On Aging

Last week I celebrated my 56th birthday with my family and friends.  I had a great time.  Getting older hasn't really bothered me too much.  In fact when asked what age I would be if I could be any age I choose, I said I would be 50 because at that age I have become comfortable with who I am, lost much of my insecurity, have become financially well-off, and have the good health to do pretty much anything I want to.  It is also a time in my life that the experience of a full career of teaching gives me confidence; I feel very comfortable in my professional life.  So aging has been a very positive process for me up to this point.

I realize that the future holds challenges.  I watch my mom and dad, aunts and uncles, and see that this is inevitable.  But as I watch, I have written here before about how I'm trying to think about the aging process and what lies ahead.  And I've been collecting some thoughts on this from other sources too.  

In a recent interview, Ann Lamott said, “Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life.  It has given me me. It has provided time and experience and failures and triumphs and time-tested friends who have helped me step into the shape that was waiting for me. I fit into me now.”

I would agree wholeheartedly with this statement.

Another interesting perspective comes Tyne Daly (of Cagney and Lacey fame).  She has let her hair go gray and says, “You know, my hair is very upsetting to people, but it’s upsetting on purpose. It is important to look old so that the young will not be afraid of dying. People don’t like old women. We don’t honor age in our society, and we certainly don’t honor it in Hollywood.”  I agree with her and someday soon I'm going to join her, and just let my hair be gray.  I'm just not quite ready yet.  What will be the appropriate age? 60? 65?  We shall see.




And just today I finished The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard (I've been working on this book for months, whew!).  Here's how he sums it up:

Aging, accordingly, will become a process not of losing, but of gaining.   As our physical body fades out, our glory body approaches and our spiritual substance grows richer and deeper.  As we age we should become obviously more glorious.  The lovely words of George MacDonald, once again, help us to imagine this crucial transition:
          
          Our old age is the scorching of the bush
          By life's indwelling, incorruptible blaze.
          O life, burn at this feeble shell of me,
          Till I the sore singed garment off shall push,
          Flap out my Psyche wings, and to thee rush."

These kinds of outlooks are not the norm today, but they are certainly thoughts that I want to cultivate, because I think they ring true with the idea of the new, continuing and abundant life we will find at the end of this one.

So...Happy Birthday to me!

Christmas Eve

We had a lovely Christmas Eve service tonight.  We sang a few songs, read the Christmas story from the Jesus Storybook Bible and had time to visit with our extended church family.  One of the readings we shared was a passage from Ann Voskamp.  I wanted to share it with you here.

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The message of Christmas is this world’s a mess and we can never save ourselves from ourselves and we need a Messiah.

For unto us a Child is born.

The Light never comes how you expect it.  It comes as the unlikely and unexpected—straight into Bethlehem unlikely and the feed trough hopeless, and Christmas whispers there is always hope.  It doesn’t matter how dark the dark is: a light can still dawn.  It doesn’t matter if the world whispers, “There’s not a hint that help will come from elsewhere,” telling us that nothing will ever improve, get better, change.  God favors the darkest places so you can see His light the brightest.

And once the light of Christ shatters your dark, shadows forever flee your shadowlands.  There’s no going back and living in the dark; you live in the impenetrable, safe Light of light, and Christmas never ends for you.  A Christian never stops living Christmas.  True, you cannot light Christmas—because it’s Christmas that lights you.

It’s Christmas that dawns on you, and you only really believe in Christmas when you really live it.  When you light a dark world and the unexpected places with a brave flame of joy; when you warm the cold, hopeless places with the daring joy that God is with us, God is for us, God is in us; when you are a wick to light hope in the dark—then you believe in Christmas.  When you really believe in Christmas, you believe there is really hope for everyone.  When you get Christmas, people get hope from you—they don’t lose it.

Unless you keep passing on the miracle of hope, you live like Christmas is a myth.

So light the Advent candles.  Light them! Light them!

And you can see it, with every lit candle, sparks of the dawning.

Hope catching on everything. 

Advent Thoughts

This year I’ve been celebrating Advent, and I’ve had a hand in bringing it into the services at my church.  I have enjoyed each of the Sundays very much.   I’ve also enjoyed using “The Greatest Gift” by Ann Voskamp.  She is a wonderful writer; her style is so poetic.  She creates some beautiful word pictures. 

I thought I’d share a few of the passages I’ve read from Voskamp and others.  Enjoy!

Hope is not a passive reliance upon God.  Hope is a human act of commitment to and investment in the future.  Hope is an act of human courage that refuses to cherish the present too much or be reduced to despair by present circumstances.  Hope is the capacity to relinquish the present for the sake of what is imagined to be a reachable future.  In the end, hope is a practice that bets on a vision of the future that is judged to be well beyond present circumstance, even if one does not know how to get from here to there.  (Walter Brueggemann)

It’s the whole of humanity who live fixated on facades, blinded to the realest real.  The shiny shell of things can bind you and blind you.  It’s a veiled God who elevates the veiled things; the heart, the interior, the soul.  And it’s a temporal world that elevates the foil and the plastic, the status and the skills, the physical and the tangible—all this concrete mirage.  Humanity obsesses with vapors, not eternity.

The reality is, you can lose your life, your joy if you are beguiled by the world’s rind and blind to its inner reality.  The endless bombardment of ads, gloss, Photoshop—it’s like full-immersion sight lessons, schooling us to have eyes for everything unimportant and unreal.  From Hollywood to Pinterest, the media of this world aggressively schools your soul to see the exact opposite of the way God sees. 

People aren’t bodies; they are hearts.  We could train our eyes to turn everything inside out.

“Why should the eye be so lazy?  Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see,” writes G.K. Chesterton.  Let us exercise the eye until it sees through the fat of things, down to the eternal of things.  Let us exercise the eye by walking with Christ.

There is this call for every Christian to answer His calling to be an ocular surgeon.  Our seeing must cut through surfaces and down to souls.

You could close your eyes and ask it, see it…

Is my life about the heart of things?  Is my Christmas?  Am I deeply absorbed in Him and the heart of things?  Or is my life a shallow absorption with surfaces? (Ann Voskamp)

O God and Father, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible things.  The world has been too much with me.  Thou hast been here and I knew it not.  I have been blind to Thy presence.  Open my eyes tht I may behold Thee in and around me.  For Christ’s sake, Amen.  (A.W. Tozer)