Green Leaves for Later Years: The Spiritual Path of Wisdom

Preface

It is early in the morning, and I am grateful. Grateful that in this year of grace I took a little of my own medicine and returned with a kind of humility. Well, a kind of humbling, at least—a low-to-the-ground way of remembering what it is to begin again. And again. And again. This is the year I admitted, for example, that I cannot ever find my Bible in the early morning, because the house is filled with Bibles, and not one of them is ever the one I’m after when it is still dark and I want to watch the light come up over the trees. For me the light is Christ.

So I begin again, looking for today’s Bible reading electronically this time, pulling the day’s Scripture up from the website I have bookmarked as "hodie, which is Latin for today." It is also the first word of the chant monks use to open the Christmas Day antiphon at second vespers. Hodie Christus natus est. Today Christ is born.

This is the first line of Benjamin Britten’s Hodie in the Ceremony of Carols, that beautiful work of almost-chant that long ago swept me into the Christian life. And so each morning now this simple Latin word—hodie, today, this day—is my entrance into the beauty of the moment and the life of the Lord. Fittingly, it is in the later years that I claim this phrase as part of the day’s opening reading and opening prayer. Why fittingly? Because I am fully present in the moment, in the instant, yet by grace connected fully to the Lord. His word, my action. His touch, my word and world enough. Stretching across the globe itself by grace. My self extended. This word, this time, this instant of prayer, my entry point into the day.

Then, through my window—dawn. I am surrounded by green leaves. Emerging from the ground as ferns, wildly successful plants that tap against my windowpanes when the wind blows. Poking up everywhere, rising again like sap one forgets till spring and all comes once again alive, with Christ, with meaning, my Word, God, Lord of hope and all.

First light, first prayer

Now into winking blue I dive for the first sacred word and prayer of the day:

well it’s not blue screen

(that’s a tech term, electronics, all that)

but it’s my screen

blue

deep

winking in pre-dawn light

which is

on the whole

the best time of my day with God.

(though it could be any time.

you know how that goes.)

My bell

My diving Dell

opens a path

early early

not sure when

sometime before dawn.

blue screen

for me

unlimited future

and just to make it extra nice,

the metaphor,

blue is Our Lady’s color,

larkspur,

loveliness,

joy.

Hard to explain.

you had to be there.

But I was there,

it was me

and Jesus

me and Jesus

and the whole world besides.

Heart of Christ

Extending pole to pole

and still farther

into the limitless future

of God’s love.

When the above text was written, it was January and bitter cold. The text for the day was from the book of Acts: We set sail from Troas, making a straight run for Samothrace (Acts 16:11 NAB). I love this reading, and I love Paul’s journeys as ways into the life of God.

Leave Your Chair

Bill Griffin has gone, I wrote back in January, onto the board of the Alexandria Museum of Art. I am glad of it. That’s my one glimmer of hope in a desolate winter, shaken by illness, a chaotic family Christmas, periods of temporary deafness, surging blood pressure, new medications, unpredictability. Only one answer, I conclude. Get up, leave your chair, stop letting rheumatoid arthritis and its courtesies dominate you. Learn to deflect, charmingly, the constant hum of well-intentioned advice that tells you you are sick and getting sicker and put on the Keds, the ones Wendy says you shouldn’t wear because they hurt her feet. Oh yes, you heard me right. I shouldn’t wear them because they leave her comfortless.

That’s it in a nutshell. Everyone seems to have ideas, thoughts, suggestions about how I should get well. But unless the Keds fit, everyone stumbles. My conclusion is that I have to stretch into my recovery. Without being too demanding or officious, I have to take charge. Until you take charge of your own recovery, until you intend to get well, you won’t. Intending to get well isn’t the same as getting well, but it’s a start.

Here is what Oliver Sacks has to say about adaptation in the later years: Whether it is by learning a new language, traveling to a new place, developing a passion for beekeeping or simply thinking about an old problem in a new way, all of us can find ways to stimulate our brains to grow, in the coming year and those to follow. Just as physical activity is essential to maintaining a healthy body, challenging one’s brain, keeping it active, engaged, flexible and playful, is not only fun. It is essential to cognitive fitness.

Oliver Sacks encourages me. I find that his explorations of the worst-case scenarios, in which people have had scary experiences of brain failure, unexplained brain failure, are not depressing but encouraging. These clever New Yorker stories of his may look like entertainment to some. But to me, wrestling with all the uncertainties of the later years, Sacks is optimism itself.

I pause to reflect on what lies ahead. This is a big year for me as I turn seventy-five and try to decide what part of me is ready to rest and what part ready to rise and shine.

I make a list of the things that have happened since last year. Not the best things but the most significant things, things that have marked off the months and days. And I find they are few.

Bill Vaswig’s newsletter, in which he accepts his approaching death.

Gratitude for knowing Bill Vaswig and working with him.

Thanksgiving and Christmas (chaotic, confusing).

Epiphany, and the chance to speak of it at the Renovaré Institute in Menlo Park.

The Chrysostom Society meeting in the Hill Country of Texas.

The health scare involving Luci Shaw.

The list trails off. At my age—did I say I am seventy-five this year?—I hear a lot of athlete talk about pushing past the pain. I think about my editors and readers who have said, Tell us more about your pain. I hope in these pages I can respond to that question, maybe even be glad of such questions at last.

