As I approach Eighty-Eight years of age, I find myself less preoccupied and involved in the concerns and problems of the world than I was in my earlier years. Instead, I’m living in a quieter, more reflective mood as I engage the world of today. I am aware, with a equal measure of sadness and hope, that as my grandchildren ask me to perform their wedding services, that this world & its problems and needs is largely in their hands now.
This is true to some degree of many of the aging members of our churches as we witness many of our siblings and friends dying and whose reality for us is held only in our memories and hearts. Death is not a distant, nearly out of sight reality as it used to be.
As people of faith and hope we begin to take time – years, days, hours and yes, even minutes - more seriously, to examine, value and seek to fill each moment with thoughtful attention, to be more awake, more aware of the precious gifts of life and love in each moment of time.
Wendell Berry, the American poet, essayist and author of 40 books has written this bit of wisdom about aging in his poem, “Awake at Night:”
Late in the night I pay
the unrest I owe
to the life that has never lived
and cannot live now.
What the world could be
is my good dream
and my agony when, dreaming it.
I lie awake and turn
and look into the dark.
I think of a luxury
in the sturdiness and grace
of necessary things, not
in frivolity. That would heal
the earth, and heal men.
But the end, too, is part
of the pattern, the last
labor of the heart:
to learn to lie still,
one with the earth again,
and let the world go.