The Noble Task of Aging
When we LOL’s (Little Old Ladies) get together these days, we compare pains and humiliations and losses. Not an uplifting experience, but misery does love company. However, sometimes one of us finds some humor in our daily decay and once in a while, someone shares an experience of grace in the middle of disaster. And those who can, drive those that can’t to Doctors’ appointments and church and lunches out. And those that cook use that talent when one of us isn’t able. Some faithfully call to check on the house-bound and others send cards so they will know they aren’t forgotten. We share pain relieving stick-ons and advice we’ve learned from experience. Old age makes us a family, when we are loved by our children, but they can’t really understand from the inside out. To me that’s part of our Noble Task. In the following, Kathleen Dowling Singh writes about coming to grips with the losses and precariousness of old age.
A Noble Task
Known for her deep wisdom around death and dying, Kathleen Dowling Singh (1946–2017) also wrote about the awakening that can occur when we consciously address aging:
Opening deeply to the truth of our own aging is wise. Opening deeply to the truth of our own impermanence is wise. Although such opening may not come easily at first—we all know how the ego tends to resist vulnerability—it is important to do so if we wish to mindfully use the time remaining to us.
To live a life of an elder is to ripen into being that is more than simply elderly, more than just old. It involves ripening into clear-eyed acceptance of the way things actually exist. That ripening involves, for each of us, many difficult reckonings in the multifaceted, multidimensional understanding that everything that can be lost will be lost. . . .
Grey hair and sagginess notwithstanding, many of us still cling childishly to so much that is unreal and inessential. Many of us still cling to reputation, to imagined security, to unexamined habits of attitude and behavior, and to self-image. We have deep aversion to having all of our cherished illusions stripped away by life-in-form’s seeming indifference.
We all have reservoirs of fear, some large and some small and subtle, around entering this new terrain of unknown and mystery: our last years. What will aging to do me? To my body? To my mind? . . . Will I matter to anyone? Will I be a burden? How will I die?
We do not know. We have no clue what these years will hold for us. We have no clue what will happen tomorrow. The “moment that changed everything” usually arrives unannounced.
The only person who can answer the questions posed by the often painful challenges of aging is the person we will be in the moment we confront those circumstances. The shaping of that person into someone with greater wisdom and equanimity can begin in this moment.
For Singh, when we choose to ripen, to awaken as we age, we offer a gift to the world and future generations:
If we are to claim the last years of life as years that hold the possibility of awakening into equanimity and lightness, into the very embodiment of grace, we need to bear witness to the ripening of that possibility. Not only would it be a blessing for each of us, it would be a blessing for a world starving for such witnessing. . . .
Mindful of impermanence, the breath-by-breath arising and abiding and falling of each moment, we can remain in remembrance of our longing to exist in wisdom and love and compassion. We can remain in our intention to ripen into the spiritual maturity that is our birthright to cultivate. There is no more noble way to spend these years than to become an elder, to bear witness to the world as placeholders for peace, love, wisdom, and fearlessness.
The Prayer of Jesus
What is the Glory of God that we all fall short of? I’m pretty sure it’s the kind of Love that Jesus had for those that crucified him. “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” I have to admit, I fall short of that kind of love.
Listen carefully to John 17:20-26. Jesus prays: “I ask, not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, (that’s us) so they may all be one. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and you have loved them as you have loved me.”
Jesus asks God for us, and all who claim to follow Jesus, to be completely one, so the world will know that God loves us all just as much as God loves Jesus. That means God loves every single one of us: bitter old curmudgeons, young know-it-alls, the middle-aged tempted to stray, Republicans and Democrats, unquestioning believers and loyal, but doubting Thomases, the pure of heart and those addicted to sin, the victims and the criminals. Nobody deserves it. All fall short of the glory of God’s unconditional love. So, we don’t get to get to feed our egos by looking down on anybody. It’s time to do some soul searching on why we Christians all across the world are fighting bitterly on almost everything. The world is supposed to know we are Christians by our love for one another, so they will want to follow Jesus. We obviously are missing the mark. But how in the heck, can we begin to love one another enough to become one. I’m not sure that can happen with only a hand me down intellectual faith. I suspect it also takes first-hand experiences of that life changing love of God to open us to God’s Spirit inside us. We are born with different strengths and weaknesses. So the timing of our spiritual journeys is different. There are no magic formulas. My Julian was a good person, but his strength was logic and he focused on what he could see and touch. So, he was eighty fighting the second round of lung cancer when he finally could let go of the limits of logic and the physical world that he could see. But then he literally danced with joy on his walker listening to “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” He died knowing that love first- hand.
