What If Human Life is in its Middle Age?

Being in the middle of things is a struggle

Photo by Philippe Leone on Unsplash

One day, not long ago, I asked my students to imagine human life on Earth in 200 years. The room erupted in disappointed and cynical laughter. As it turned out, most of the people in the room couldn’t bring themselves to indulge that fantasy. They are twenty somethings who’ve been told, for much of their young lives, that the game is pretty much over.

They’re not alone in this feeling that time is almost up, of course. Maybe it’s the mixed effect of pandemic, climate change, the eruption of war, the constant stream of apocalyptic films, novels, games, and shows. Whatever the cause, it seems to me there are a lot of us who are convinced that human life (at least as many of us have come to know it) is very close to its end.

It’s easy for me to entertain this line of thought. The field I’m trained in—religious studies and theology—has made me very good at thinking about beginnings and endings. I think about creation and apocalypse stories all the time.  It often feels to me as if only two things happen: things are either just getting started, or they’re almost over. 

But what if the story of human life on earth is neither at its beginning nor its end, but instead is caught up in the difficult middle?

I’m probably motivated to see things this way because I am now in the season of my own life that is the difficult middle. I look at everything, now, through middle-tinted lenses. But entertain me for a moment, because I think the middle of things is important. 

It’s not especially easy to think about the middle of things; it can feel like a struggle. There’s a clarity or crispness to being one thing, rather than another. The middle is neither here nor there. Neither beginning nor ending. Neither young nor old. In the middle of things, in the middle of a life, you’re still not quite free of those driving ambitions of youth. And yet you’re also already being pulled apart by time itself. There is incredible pressure, from opposing directions, in the middle of things.

The space of the middle is a zone of uncertainty. But zones of uncertainty are spaces that are, if we can see them this way, inhabited by mysteries. 

A mystery is ambivalent, to be sure. There’s no reason to be positively disposed toward something just because it’s mysterious. But one of the risks that many religious and spiritual traditions take is to imagine that our disposition toward the mysteries matters in some kind of ultimate and consequential way. How we think about mysterious things, how we show up as we stare into them, what we do to (or with, or for) one another in the face of them: all of these things have mattered, in different ways, in different times, and in different places. But ultimately, maybe the middle of things calls us deeper into the mysteries. Maybe it calls us to become someone sort of new, as we stare into the mysterious uncertainties. Maybe this calls us to account. Maybe it calls us to change. 

How we think about time, and our relation to time, matters. At least that’s how I think about it. I suppose this is why I wrote a book about death. It’s a book about mortal time, and how we are disposed towards it, how we struggle to make sense of it. We shape time, and it shapes us back. The shapes we make matter.

I recently spoke with Dan Miller, who is one of the co-hosts of the Straight White American Jesus podcast, about my book Sister Death, and one of the things we spoke about in the second episode was this idea of collective mortality: our mortality as collectives, and not just as individuals. Western philosophy, especially, has been consumed with reflections on our individual mortality. How do each of us, as isolated and atomized individuals, feel as we face into our mortality all alone? This is what it’s often meant to think about life and death, in the western tradition.  And the whole scheme of Christian theology is often read as nothing more than a plan for the salvation of your own individual soul.

I think individual mortality is an important thing to talk about. It matters. But so many other human communities, across the long spread of time, have been better at thinking about collective mortality: the life, death (and afterlife) of a people, a community, a group. I feel like my own cultural context and intellectual training has been rather void of this sort of contemplation. I’ve been kind of hungry for it. The only place I really see it showing up, in mainstream American discourse, is the fearful and obsessive reflection on human extinction: the ritual incantation that it’s all on the verge of falling apart, for all of us.

The fact is, of course, that we really don’t know. Whoever convinced my students that this is the case doesn’t know. None of us know. We can count on radical change ahead, but none of our predictions are destiny. The future doesn’t yet exist for us to consider and contemplate. It might feel like a certain kind of justice, to imagine that the human life forms who do so much damage to the earth today, will soon be gone. But for now, it’s just a fantasy. It might feel like a certain kind of emotional preparation to remind ourselves that none of this will last, that all of this will soon be gone. But, for now, it’s just a fantasy. For now, we really don’t know what 200 years from now looks like. Or 20,000. And sometimes our hubristic predictive confidence can be a form of violence against people making their way toward the future. Human life, whatever that actually is, might be in a sticky and uncertain middle of things.

What if we were to look into that abyss of the future with something other than the fresh-faced optimism of youth, or the weathered surrender of old age? What if we brought more of that capacity to struggle that we practice, and live into, in the middle of things: a willingness to be called to account, to be called to change, a mad charge to live into the uncertainty because it’s the only thing we can see?