When Nikos Kazantsakis was a young man, he interviewed an old monk on Mount Athos. At one stage he asked him, "Do you still struggle with the devil?" "No", the man replied, "I used to, but i've grown old and tired and he leaves me alone!" "So your life is easy then." Kazantsakis asked, "no monk, its worse. Now I struggle with God!"

Someone once quipped that we spend the first half of our lives struggling with the devil (and the sixth commandment), and the second half of our lives struggling with God (and the fifth commandment). While that captures something, its too simple, unless we define the "devil" more widely to mean our struggles with the untamed energies of youth eros, restlessness, sexuality, the ache for intimacy, the push for achievement, the search for moral cause, the hunger for roots, and the longing for a companionship and a place that feels like home.

It's not easy, especially when you're young, to make peace with the fires inside us. We need to establish our own identity and find, for ourselves, intimacy, meaning, self-worth, quiet from the restlessness, and a place that feels like home. We can spend fifty years, after we've first left home, finding our way back there again.

But, the good news, is that generally we do get ther. In mid-life, perhaps only in the late mid-life, we achieve something the mystics call "proficiency", a state wherein we have achieved essential maturity, basic peace, a sexuality integrated enough to let us sleep at night and keep commitments during the day, a sense of self-worth, and an essential unselfishness. We've found our way home. And there, as once before the onset of puberty, we're relatively comfortable again, content enough to recognize that our youthful journeying, while exciting, were also full of restlessness. We'd like to be young again, but we don't want all that disquiet the second time. Like Kazantsaki's old monk, we've grown tired of wrestling with the devil and he with us. We now leave each other alone.

So where do we go from there, from home? T.S. Eliot once said, "home is where we start from." That's true again in midlife.

The second half of life, just like the first, demands a journey. While the first half of life, as we saw, is very much consumed with the search for identity, meaning, self-worth, intimacy, rootedness, and making peace with our sexuality, the second half has another purpose, as expressed in the famous epigram of Job: "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked i go back."

What does that entail? From whay do we need to detach ourselves?

First, and most importantly, from our wounds and anger. The foremost spiritual task of the second half of life is to forgive others, ourselves, life, God. We all arrive at mid-life wounded and not having had the life of which we dreamed.  There's a disappointment and anger inside everyone of us and unless we find it in ourselves to forgive, we will die bitter, unready for the heavenly banquet.

Second, we need to detach ourselves from the need to possess, to achieve, and to be the center of attention. The task of the second half of life is to become the quiet, blessing grandparent who no longer needs to be the center of attention but is happy simply watching the young grow and enjoy themselves.

Third, we need to learn how to say goddbye, to the earth and our loved ones so that, just as in the strenght of our youth, we once gave our lives for those we love, we can now give our deaths to them too, as a final gift.

Fourth, we need to let go of the sophistication so as to become simple "holy old fools" whose only message is that of God's.

Finally, we need, more and more, to immerse ourselves in the language of silence, the language of heaven. Meister Eckhard once said: "Nothing so much resembles God as silence." The task of mid-life is to begin to understand that and enter into that language.

And it's a painful process. Purgatory is not some exotic, catholic doctrine that believes that there is some place in the next life outside of heavenand hell. It's a central piece within any mature spirituality which, like Job, tells us that God's eternal embrace can only become ecstatic once we've learned to let go.