“However it happens, such people feel confused and even lost. They can no longer keep life in working order. They are dragged away from chosen and cherished patterns to face strange crises. This is their second journey….
Second journey’s usually end quietly with a new wisdom and a coming to a true sense of self that releases great power. The wisdom is that of an adult who has regained equilibrium, stabilized, and found fresh purpose and new dreams. It is a wisdom that gives some things up, lets some things die, and accepts human limitations. It is a wisdom that realizes: I cannot expect anyone to understand me fully….
The second journey begins when we know we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the morning program….that awareness illumines for us what really matters, what really counts….
The second call invites us to a serious reflection on the nature and quality of our faith in the gospel of grace, our hope in the new and not yet, and our love for God and people. The second call is a summons to a deeper, more mature commitment of faith where the naïveté, the first fervor, and untested idealism of the morning, and the first commitment have been seasoned with pain, rejection, failure, loneliness and self-knowledge….
This is what the second call of Jesus means today: a summons to a new and more radical leap in hope, to an existential commitment to the Good News of the wedding feast….we must love and, even more, we must run the risk of being loved….
There is no growth in Christ Jesus without some difficulty and fumbling. If we are going to keep on growing, we must keep on risking failure throughout our lives….
This is what the world wants from our rhetoric, what the man or woman of God longs for in a shepherd – someone daring enough to be different, humble enough to make mistakes, wild enough to be burned in the fire of love, real enough to make others see how phony we are.”
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