Aging: Complex Feelings, Invitation to Deeper Faith

Aging: Complex Feelings, Invitation to Deeper Faith
by Helen Maher Garvey, BVM

It happens quietly, gradually. A clerk inquires whether you want the senior citizen discount. An unwelcome letter invites you to join the AARP. The oldest person at most meetings is you. Unexpectedly, you realize that you are growing old. What feelings and behaviors does this realization evoke? Perhaps there is a range of emotions and behaviors.

I may retreat into denial. I may tell myself, and others if they will listen, that I am just as strong now as I was in 1960. I can still deal with junior high kids, golf with the best of them, follow the lawn mower around my yard.

Another opposite response is a rejection of life. I am getting my social security and other retirement funds; I am finished now; don't bother me about life, the war in Iraq , or old friends.

Finally, I may embrace the reality of my life. I may understand the paschal mystery of death and resurrection in a new way. I am older, but I choose life, life expressed differently than I expressed it 50 years ago.

Feelings about aging run a continuum from dread to eagerness. Dread is related to loss: the loss of the myth of an endless future, the loss of family and friends, and at some point, the loss of regular work, with the end of the institutional supports available at workplace, the fax, the email, but most of all, the comradery. In addition to these fears there may a subtle anxiety about quiet, idleness.

They have the courage to work.
They lack the courage to be idle.
They have enough virtue to work.
They haven't enough virtue to be idle.
To stretch out. To rest. To sleep.
Poor people, they don't know what is good.
They look after their business very well during the day.
But they do not have enough confidence in me to let me look after it during the night.
“Sleep,”

Charles Peguy 1

As much as some people creep towards this change in fear, others sprint towards it with excitement. They are ready for a new experience. Some folks both sprint and creep towards this different season, depending on the day and the arthritic count.

On the good days, they look forward to the opportunity to labor at their regular job, volunteer, travel, read, contemplate and enhance relationships. They realize that the fundamental vitality of our lives, the basic realities that constitute well-being through life's course, stays with us.

Focus on Essence

According to Bill Moyers, that essence of life is encapsulated in close relationships and activities with meaning and purpose. 2 These core values can not only be continued, but enhanced as we age.

For most of us, the prospect of aging involves complex feelings of fear and hope. Human enough to embrace both emotions, we are afraid and we are enthusiastic. As one recently retired person who was acting as mentor to her successor cried, “It is hard. It is so hard to let go.”

The same person mentioned her deep desire for time to pray, to enjoy her grandchildren, to do some of the things she always wanted to do, but neglected because of other obligations. According to a study by the MacArthur Foundation, the most important aspects of aging are attitude and activity.

How do faithful believers deepen a gracious attitude? How do aging persons solidify close relationships? How do these faithful believers, these aging persons, participate in activities with meaning and purpose? In the unfolding years, years drawing us closer to death, how do aging persons live?

The answer will be different for each person, depending on health, personal gifts and deep desires. Some will struggle with painful physical and/or disabilities early. Some will work and play with agility into their nineties. Some will work and play with minor problems until natural and peaceful death. All are called to the fullness of life; God is not a God of the dead; She is a God of the living.

Giving

All persons are called to a gift richer and deeper than that of the wedding day, or the profession celebration or the graduation moment. All are called to a second giving, poor in glamour, but abounding in experience and wisdom, rich in purpose and meaning. All aging persons are called to a “second giving.”

The Second Giving

The second giving of God is the great giving
out of the portions of the seraphim,
abundances with which the soul is laden
once it has given up all things for Him.

The second growth of God is the rich growing,
with fruits no constant gathering can remove,
the flourishing of those who by God's mercy
have cut themselves down to the roots for love.

God seeks a heart with bold and boundless hunger
that sees itself and earth as paltry stuff;
God loves a soul that casts down all he gave it
and stands and cries that was not enough. 3

Jessica Powers

The “Second Giving” is not all poetry. It involves a significant transition inviting us to the discipline of change and the possibility of transformation. According to William Bridges who wrote the classic text, Managing Transitions , every transition involves an ending, a letting go of something.

Following the “letting go,” there is a neutral zone, a wilderness, a dangerous time, a time of opportunity and creativity. Next there is an interregnum, a place and time where old habits are extinguished and new habits begin to take shape. 4

Anxiety is a natural accompaniment of these different movements. Most people think they have put it together in middle age, that they have integrated their lives. Then imperceptibly, an upsetting change challenges us, the experience of aging.

Paschal Mystery

For the Christian, the symbol of the paschal mystery, the reality of death and resurrection is always present, within us and among us.

It is well to remember Pope John XXIII who, late into the early morning hours, in the last two months of his life, as he suffered with fatal cancer, wrote Pacem in Terris, one of the greatest encyclicals of all time. It was he who reminded us that “God did not ask us to guard a museum but to cultivate a garden.”

Aging is dread and eagerness. Aging is the idleness of the courageous. Aging is close relationships. Aging is activities with meaning and purpose. Aging is the Second Giving. Aging is transition with its letting go, its creativity and anxiety. Aging is the cultivation of a garden. Aging is death and life. Aging is the paschal mystery, the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Endnotes

Peguy, Charles, “Hope,” in God Speaks, (New York: Pantheon, 1943).
Moyers, Bill, Moyers, Moyers on America , ( New York : New Press, 2004).
Powers, Jessica, Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, eds. Regina Siegfried and Robert Morneau (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1999).
Bridges, William, Managing Transitions, (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 1991).

About the author: Helen Maher Garvey, BVM (Robert Joseph) resides in Lexington , Ky. She is an aging consultant on organizational development for parishes, schools and religious congregations.