A Prayer of Gerontius
[“Do not cast me off in the time of old age; do not forsake me when my strength fails. . . .And even when I am old and gray, O God, do not forsake me” (Ps 71:9, 18).]
O Lover,
A recent citation by Pope Francis enhanced my awareness of the above text. In my earlier life I read Psalm 71 many times, but now one thing had changed: I myself had become Gerontius (“old one”). Context always matters, and my present season became the kaíros for this text. As the psalter’s prayer becomes increasingly my own, what are the issues I bare before You, O Lover?
First, I want to come to a greater peace with my own bodily death. Having experienced, seldom easily, the ubiquity of paradox, I am no longer confounded by the hope that amid my season of declining powers You are unfolding the very best of all. However, none of this harrowing and winnowing comes easily or pleasantly, nor is ageing merely a state of mind. And there can always be retro moments of grieving the demise of youth’s allure.
My principal paradigm is Jesus whom I embrace as embodiment of You, O Lover. One implication of Your Self-materialization in him is the sacralizing of all finites gifted with being. This includes, among many other dimensions, temporality and perishability. Given Your embrace of the totality of finite creaturehood, how could I despise its mortality dimension? How could I loathe thánatos, however implacable? The Incarnátus is thus invitation to embrace as my own “sister death” (Francis of Assisi) rather than ”rage, rage against the dying of the light” (Dylan Thomas). Mostly my center responds to this invite in the affirmative; in other times the most I can muster is the retrieval of a “yes” from the bank of past experiences. Whichever, the “sting” of death is being deconstructed (I Cor 15:54-57), for, to allude to Augustine, we geriatrics (in particular) are an “Easter people.” “The Dream of Gerontius,” to reference the poetic/musical collaboration of the Brits John Henry Newman and Edward Elgar, is You, O Lover, both throughout and beyond this life.
Second, I want to come to a greater peace regarding the “after” of my bodily death. I experience my faith as grounded in You: generator of all being, conqueror of death, deifier of the cosmos, unmetered by time. And though the present life in and of itself provides full warrant for gratitude to You beyond words, I repeatedly experience extrapolation of that finite splendor into “afterwards” as seductively drawing me. Though I am inclined to view “eternal life” as inherent in who You are as principally Self-disclosed in the Christ, that inkling provides minimal content or certitude. As awareness of my own approaching end increases I clutch To sólus (“You alone”) asking only to be drawn into the interiority of Your “all in All” (I Cor 15:28). May I in the final unraveling of my finitude experience the encroaching darkness to be in reality Your Luminosity for which I have long since lacked register or measure. And may in that passage into the ineffable grandeur of You the eradication of the fabricated self, so long a contested scrum, be finally completed.
Rather than protracting my finite separateness out beyond physical death, I pray for “a new heaven and a new earth” (Apoc 21:1), the healing of the “groaning” creation (Rom 8:20-23), the lavish blossoming of Your “all in All.” Given who You have shown Yourself to be, the scale of Your heílsgeschichte (“salvation history”) cannot but be universal, transformational, and unitive. As I am incrementally letting go of all that has been familiar to me in this my beautiful life, I cleave solely to You and Your dream encompassing everything. Let it be!
