That is not an easy question. Some go to great efforts to be remembered as they wish. In the end it seems to me life gives us the memories of others it chooses. I'd be pleased to be remembered as an imperfect yet kind and supportive man. Especially to my wife Beverly and my three children.
It might be worth remembering that I faced a totally unexpected 'midlife crisis' at age forty. My life had been very stable, organized and predictable. My young family needed that from me. But suddenly one's world can be stood on end with respect to life's work and by threats to some long held values. With me as a sincere minster it was my deeply ingrained and restrictive religious values and attitudes that, without my permission, were to be upset and challenged.
I found that such a tornado in personal life can't be met with only good reasoning and ordinarily helpful advice. For it includes content from one's inner, at first seemingly irrational and illogical, depths of mind. One hopefully manages to find unexpected new paths and beliefs that better prepare him for the second half of life.
While I was in this process there were numerous extended family and long time friends who were unable to join my rather irrational hope that new light would come from what only seemed to be darkness. C.G. Jung's writings on these topics were partially the grounds for my 'hope in the darkness.' I was extremely fortunate that my most immediate family kept confidence in me.
The gracious outcome, after a couple of years, was that new paths for work opened up. Work that was far more in line with my natural abilities and temperament. The work included 19 years as licensed/ordained pastor to Untied Church of Christ and Presbyterian(USA) churches, 12 years working for private and public institutions as an Illinois Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor, 5 years as a science/math teacher for high risk students in our public schools and 13 years as a hospital/Hospice chaplain.
This natural psychogical/social/spiritual process also unexpectedly worked for me a long retirement (unusual for such a diverse employment record) in which to reflect on the outer and inner aspects of my life experience. And do an amount of informal educational travel which I'd not expected to ever do.
I am left grateful that I was granted work which fit me, benefited others appreciatively and provided well for my family.
So I think this remembrance stands as an example of how a threatening midlife intrusion can generate positive life changes which a person would have never imagined from only their conscious ego efforts or plans. I hope such a remembrance might only increase someones' confidence in life and it's purposeful meandering ways.
I suspect there are times when it is best to step out of the way and let life happen.
There's a deeper, unexpected, and somewhat embarrassingly presumptuous, aspect to my strong turn at midlife. It remains in many ways still beyond my comprehension. I became somewhat aware that my life was being a kind of divinely determined experiment.( I suspect this the case of all lives in their uniqueness.) That my life's central purpose, and its at first unconscious goal, was to become increasingly more conscious of love's meaning and power. And, in it's small unnoticed way, to promote somehow becoming more conscious of the importance, essential nature and supreme grandeur of creative love.
It was a life shaped to surprisingly help drive home the eternal truth that in our lost and desolate times only a rediscovery of love from our depths can bring humans their highest personal joy. And also provide the redeeming path to prevent our destroying ourselves and this planet Earth, our only home.
A love that pushes one beyond a healthy valuing of one's self and those in one's circle to a more universal love which embraces with equal value all of humanity and the Earth with all it contains.
I can point to my blog as my best, however scattered, effort to explain how I have discovered and experienced being such an unlikely experiment. There most any question that can be asked about me is directly or indirectly addressed.
Below is something I've just written in metaphorical language about love. It attempts to express the redeeming richness and beyond words our word love is pointing Western cultures toward in our present time:
"Even Carl Jung has credited Freud that the Western mind has still not significantly stated the importance of sex, of godlike Eros.
I doubt many couples or would-be lovers have yet to pay proper tribute to Sex or the Spirit. Have yet to know the cost they are asked to pay if they even get the chance.
And Spirit and Eros are determinedly aiming at couples as their target, where consciousness born in humble delicate childlike mutuality and beyond reasoned words can still happen, not at the alone
individual level.
Westerners are too sophisticated for Eros and too brutish for the Spirit. We are not yet ready to play in life's mud to retrieve its golden most expensive hidden treasure. And maybe not ready to support it happening to someone else for the good of all.
Eros and Spirit determine to be united in the couple's sincere shared spiritual ecstacy where no words matter except, 'O my dear Holy God.' We indeed are religious at our core.
Such a union results in the nameless that is beyond our definitions of either Eros or Spirit. It must happen when the swirling undefined and gathered 'All and Nothing' of the Great Mother finds, to it's own shock, it's most important and secret meaning and expression of love within two. The primordial eternal Yin and Yang.
Of love which truly is, after all else is gone, in all and every way the greatest of what is, can be or has ever been.
Ironically and sadly I confess it is out of my life's part of not living in personal sexual/spiritual love that any insight into the grand meaning and extreme importance of love has come to my conscuous attention and deliberation. Perhaps only a broken heart is able to sing of 'joy unspeakable and full of glory.' Maybe this has been the only way the experiment could proceed?
I'm always very grateful of such love if I sense it in others' faces, words and actions. I must be some proof we cannot egotistically will such love including its Eros and Spirit aspects into being. It will always be the highest gift and grace bestowed on a human by the Divine will and Its own need for a more expanded consciousness of love through love's suffering in both God and the Human Creature.
I'm very appreciative of 'youthful Jim(Jimmy)' and believe his path has been much as it had to be.
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