2 weeks Ago
“Suddenly I feel old,” someone said recently. He may have been in his 70s, but what he meant was that he had recently lost his long-time partner, and about the same time he was having life-changing health issues. His network of family and friends were concerned but there was only so much they could do.
“Suddenly I feel old”—I kind of knew what he meant. Old age is not simply a matter of adding up the years. Old age has a lot to do with how we’ve lived those years, what we’ve learned from them, and what they have done to us.
Some people seem to age gently and gradually like autumn creeps through a forest, while for others the passage into old age is turmoil marked by significant losses, body changes, a sense of disintegration of orderly life and anxiety facing the future. Suddenly, or over a short span of years, they feel old. If we live long enough, one way or another, we all come to feel old.
Our bodies tell us by our pace, hearing, aches and pains, and memory; we all know the litany of mounting physical complaints. Like the saying has it, “My get up and go has got up and went.” Dependable social arrangements change when close ones die or leave the community; bank accounts start wheezing; the whole construction of our life is under stress.
Old age comes knocking at our door, sooner or later, gently, persistently, or sometimes with a battering ram. I was thinking about how age has come upon me, as well as how I’ve grown into it, during Lent this year. That sounds self-absorbed but not entirely, because so much has happened in our national life during the last six weeks that threatens our health care, our families, our financial security, our sense of living in a stable and hospitable land that we can be proud of.
We’re all on the train together and many are fearing that the train is off the tracks in very dangerous terrain. The friend who said, “Suddenly I feel old,” seemed to focus this much wider disintegration into a personal package and make “falling apart” more heartfelt. Against this background of anxiety, my Lenten practice this year was to memorize and meditate on the Beatitudes, those “blesseds” found in Matthew Chapter 5.
Memorizing wasn’t too hard even for me, because there are only eight of them, but meditating on them was startling: I found the Beatitudes speaking to me much differently than they did in my younger years. I discovered that the conditions which Jesus says are accompanied by blessing or happiness sound a lot like conditions we meet in old age! Those are blessed who are “poor in spirit”—who are not proud in an arrogant way, or brash or competitive, filled up with self, but who possess an emptiness that leaves room to receive. Blessed are the meek, the Beatitudes continue, those who mourn and are brokenhearted, those who hunger and thirst for justice because they suffer from being left out, those whose character is merciful and forgiving, those who stand in the middle as peacemakers.
These conditions don’t sound like fierce independence, wielding power, climbing the social or business ladder, or doing to others before they have a chance to do unto you. Talk about counter-cultural! The things named in the Beatitudes are more like things we fear, avoid, deny, and see as weak. They are like the things that happen to us as we totter into old age.
And then I realized that that’s just the point. The conditions that Jesus calls blessed are the very conditions that might appear like a declining system, like getting old and weak, but that surprisingly have the hidden power to give a new lease on life. The core of Jesus’ revolutionary teaching is what Franciscan priest and writer Richard Rohr calls “the integration of the negative.
” That phrase has a lot to do with understanding and accepting parts of ourselves that we’ve done our best to cover up over the years, and kept underground from ourselves as well as others. But it also means admitting life’s accumulating weaknesses and losses, and more than that, actually embracing what we earlier feared, avoided, denied, and saw as weak. Integrating the negative means voluntary consent to being more marginal, poor, slow, and outside systems of power or status.
In other words, surrendering our superiority. Take “Blessed are the meek,” for example. I used to just mumble that one.
There’s a self-deprecation that is just part of the act, false humility that’s almost comic, and there’s the low self-esteem that nips at our heels and makes us timid and ashamed. Not much in either of those “meeknesses” to be happy about. But when a person actually takes to heart the darkness and suffering of their life, and of what’s happening in our beloved country and in the world, and also all the generosity and care shown by others in response to suffering, the consciousness that emerges has a ring of authentic humbleness.
And that humble and graceful consciousness is blessed. Such a meekness opens us to relate to the world in a different way. Regardless of your religious views, read the Beatitudes to find a positive guide for embracing and possibly transforming the realities of old age.
Good religion understands that the place of emptiness and surrender is where we find grace most freely offered. It’s the lost one who is found, the blind who discover they can really see. Those who mourn are comforted.
That paradoxical insight of wise religion transfers perfectly, I believe, to our living old age well. Blessed is the old person whose increasing infirmities open them to a fresh persuasion of grace and consent, for they shall be called Elder. For them, aging is not a process of decline but a process of insight, growth, and gratitude.
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