Stumbling Stone

The transition from the first half of life to the second half often involves a stumbling stone. In Greek the word for stumbling block is skandalon, from which the English word scandal also comes. Originally, scandal expressed how you felt about yourself when you tripped over the stone, when you were disappointed in yourself. You wondered, "Why did I do that? What's wrong with me? What kind of person am I?"

Until you can trust the downward process, the Great Mystery cannot fully overtake you. It's largely a matter of timing. Some of us put it off until the last hour of life. But the sooner you can do it, the better. Almost all spirituality teaches you the secret of dying before you die.

If you can face your mortality and let go of this small self early on, you'll experience heaven here and now. You'll begin to experience the freedom of the children of God. So the sooner you can trust and allow the precipitating event, the sooner you will understand the resurrected life, and you'll live by a life not your own. That's the whole Gospel in a nutshell. None of us can engineer it; we simply wait and watch and surrender to it.   ~R. Rohr