On Holding and Folding
[“Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were younger, you used to gird (‘dress’) yourself and walk wherever you wished; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands and someone else will dress you, and bring you where you do not wish to go” (Jn 21:18).]
[“ . . . the Father loves me, because I lay down my life so that I may take it again. No one has taken my life from me, but I lay it down on my own initiative. I have agency and authority to lay it down, . . .” (Jn 10:17-18).]
O Lover,
One of the dimensions of my spiritual journey has been an inexorable gravitation from the literal to the metaphorical, from what can be depicted with cognition, language and/or image, and that increasingly transcending such representation. Indeed, my entire journey is in correlation with that shift. Thus it is noteworthy that during recent months the development of the John 21 text’s meaning has seized me, only in the opposite direction. Although this text’s principal interpretation views it as Jesus’s veiled poetic prophecy of the martyrdom of the Apostle Peter, it has been its literality that has become uncannily applicable to me of late. Stated otherwise, a greater metaphorical thrust has counter-intuitively reached back, as it were, to skewer me by its surface meaning.
In this my anecdotage I am increasingly experiencing on various fronts the reality of aging. One concrete example of this diminishment alluded to in our text involves daily health maintenance: e.g., self-care in general, self-dressing in particular. While I remain largely independent in this regard, I can now clearly foresee expanding dependency up ahead. I experience a second concrete expression of slippage into greater dependency, this involving bodily mobility, to be more advanced than the first. While I still drive, for example, I generally do not so alone, our beat now largely circumscribed by our small city. Walking outside is often with use of cane and/or rollater. While the hint of malevolent coercion in our text is not my experience, my growing sequesterment is nevertheless involuntary: I can no longer go wherever I wish to go. Thus living with the John 21 text, now the second time around, is increasingly like looking into a mirror.
The above being said, the principal thrust of Your Christ-event lays bare a vastly larger picture than the dynamics of aging. His embodied vision and teachings, his Passion and union with You, all intimate Reality as revolutionary and challenging in every respect. Your “big picture” Self-disclosed via the Christ is a Resurrection story throughout, its scale reaching from quark to cosmos and beyond. In short, Your words addressing the 13th C beguine Angela of Foligno—“My love for you has not been a hoax”—are directed to me as well.
John 10:17-18 references one dimension of this Your macro-vision: the manner in which diminishment and dying is held. Here Jesus rejects victimhood, despair, and the immolation of agency. Out of loving solidarity with You he both actively surrenders his very life and asserts his prerogative to take it up again. And In this comprehensive inversion Jesus is shown to be harbinger, precursor, and incarnation of all gifted with being; he is the concretion of Your M.O. for which we pray daily: “Your reigning come, Your will be done” (Mt 6:10). Whatever else the Resurrection of Jesus encompasses, it both challenges on all fronts the seeming ubiquity of death (I Cor 15:54-55) and opens wide the scope of implications vastly transcending human imagination (I Cor 2:9).
So then, in the Fourth Gospel’s glimpses into Your Christ’s preparation for his own death he is also implicitly inviting all of us to embrace our own entropic diminishments, challenges such as self-care and mobility not excepted. It is Your invitation for us, both ultimately and penultimately, is to offer up rather than clutch, surrender rather than cling. In this my December may I more fully open myself to this invitation.