So, here’s a challenge for all of us, including illogical fly by the seat of my feelings me, because when I feel unlovable, I don’t like anybody very much. Let’s make these verses in the Gospel of John our daily meditation. Let’s read it thoughtfully with open minds and hungry hearts. Taking time to savor that love, opening our hearts to experience it. Just imagine being wrapped in the soft warm comforter of God’s love. Treasure that. Let’s keep on opening our hearts to love, however long it takes, until we too can dance with joy. Because that love can free us not only from judging ourselves, but from needing to judge others. Every single day, let’s whisper to God, “I’m yours. Thank you for loving me through Jesus.” Because with that love of God within us, we can become one.”
I Ask for Peace
(I found this very thought provoking.)
Mpho Tutu van Furth describes a painful miscommunication that took place during South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process:
‘I am sorry. Forgive me’ were the words the perpetrators said. I am taking responsibility for what I did and what was done at my command or in my name. But what the victims heard was not the same. They didn’t hear the words the perpetrators said. They heard the words of the translators instead. ‘Ndicela uxolo.’ But that’s not the same.
The English ‘I am sorry’ wraps the plea in the logic of individuality and the English ‘Forgive me’ underlines the same. What I have done was done only by me and thus is only my responsibility. This ‘I am sorry. Forgive me’ is all about me.
But the old ones heard a different word. ‘Ndicela uxolo’ means ‘I ask for peace.’ It is an ubuntu apology and it is about we. ‘I ask for peace’ sees our interconnectivity.
‘I am sorry. Forgive me’ means set me free of the guilt and the shame that has burdened me. Decide to wipe the debt slate clean for me.
The old ones heard ‘I ask for peace’ and they offered forgiveness as peace based on ubuntu reciprocity. They gave their forgiveness as space to plant the seeds of a better future for the whole community. . . .
Ubuntu peace is peace between us and peace within each of us. Ubuntu forgiveness is peace that heals. . . . When the old ones heard Ndicela uxulo . . . they heard perpetrators asking for hope for a better ‘we’. They heard an appeal for healing for all of us and the space between us that is community. They heard an appeal for a healing of the fabric of life.
Tutu van Furth explains how ubuntu peace moves beyond verbal apologies to sincere action and reparations for past harm:
Without reparations ‘I am sorry. Forgive me’ asks victims to pick up an eraser and walk through the past eradicating the injuries that perpetrators inflicted so that those who wielded the scythe of destruction can be released from the guilt for their cruelty and their greed, their prejudice and violence, while preserving the benefits that their behaviour has bestowed on them and their children. Without reparations forgiveness has no ubuntu, and it heals nothing. . . .
The ubuntu understanding of forgiveness is that forgiveness cultivates justice and bestows peace. . . .
The forgiveness we once offered you would build justice where cruelty had lived. Our forgiveness was born and bred in ubuntu. Later we came to understand and see that forgiveness for you had its home in individuality and could not understand the logic of community. So forgiveness for you was what set you free of all responsibility for us.
But reparations have made a new place for us to gather. Reparations have started to reveal what it takes for all of us to heal and to step into God’s new creation.
Essential Humility
In their Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and our World, Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1931–2021) and his daughter Mpho Tutu van Furth focus on our fragile humanity, the good and bad that we are all capable of, as the entry point for forgiveness:
“We are able to forgive because we are able to recognize our shared humanity. We are able to recognize that we are all fragile, vulnerable, flawed human beings capable of thoughtlessness and cruelty. We also recognize that no one is born evil and that we are all more than the worst thing we have done in our lives. A human life is a great mixture of goodness, beauty, cruelty, heartbreak, indifference, love, and so much more. We want to divide the good from the bad, the saints from the sinners, but we cannot. All of us share the core qualities of our human nature, and so sometimes we are generous and sometimes selfish. Sometimes we are thoughtful and other times thoughtless, sometimes we are kind and sometimes cruel. This is not a belief. This is a fact.
If we look at any hurt, we can see a larger context in which the hurt happened. If we look at any perpetrator, we can discover a story that tells us something about what led up to that person causing harm. It doesn’t justify the person’s actions; it does provide some context. . . .
No one is born a liar or a rapist or a terrorist. No one is born full of hatred. No one is born full of violence. No one is born in any less glory or goodness than you or I. But on any given day, in any given situation, in any painful life experience, this glory and goodness can be forgotten, obscured, or lost. We can easily be hurt and broken, and it is good to remember that we can just as easily be the ones who have done the hurting and the breaking.
