The Autumn of our Being, and the Ripening of the Soul
Somewhere about the age of 60, we begin to realize that we really are aging.
Now, at 76, I have come to see that old age is a complete changing of gears and does not happen without the slow realization, almost calming feeling that we have journeyed through the protected space of childhood joy and innocence, the rocky road and angst of teenage uncertainty, the no-handbook reference library for marital life and parenthood, the sadness of empty nests, the joy of grandchildren and now find ourselves slowing passing through inner resistance and denial into a place of peaceful surrender.
As paraphrased by Father Richard Rohr, Franciscan friar and ecumenical teacher, “Most of us tend to think of the last half of life as largely about getting old, dealing with health issues, and letting go of our physical life, but I simply don’t believe that’s all there is to it. What looks like falling can largely be experienced as falling upward and onward, into a broader and deeper world, where the soul finds its fullness, is finally connected to the whole, and lives inside the Big Picture.”
I would wholeheartedly agree that the “falling” is indeed a falling upwards…to that place from where love first brought us into existence.
That falling upwards is a time of ripening, of rounding, of mellowing and, most importantly, of finally understanding that our desires and hopes for everything good, true and beautiful is the result of our willingly emptying our selves and leaving space for the fulfilment of God’s great outpouring of love.
Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister writes “If we learn anything at all as time goes by and the changing seasons become fewer and fewer, it is that there are some things in life that cannot be fixed. It is more than possible that we will go to our graves with a great deal of personal concerns, of life agendas, left unresolved. [ ]”
Something we have to face is that to live as an “elder” (a position much respected in many cultures) is to ripen into clear-eyed acceptance of the way things actually exist. For many of us, this ripening involves the multidimensional understanding and acceptance that everything as we now know can and will be lost and will be replaced by questions such as: what will happen to me? To my body? To my mind? Will I matter to anyone? Will I be a burden? How will I die?
The truthful answer to all these questions is - we do not, we can not know because the moment which changes everything usually arrives unannounced.
James Finley, a colleague of Richard Rohr at the Centre for Action and Contemplation shared his thoughts on spiritual maturity as a form of ripening:
“We ripen in holiness and spiritual fulfillment as we learn to sit in the sun of God’s mysterious, sustaining presence that energizes and guides our efforts, bringing us to realms of grace that are beyond, way beyond, anything we can achieve by our own efforts alone. . . . As a person ripens in unsayable intimacies in God, they ripen in a paradoxical wisdom. They come to understand God as a presence that protects us from nothing, even as God unexplainably sustains us in all things. This is the Mystery of the Cross that reveals whatever it means that God watches over us; it does not mean that God prevents the tragic thing, the cruel thing, the unfair thing, from happening. Rather, it means that God is intimately hidden as a kind of profound, tender sweetness that flows and carries us along in the intimate depths of the tragic thing itself—and will continue to do so in every moment of our lives up to and through death, and beyond.”
And so, we, like fruit, ripen. As we age, we realize that in all we have been through, Love has been using us for its own purposes. And for this I feel immensely grateful. We know, too, that our inevitable passing away, in which we fall into the ground and die, is not the end of our ripened and transformed life.
Again, to share the words of Richard Rohr “When we can let go of our own need for everything to be as we want it, and our own need to succeed, we can then encourage the independent journey and the success of others. The grand parent is able to relinquish center stage and to stand on the sidelines, and thus be in solidarity with those who need their support. Children can feel secure in the presence of their grandparents because, while their parents are still rushing to find their way through life’s journey, granddad and grandma have hopefully become spacious. They can contain problems, inconsistencies, inconveniences, and contradictions—after a lifetime of practicing and learning.”
Hopefully, as ripened fruit, we have come to trust life because we have seen more of it and, as a consequence or blessing, we trust death because we are closer to it. And, somewhere along the journey, something has told us that who are now is not the final stage.
We need to be close enough to our own death to see it coming and to recognize that death and life are united in an eternal embrace, and intimate and continuing dance, and one is not the end of the other. Death is what it is.
Someone once said “the truth will set you free.” Perhaps the love and truth of God is what finally allows us to soar and meet our Maker unencumbered.
At this moment, as I share these thoughts, I hold even dearer the words of our beloved creed:
“In life in death, in life beyond death,
God is with us. We are not alone.”
Thanks be to God.
In peace,
Pastor Beryl