Hard. It’s hard, admitting to myself that spirituality can make a difference. My evaluation of the preceding year has begun after a week of teaching the spiritual life. And speaking is sometimes euphoric. When you teach the spiritual life you believe you are living it. What you sometimes don’t realize is that you, like all those in your audience, need to live each day as a new beginning. In the spiritual life there are no time-outs, no free passes. Everyone has to begin, and begin again.

So I name it all: The gift of pain. The challenge of illness and other surprises. The relentless march of birthdays, joyful yet wistful because they mark off time. My own inadequacy dealing with seas of paperwork. Losing a cherished letter in the whole post-Christmas rush. Bursts of insight and gratitude—for Conversations, a wonderful Christian journal, for friends near and far (the season brings them to mind—James Catford, friend in Christ; Kate Campbell, grace maker; Jan Peterson, friend, encourager). The bah-humbug side of Christmas. Recovery, my own, because I have to begin again. Admitting to myself that Christmas is not always peaceful, that family connections are sometimes chaotic. The sorrow of it, taking the fall—that is, accepting my own inadequacy and my need to begin again.

Some weeks later, after days of new beginnings, another list emerges. This time it’s more of a gratitude list, but not without dark spots. Amazing Bill Griffin, the list begins. Then next I write the title of his novel, Dill of the Nile. March 25th, Feast of the Annunciation, is the publishing date for Dill. I begin to understand that part of me is unhinged by the flood of feelings released by the holidays—concerns about people in far-off places, friends I can’t always visit in person but don’t want to lose. Then there are friends and colleagues facing death—like our friend Father Val, a Dominican priest in his eighties, brilliantly transcending his illness though it is a constant fact of life for him.

A Spirituality for the Later Years

Some years ago one of the best modern writers on the life cycle, Erik Erikson (1902–1994), realized that he was starting to outlive his categories. He had identified seven stages of life, had written and studied and taught about them extensively, but the longevity of modern people was beginning to outstrip his analysis.

So he began to write and speak about the years after age sixty-five as new and adventurous territory. He applied many of the life lessons he had already discovered and came up with some new ones. The word wisdom continually appeared in his writing. But also he wanted to correct the ster­eotypes of old age and offer a freedom to reinterpret these later stages of living.

My central theme in this book is how Christian faith informs us in the life journey, especially in later years. From time to time I will also touch on my own struggle with illness, a wide array of autoimmune diseases. I don’t want to dwell on the pain. But the pain is real. I don’t want to suppose that if I just don’t think about it, it will go away. I want to show where my encouragement comes from: how God speaks in my life. Especially I am encouraged by Jeremiah 17, which tells us that the righteous person is like a tree planted by living water, whose leaves stay green.

In writing this book I have learned a good deal through observation, reading and study, conversing with others and simply through my own experience and reflection. The words I like best to deal with this stage of life are transcendence and adaptation. My focus is on a person’s quest to live deeply and well. My delight has been to raise good questions. Does later life have meaning? Should people continue to work? Should their work change or shift in some way? How important is the creative side of living? What about lifelong learning? What is a good fundamental attitude about change and diminishment? Should society change to accommodate these new elders?

The Hidden Spot

Sometimes I think there is a hidden spot in the universe where God is to be found, God and the whole rest of the world besides. It is a sort of Aladdin’s cave of memory, joy and courage where all the spiritual gifts glitter in the darkness and every jewel shines.

When I first set out to offer God the best I had, I reflected on an image: the apples of my experience ripening, falling, scattering on the ground. I pictured myself entering into my future with all the hopes and gratitude of a life well lived, trying to gather all the golden apples of the Spirit, the beauties God had bestowed on me.

The years ahead would be my new territory—years of joy and sorrow and uncertainty in the uncharted country of the heart with the Lord himself as my guide. Day by day I would follow this shadowy figure on the path. Sometimes Jesus would walk beside me; sometimes he would climb the rock just ahead and wait for me to catch up, battling with forces of fear and death like Gandalf at the crag of doom. Sometimes I would imagine Jesus as a twelve-year-old, a youth barely older than a child but already wise and able to explain to his elders the meaning of God’s plan.

That was my Jesus, and I would follow him.

I sat in a coffeehouse and attempted to capture—like a sketch artist who works quickly because the light is fading and the sun will soon be down—the vision I had seen, the glimpse into the meaning of existence that is the writer’s only spiritual treasure.

Then fear closed in. Fear and self-doubt, my ancient enemies: Who do you think you are, to bring the golden apples of God’s wisdom to the world? To the bystanders, the wayfarers, the random readers who riffle the pages and put the book down? Who declared you the keeper of the universe?

Then I knew for sure that the Lord was with me. At every step of the long journey that is the later years, he has accompanied me. There are many who tell me they do not know the Lord, that he has never walked with them, never offered a wafer of comfort along the hard and perilous way. And I tell them, Wait.

Wait until all earthly consolations and comforts fall away. Wait until the constellations that once populated the night sky fade and the universe seems to grow cold. Think, always, that when you are exhausted and drained from the long trudge of existence, there will be golden apples on the ground, scattered randomly but wonderfully ripe. Never hesitate to think, The Lord put this one here just for me. It is an old story, and the Lord never seems to stop telling it. It is a story of encouragement, confidence and love.

I am conscious of the passing of years. As I move into the future I am conscious of all the coffeehouse reflections of the past—discarded pages, lists and notes that have long