We are all members of the same human family. . . .
In seeing the many ways we are similar and how our lives are inextricably linked, we can find empathy and compassion. In finding empathy and compassion, we are able to move in the direction of forgiving.
Ultimately, it is humble awareness of our own humanity that allows us to forgive:
We are, every one of us, so very flawed and so very fragile. I know that, were I born a member of the white ruling class at that time in South Africa’s past, I might easily have treated someone with the same dismissive disdain with which I was treated. I know, given the same pressures and circumstances, I am capable of the same monstrous acts as any other human on this achingly beautiful planet. It is this knowledge of my own frailty that helps me find my compassion, my empathy, my similarity, and my forgiveness for the frailty and cruelty of others.”
We All Need Forgiveness
In this homily, Father Richard Rohr reminds us of the radical and transformational power of forgiveness:
When all is said and done, the gospel comes down to forgiveness. I’d say it’s the whole gospel. It’s the beginning, the middle, and the end. People who know how to forgive have known how good it feels to be forgiven, not when they deserved it, but precisely when they didn’t deserve it.
If we’re Christian, we’ve probably said the “Our Father” ten thousand times. The words just slip off our tongues: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” By saying this prayer, we’ve asked and prayed for forgiveness. Notice the full correlation between how we give and how we receive: “Forgive us as we forgive.” They’re the same movement. We need to know that we need mercy, we need understanding, and then we also need to know how to give it. Each flows with the energy of the other.
I have often found people in 12-step programs or in jail who were quite forgiving of other people’s faults because they’d hit the bottom. They knew how much it hurt to hurt. They knew how terrible it is to hate yourself and to accuse yourself. When someone with a generous heart and a loving spirit entered their lives and forgave them, it was like being reborn. Someone else loves a part of me that I can’t love myself! They just taught me how to do it!
I remember when I was jail chaplain in Albuquerque, I would read in the newspaper the stories of criminals in our city and I would form an opinion about how terrible they were. Years ago, a young woman committed murder to steal a baby. Everybody in the city hated her, I think. I went to the jail the very next day, and they told me that she wanted to see a priest.
I didn’t want to go in the cell because I knew I wouldn’t like her. I knew I would judge her because I’d already judged her. I can’t tell the whole story, but I will share this much: when I left that cell, I had nothing but tears and sympathy for the suffering of that young woman.
You see, the One who knows all can forgive all. But all we know is a little piece—the part that has offended us. Only God knows all, and so God is the One who can forgive all.
If we’re honest, none of us have lived the gospel. None of us have loved as we could love, or as we have been loved by God. I talk about it from the pulpit much better than I live it. And yet that very recognition—that I have not yet lived love—allows me to stand under the waterfall of infinite mercy. It’s only then that I know how to let mercy flow through me freely. That I receive it undeservedly allows me to give it undeservedly.
Note from Eileen: It scares me to pray: “Lord, show me my sin, so I can be forgiven and freed to forgive.”
Living with a Grail Experience
by Richard Rohr
(Eileen: This captures the effects of my own experience. At the age of thirty, I recognized and admitted with great shame to others in a counseling group that I was incapable of loving anyone, even my wonderful loving husband and my five young children. When they tenderly accepted me without judgement, it began tp free me of my self hate and it opened my heart to a healing experience of the presence of Jesus as the expression of the unconditional love of God for me and all others.)
A powerful spiritual experience challenges us, like Parsifal in his quest for the Grail, to find a way of holding the paradox of living in the everyday world while knowing there is something beyond it. Richard explains:
Once the Grail experience is over for Parsifal, he finds himself back in the forest, back in the world as he knows it. He has been touched by God in such a way that only God will do for him from now on. He has experienced the Absolute, and the relative will never again totally satisfy him. He aches for God, and the aching now becomes the seeking.
After our own Grail experience, our lives are characterized by some measure of perpetual dissatisfaction. Nothing lives up to our standards: not the church, not ourselves, not our country. There is a radical, aching longing: Ordinary life will never again be good enough, yet it is not meaningless either.
After the Grail experience, the ordinary forever becomes extraordinary. God is both perfectly hidden and perfectly revealed in everything. Once a paper cup becomes a Grail, even if it looks like a paper cup to everyone else, we know it’s also a golden cup. What frustrates us is that we can’t tell anybody. They all think it’s just paper!
