Other Tigers, Other Christs

Middle-age is one of the little deaths we encounter on our journey through life. When is middle-age? People who get there always seem to move it back a few years. Someone has said that the trauma of middle-age consists of men of forty closing the doors to rooms that they will never go back to. There are, of course, many men of forty who rebel against that. They refuse to go through the dying. They discard their wives; they look for the company of younger women; they neglect their children; they become workaholics. They will try all kinds of ways to walk back into those rooms, not realizing, perhaps, that to continue to live with integrity they must close the…