This is 50

At the end of the fall semester I turned 50. My birthday always arrives just as the push to finish the semester fades into the beginning of the week before Christmas, so it tends to sneak up on me and to pass quietly. But this year I began to feel my birthday approaching weeks in advance. I felt unsettled, in the way that birthdays ending in a zero can unsettle us. But I also felt excited, as if there were some as-yet-unknown change on the horizon. Turning 50 was a reminder that I wouldn’t accomplish everything I once dreamed of doing. But that sober knowledge brought with it a glimpse of freedom—the freedom to turn my life toward what matters most, to concentrate my energies in one direction.

How to seize upon this possibility?

Providentially, the fall issue of Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality arrived, with an article by Edward Kaplan on journal entries that Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote around the time of his 50th birthday. Merton called his 50th year his jubilee year. His journal entries reflect his desire to clear away accumulations of projects and illusions and begin anew. He longed for more authentic solitude; he settled into his hermitage; he pondered his sexual past and acknowledged that he gave up sex before he understood the role it could play in human life. He pledged his 50th birthday as “a turning point” in which he would turn away from projects and toward solitude, away from self and toward God. But a persistent question troubled the dichotomies on which he built these resolutions: “Who am I?” he asked.