A peak experience can be disconcerting. Sometimes we might even be ungrateful for it. We don’t fit in anymore. We live the rest of our lives at a tilt, wandering like Parsifal. We might feel a bit off-center. We can’t get excited about things most people get excited about. We just don’t believe they’re important anymore.
Life’s not about being perfect. It’s about getting involved in this great wrestling match. We get wounded in the hip, like Jacob (Genesis 32:26), and we limp the rest of our lives, but we’re not worried about the wound. We’re utterly confused, but we’re not confused by our confusion. We can live with our confusion now because, behind it all, we know.
Does that sound like double-talk? When one gets into Grail language, it’s all paradox. Everyone wants to pull us back to the first language of logic, law, and ego-tower building. But we can’t go anywhere with that. We have jumped off the ego tower. Once Parsifal has seen the Grail—even though he returns to the world—he is radically different ever after.
Once we have experienced the Grail—our soul, our True Self, God-in-us—we still fall short. We betray others and ourselves. We fail to live our own truth. We act contrary to our values and beliefs. We are hypocritical, lazy, lustful, and all the rest. But we are also trapped in the truth. As Jeremiah says, it burns within us (20:9). We know it’s the truth, even though we can never live up to it. Henceforward the only sin would be to deny that it is the truth. Trying to live up to it is the rest of the Grail journey.
Now the quest is real because the Grail is real. God is real.
Breathes There a Woman with Soul so Dead, Who Never to Herself has Said: “That Guy’s Got a Great Set of Buns
I recently was with a group of widows of ages between 65 and 85. Somehow, one honest woman admitted to horrifying her grown daughter by obviously getting a “charge” out of looking at good looking young hunks. This admission led to others admitting they didn’t even have to be young as long as they were mobile and not dribbling. They also admitted to struggling with some shame over this. I speculated that this was caused by the balance of estrogen/testosterone changing for us. (I later actually checked this out with a physician and it turns out it really can be part of this time of our hormonal existence.)
Now, for someone my age (85), practically speaking, any male my age is probably an invitation to caregiving. Most of us have been there, done that, and rather not have a replay. We grew to love our long-time husbands enough that, as hard as it was, it was an act of love and we have no regrets. But that kind of love grows from many years of marriage. Another problem is that if men our age are affluent and fortunate enough to have stayed healthy physically and mentally, there are plenty of younger (50-60-year-old) gals waiting in line.
And even memories of good times with our own dearly departed often bring tears from feelings of loss, so many of us find it safer to fantasize about long gone movie stars.
By now, I’m sure everyone is familiar with the “baddie/goodie” combination I look for in everything. Well, this stage of life has opened my eyes and triggered sympathy and understanding of the challenges many, if not most, men have had to deal with from puberty. And what a crock it is for us women to expect them not to react hormonally not only to the young and well endowed, but even to well preserved middle-aged women running around half naked. Earth to women! Jimmy Carter was honest; lust is hormonal in nature. If you are not offering something with that much appeal, play fair, don’t advertise it. And be honest. Admit that at some level, you know your power.
Love Fleshed Out
Most of us need Love fleshed out, not just an abstract concept. That’s why Jesus means so much to many. We not only see the crucified Jesus as ultimate Love, in fact the Love of God made visible for us, but we see him showing us the WAY for us to also become love.
We watch him walk through the Scriptures: learning kindness from his mother, outgrowing making law into a God, outgrowing thinking his group had a monopoly on God, outgrowing loving just neighbors who are like himself, but even the enemy, struggling to outgrow human fears to make the choice to not only accept physical suffering, but the loss of everything that made him who he was, and forgiving not only his friends who abandoned him, but even the enemies who tortured and killed him, and finally even when he felt abandoned by God, choosing to trust.
Whether we like it or not, this is not only his WAY, it is also the WAY for us, just as it was for his first disciples. This is the WAY of giving, growing, healing, forgiving, letting go of pride and power, accepting suffering, loving even enemies, and trusting God in the darkness of the unknown at the end of life.
The Sign of Jonah
This is my paraphrase of today’s reflection by Richard Rohr: The Sign of Jonah
There is a flow to our spiritual journey. There are times of grace when we experience Love of God’s presence with joy. But for the journey to transform us we must, like Jonah, spend time in darkness. Our spiritual lives are journeys of deaths and resurrections as recurring stages of darkness, grace, growth and new life. This is the pattern Jesus promises us and we see it in other traditions as well. Native religions speak of winter and summer; mystical authors speak of darkness and light; Eastern religions speak of yin and yang or the Tao. Christians call it the paschal mystery: all point to the same necessity of descent and ascent. We are transformed through death and rising many times in our life.
