Aging as Separation or Link?
[“The soul does not grow by addition but by subtraction” (Meister Eckhart, OP (c.1260-1328]).]
[“Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing that separates them but is also the means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link” (Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace).]
O Lover,
I remain astonished at the potential for spiritual density in the aging process. In this prayer I express gratitude to You for the promise of this penultimate season and plumb its paradoxical preciousness. A nod to Eckhart’s addition/subtraction distinction regarding the shape of this prayer.
On the one hand, life can be viewed primarily in terms of addition, indeed multiplication, a perspective often indulged in by youth as it was for me. For example, the present Israel/Palestinian conflict has forcefully reminded me of some of the choices I made half century ago while our family was living first in East Jerusalem during the 1973 war and then in Jábal Lubnán when the Lebanese civil war began. In retrospect, an omnivorous appetite for new experiences was operative in me. I see that same feature in my graduate education, exploration of the counter-culture, personal relationships, and risk-taking in general. On these and other fronts I repeatedly wanted more. Today my memory of life experienced as a candy store in which I was youthfully self-indulging is laced with gratitude to You, O Lover, that I did not crash and burn worse than I did.
On the other hand, my era of subtraction and relinquishment, beginning with a cardiac diagnosis at age thirty-seven and waxing undeniable in a mid-life crisis a decade later, introduced me to delimitation which would characterize my life’s second half. Now a geriatric, my life is characterized by miniaturizing and contracting, by involuntary relinquishment and loss. Legion are the areas of this unfolding loss: somatic and experiential mobility; public voice and pulpit; passions tethered; uncertainty whether attrition of adventuresomeness is attributable to laziness, cowardice or wisdom; sociality as peers age, wax sedentary, and die; the question of identity itself. Aging, prelude to bodily death, the displacement of all of the above, and much more, by Your unknown, hums a requiem for the omnivore.
However, O Lover, and I resort to the interrogative, what if this litany, seemingly atrophic and entropic, is not Your final word, the télos of Your Mystérium, this blogger included, not a cooling and twisting cinder? Might December’s paradoxical and oxymoronic waning be the lifespan’s most fertile soil for spiritual exploration of Your brooding and ubiquitous Presence, both without and within? Insofar as attrition is throttling my thirst for all but You, might this depleting state be precisely where I need to be? Having sampled much of life’s rich fare, am I being shown that all of the dishes were sacramental and my actual hunger was and is for The One throwing the party? Might life’s narrowing, intermittent harrowing, and stripping down, while eliciting lamentation, also skewer the awareness of You in my underemployed heart? Is the journey of my now wee little life simultaneously breaking through into the macrocosmic reaches of Your Sacred Heart? Is this what makes these the “golden years”? Can the unprecedented subtraction and relinquishment be allowed to cleanse the palate, reduce the noise, hone the Core Reality who is You, O Lover? Is lurking just beneath my present ever-less Your eternal evermore?
Yes, O Lover, this my final season is all about a choice. In the imagery of Simone Weil, the relentlessness of my winter can be an emerging massive wall sequestering and separating me from fellow finites and from You. Or it can constitute a medium via which You are drawing me into an ever-deeper awareness of my unítas indistinctiónis with You and Your “all in All” (I Cor 15:28). Yes, aging can be fracturing foe or facilitating friend.
So which will it be: entropy or trust, incremental death or You, O Lover?
