The temptation to "pull out the oars" paralyzes our human and spiritual growth

by Giovanni Cucci

Every man's path sooner or later enters "in the middle of our life's journey", a situation of darkness and mediocrity in which the realities dear to us go into crisis, surprisingly finding us tired and disheartened. Historical eras, societies and empires also experience crises, declines and falls. This period of difficulty, of confusion, seems to constitute the very modality of life and relationship with God; when you reach a certain point, unexpectedly, you find yourself lost, you no longer understand anything, you find yourself lost without strength, energy, motivation.

And in all this chaos, or perhaps precisely for this reason, the Lord seems absent and the days, the activities, the prayer, the whole life lived up to now becomes unexpectedly empty, dull, meaningless: «After the time of enthusiasm, characterized by generosity , enthusiasm, the temptation to stop re-emerges, to "pull out the oars", to give up fighting, to grow. It makes its nest in the acquired situation. Sometimes the abandonment of the vocation, the spiritual divorce, with or without the civil divorce is included" (Imoda).

This tiredness involves everyone and has repercussions in the professional, apostolic and relational spheres, dangerously compromising life choices undertaken for years and which were now believed to be safe and safe from danger. Some of these difficulties coincide with the explosion of a hitherto denied or repressed affectivity, which claims its part: it is as if the person found himself facing a crossroads, or radically renewing the way of living one's way of life, allowing new energies and tensions to emerge, or abandoning the entire ministry. These difficulties had been clearly recognized by Pope Paul VI regarding priestly celibacy, but highlighting problems specific to every state of life: «The difficulties and problems that make the observance of chastity very painful or completely impossible for some, derive not infrequently from a type of training which, given the great changes of recent years, is no longer completely adequate.

Nor should it be expected that in these cases grace compensates for defects of nature." These words were written in the months immediately preceding the era of protest (the famous '68), on an ecclesiastical, political, cultural and spiritual level. Yet it would be trivial to restrict this diagnosis to the pure time frame of the era in which these words were written: the testimonies in this regard instead seem extremely varied, and include the most austere forms of religious life. In 1957 R. Voillaume, successor of Charles De Foucauld, introduced the term "second call" to characterize this phase of life: "Human enthusiasm gives way to a kind of insensitivity to supernatural realities, the Lord seems distant to us further away and on certain days a certain tiredness overcomes us and we are more easily tempted to agree to pray less or to do it in a mechanical way.

Chastity presents us with difficulties that we had not considered: some temptations are new; we feel a heaviness within us and seek sensible satisfaction more easily. In a word, we progressively enter a new phase of our life, discovering at our expense that the demands of religious life are impossible." A crisis therefore recognized by many parties, and to which everyone tries to react as they can, trying to save what is most dear to them: some succeed, some do not. That this problematic age also affects the relationship with God was well recognized by the great mystics. For example, Taulero, a Dominican who lived in the 40th century, wrote: «Let man do what he wants and start as he wants, but he will never reach true peace if he has not first reached 10 years of age. Until then man is too busy with a multiplicity of things and nature pushes him here and there. Then man must wait another XNUMX years before the Holy Spirit, the Consoler, the one who teaches everything is truly communicated to him." The life of men and women of all times sooner or later reaches a critical threshold from which one cannot escape, radically questioning and perhaps even destroying everything that has been achieved up until now in the various spheres of one's existence.