Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

by Barbara Brown Taylor

At the fifth stage, which Fowler says is unusual before midlife, people know “the sacrament of defeat.” They live with the consequences of choices they cannot unchoose. They have been permanently shaped by commitments they cannot unmake. Yet there is still a lot of undoing at this stage, as people let go of many of the certainties about themselves and the world that they earlier worked so hard to put in place. The boundaries of the tribe no longer hold. Strangers and strange truths are no longer frightening but compelling. Paradoxical truths are the most compelling of all. With the gravitas that arrives when life is more than half over, people at this stage are ready to spend and to be spent, emptying their pockets in one last-ditch effort to make meaning.