Usually, it is a loss that takes us there. Sometimes the loss of a loved one, a relationship, a career setback, or sudden financial insecurity. The American dream of a steady ascent without failure or loss is a delusion spiritually. Mature religion teaches us how to enter with trust the difficult periods of life. Knowing we are not alone and that this is the crucible of transformation opens us to the grace for growth and transformation. These hard passages are good teachers.
Our first reaction is to try to change events so we can avoid changing ourselves. Learning to stay with the pain of life, without answers, even some days without meaning is the hidden path of contemplative prayer. Grace leads us to the state of emptiness, to a momentary sense of meaninglessness in which we ask, “What is it all for?” But this spaciousness within the question allows Love to fill and enliven us.
A quote from another priest, Father Powell : “ PassionDeathResurrection should be all one word” sums it up.
A personal experience may illustrate this. My husband made an ethical decision that caused us to have to start over in business. We lost our original investment in the company he and two others had started and in the following year a recession hit and our new business had almost no clients. I got a job as Associate Director of Religious Education for the Chaplains Division at Fort Campbell that helped us stay afloat, but we gradually had to sell all our investments and even our wedding silver. We had to learn how to heat with a wood burning stove and fireplace. We almost lost our home. Our children got jobs, scholarships based on ability, and did without the extras most of their contemporaries had at college. We even had to put plastic over our roof, since we couldn’t afford to repair leaks. We lived out in the country in the woods, so I hoped no one would notice. But since we were in a direct line to the local airport, I found out our plastic had become a direction sign for airplanes. We all learned new ways of being. Christmases brought out the best in all of us as we tried to make them good for our youngest child who still believed in Santa. Over and over small miracles in moments of crises reminded us that God was still with us. Every New Year’s Eve, we would say hopefully, “Well, next year is going to be better.” The seventh year on New Year’s Eve, we sighed and said, “Well, we’re getting a whole lot stronger!” That year things got better. Some of my best memories are from those seven years. I think they made all of us better people and they definitely increased my faith. I have a collection of stories of life challenges and spiritual transformations. And at eighty-five I expect to have more challenges to depend on grace to grow so I can become the person God created me to be.
Peace and Joy in the Dark Nights of our Souls
For me, this inner peace in the middle of sorrow and pain has become harder, because in my early spiritual journey, I could sense the presence of Jesus in the room even when I was in physical pain or emotional turmoil. And often joy came even in pain or heartbreak. But at least those memories help me know that even when I now feel alone, I am not.
Mirabai Starr finds inspiration in mystics Julian of Norwich (1343–c. 1416) and John of the Cross (1542–1591).
“Both endured profound suffering and yet discovered a deep and Divine love in its midst. What does a religious woman who dwelt in an anchor-hold during the Middle Ages have to do with you and me today? Julian endured a long and cruel pandemic. The disease ravaged her community and carried off the people that she loved. She learned to shelter in place, focusing on cultivating her interior landscape and sharing the fruits of her wisdom through the window that opened from her cell onto the busy streets of her city (think computer screen and Zoom), where she offered counsel to visitors . . . each day.
She found solace, not in the wrathful father-god of her childhood, but in an unconditionally loving Mother-God who could not help but forgive the transgressions of each one of her darling kids. She recognized that everything that is could be contained in a hazelnut in the palm of God’s hand, and that it all endures because God adores every particle of Her creation. She also realized that, even though the night feels impenetrable now, dawn is coming, when we will see with our own eyes that not only is every little thing going to be alright, but that it has been all along.
And how could a renegade monk, who survived the Spanish Inquisition despite the Jewish and Moorish blood that flowed through his veins, have anything to teach us about flourishing in our own dark nights? John of the Cross illumines the transformational power of radical unknowing. He rekindles our latent longing for union with the Beloved and, through sublime poetry and precise prose, blows on the flames so that they dance back to life in our beleaguered hearts.
He reminds us that when everything in us wants to rush out and fix the problem of our brokenness, both individual and collective, the wisest and most loving thing to do is to be still, letting go of our attachment to the way we thought the spiritual life was supposed to feel and the sense we assumed it should make. Once we step out of our own way, into the dark and empty vessel of the soul, “an ineffable sweetness” will begin to rise, permeating and nourishing the quiet earth, uncovering a resurrection we never dreamed possible: a dazzling darkness, a radiant night, a revolutionary newness of being.
But maybe not quite yet.
We are not alone. The wise ones who walked before us have left luminous footprints for us to follow in our own apocalyptic times.”
