall in your eyes and you feel sad and lonely, and perhaps romantic at the same time. That is the first tip of fearlessness, and the first sign of real warriorship. You might think that, when you experience fearlessness, you will hear the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or see a great explosion in the sky, but it doesn’t happen that way. In the Shambhala tradition, discovering fearlessness comes from working with the softness of the human heart.

For further exploration: Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior