Dear Ones,
If you stopped long enough to take a lingering gaze at me, you would probably surmise that under the snowcap of white hair and pruned face of wrinkles all is well. And all is well. There is within me a deep-rooted wellness that even the unrelenting demands of old age cannot touch. Yet in truth, I am very fragile. I can’t see very well, I can’t hear very well and I can’t walk very well. But, as I said, I am quite well within myself at 93.
What about old age? How do we attain to it and how do we attend to it? Attaining to it is inevitable. If we live long enough we will slowly live into it. Old age is the final season of our lives and it is the most difficult of all the seasons that have come before it. Though the preceding seasons offer us preparation indicative of our choices in the transformation process, still this final season with its diminishments, frailties and closures is brutal and long-suffering. Old age requires extraordinary and unfathomable courage. The pain, impairments…the humiliations of old age are so consuming and deeply afflicting that the cry for mercy becomes the silent but ever-present voice of the soul. It is a riveting, passionate cry that connects with the Eternal and gives strength to stay the course. If we are to finish well, we must endure our own crucifixion through an unrivaled focus on the Crucified One. Such a privileged suffering is second only to martyrdom.
Our culture shivers at any hint of old age and has little respect for wisdom. It wraps itself in an ethereal blanket and lives an illusion that keeps youth embodied as eternal. Yet to deny old age is to deny an ever-deepening spiritual maturity nurtured in the humility of frailty, its constant companion. It is to deny the vine-ripened tenderness of aging, its mellowing that spills over into the richness of so sweet a love as to stifle us with its fragrance and Its Presence.
In this brief letter, I have endeavored to paint the suffering and imprint the vitality of focus. Darkness and light embrace one another and flow into wisdom, a testimony to the Truth that the darkness has not overcome the Light and that wisdom is a gathering of truths from the Light of each season, the possession of a disposition tempered by fire. Nothing disturbs it. All things are one. Divine Wisdom, the supreme gift of redemption as experienced in old age.
Now is the suffering season of my years
A never ending struggle without pause.
No clarity beneath this burning gaze of age
No drenching rain to fall and cool its blaze
Only the slowed down steps
The heavy load—the cross.
Spirit of Love, a suffering love
My passion.
And though the why of aging, its mysteries still elude me
I know I do not walk this season all alone.
Into the peace of promise I slowly drift
Detached from time, age, and humiliation
Immersed in cool, refreshing streams of grace
Parched lips reach up through sunlit waters
The sweetest of all praise—gratitude.
Spirit of Love, a suffering love
My passion.
BWS
Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. 1Corinthians 4:16
With gratitude to Sally Chester for the beautiful photo.