In the first half of life, you are devoted to establishing yourself; you focus on making a career and on finding friends and a partner; you are crafting your identity. This reflected very closely my recent ability to inwardly bless and wish my best friend success in his recent joining of our church board - the same church board that I recently left for what I now sense are many of the reasons Rohr seems to cover in this book. We start in the ordinary world, and often have a divine or noble heritage, even if we don’t know it.

This book was incredibly helpful as I come face to face with some of the mistakes of the passions of the first half of my life. Partly as a result, slavery, racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, and homophobia have lasted authoritatively into our time—by people who claim to love Jesus! Understanding the spiritual aspects of aging is as important as appreciating the systems and biological processes that age us. I did find a few nuggets of wisdom, but as with much of Rohr's writings it seems as if he thinks his readers need simplistic explanations, and as always it's very self referential. To quote Bonhoeffer, “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession.I also appreciate his perspective about encountering challenges that we can’t overcome, and how that can be the catalyst for entering our second half of life. He says things like, “It is very surprising to me that so many Christians who read the Scriptures do not see this” as he explains that you must leave any religion or system to truly mature since these systems and faiths are too limiting. If you welcome the second half of life, this is what you will find: you learn to hear "a deeper voice of God" than you heard before. I remember my mother, ordinarily a upbeat person, during her late 80's saying, "getting old is hell.

I happen to believe that sin is part of God’s plan and that God has a much more positive view of our mistakes and striving (and failure) to become like him than some teach. Now, the conservative reader of this review may be either pumping their head up in down in fierce agreement, and the more liberal reader may be squinting in doubt right now.I'm not sure how much this book will be appreciated by those who have not read some of Rohr's earlier work. People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.