Dear All,
As promised last week, this week’s reflections will be related to autumn again with the focus on the latter part of our lives – mainly coping with, and making something of, the years when most of us feel a sense of diminishment, maybe a weakening – a time that can be challenging to live through in a positive way. Recently I have been reading quite a bit of Henri Nouwen’s writing & he has a lot to say that I have found helpful about this stage of our lives so I hope you will find something relevant here. It is largely Nouwen for which I don’t apologise!
An apology: last week we told you it was the ’Dona Nobis Pacem’ from The Sound of Silence CD and then sent you John Glynn’s ‘May the Lord bless you’ – so this week we really will have ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’.
Love to you all
Info re Evening Prayer: consequent of Stephen’s death, there will be no Evening Prayer in the Blessed Sacrament church on Tuesday 7 October. Also, there will be no zoomed Evening Prayer on Monday 6 October. Nor will there be Evening Prayer in Blessed Sacrament on October 8th (our Foundation Day).
A New Vision of Maturity
I find myself with the same old struggles every time I am in a new and unfamiliar milieu. In particular, the experience of isolation keeps returning, not in a lessening but in an increasing degree. Becoming older makes the experience of isolation much more familiar—maybe simply because of sheer repetition—but not less painful.
So maybe the question is not how to cope better, but how slowly to allow my unchanging character to become a way of humility and surrender to God. As I recognize my fears of being left alone and my desire for a sense of belonging, I may gradually give up my attempts to fill my loneliness and be ready to recognize with my heart that God is Emmanuel, “God-with-us,” and that I belong to him before anything or anyone else.
And so a new vision of maturity may emerge; not a vision in which I am more and more able to deal with my own pains, but one in which I am more willing to let my Lord deal with them. After all, maturation in a spiritual sense is a growing willingness to stretch out my arms, to have a belt put round me, and to be led where I would rather not go (John 21:18).
Ageing
John O’Donohue
The circle brings perspective to the process of ageing. As you age, time affects your body, your experience & above all your soul. There is a great poignancy in ageing. When your body ages, you begin to lose the natural and spontaneous vigour of your youthfulness. Time, like a bleak cloud, begins to indent the membrane of your strength. It will continue to do that, until gradually it empties your life completely. One of the most vital questions that affects every person is: can we transfigure the damage that time does for us? Let us pursue this question by first exploring our kinship with nature. Since we are formed from clay, the rhythm of the seasons outside in nature is also active within our own hearts. We can learn much, therefore, from the people who constructed & articulated in sisterhood with nature, namely, the Celtic people.
Even though the body ages, diminishes, becomes frail, weak and ill, the shelter of the soul around the body always embraces that fragility tenderly. As your body ages, you can become aware of how your soul enfolds & minds your body; the panic and fear often associated with ageing falls away. The soul is a great consolation & shelter. Ageing is so frightening because it seems that your autonomy and independence are forsaking you against your will. To the young, old people seem ancient. When you begin to age yourself, you realise how incredibly quickly time is moving. In fact the only difference between a young person at the height of their exuberance and a very old person at a very frail and empty physical level is time.
Befriending Death
Our first task is to befriend death. I like that expression “to befriend.” I first heard it used by Jungian analyst James Hillman when he attended a seminar I taught on Christian Spirituality at Yale Divinity School. He emphasized the importance of “befriending”: befriending your dreams, befriending your shadow, befriending your unconscious. He made it convincingly clear that in order to become full human beings, we have to claim the totality of our experience; we come to maturity by integrating not only the light but also the dark side of our story into our selfhood. That made a lot of sense to me, since I am quite familiar with my own inclination, and that of others, to avoid, deny, or suppress the painful side of life, a tendency that always leads to physical, mental, or spiritual disaster. . . .
I have a deep sense, hard to articulate, that if we could really befriend death we would be free people. So many of our doubts and hesitations, ambivalences and insecurities are bound up with our deep-seated fear of death that our lives would be significantly different if we could relate to death as a familiar guest instead of as a threatening stranger.
Our Weakness Blesses Others
Nouwen
Our weakness and old age call people to surround us and support us. By not resisting weakness and by gratefully receiving another’s care we call forth community and provide our caregivers an opportunity to give their own gifts of compassion, care, love, and service. As we are given into their hands, others are blessed and enriched by caring for us. Our weakness bears fruit in their lives.
And dying is our ultimate vulnerability. Instead of looking at the weakness of old age as simply the experience of loss after loss, we can choose it as a passage to emptiness where our hearts have room to be filled with the Spirit of Love overflowing. It is ultimate weakness, but is also potentially the greatest moment of our fruitfulness