Something new is in the making
There is in life a poem, a song, a lullaby that whispers tenderness and love, security and peacefulness. Old Age men and women can sing it from the deepest depth of their being. It is a strange feeling of joy. Joy is an up-swelling of light, tingling in every sense of our bodies making music under the master’s bow.
In Old Age one can also hear musical sounds, ominous and somber. These are the bells of our physical makeup. The bells are as many ailments and aches that befall us. They should be aggressively treated and accepted. Every tolling bell announces that something new is in the making, something more beautiful than that of the sunshine and the most splendid springs of our life—resurrection!!
However absurd the idea of resurrection may seem, it remains the source of courage and peacefulness in our life and gives meaning to our existence. Pain and mutilation bring with them the meaning of our redemption. May God bless our physicians, who play their games of chess with chemicals to relieve our soul in order to rejoice in the Lord our God.
Old Age meditates: What would resurrection be like? There is no rationalization. This is the secret of God, revealed in Jesus Christ. And they meditate: Who else can find the answer?
In essence, our body is our relationship with God, with the world, and with others; it is our life as communion and as mutual relationship. Everything in the body, in the human organism, is created for this relationship, for this communion, for this coming out of oneself.
It is not, then, an accident that love, the highest form of communion, finds its incarnation in the body, the body that sees, hears, feels, and thereby leads us out of the isolation of our “I.”
The body is not the darkness of the soul but rather its freedom, for the body is the soul as love, as communion, the soul as life, the soul as movement. When the soul loses the body, it loses life. It dies, even if this dying is not complete annihilation, but a dormition, or sleep, until the day of resurrection.
Cemetery is a Greek word that signifies a space for resting, “a waiting room.” For Christians, joy is found in the fact that even death, the thing we fear most, and rightly so, has been overcome in our Lord and God Jesus’ Resurrection. He is our resurrection. The paschal liturgy trumpets over and over again:
Christ is risen from the dead, crushing death by his death and upon those in the tombs lavishing life.
It is a victory dance. The liturgy sings resurrection every Sunday of the year. Sunday is not one singular day, but a singular event of Christ. Sunday is his Resurrection, prelude of our own resurrection. We sing it in all the eight tones of the musical world.
I am a very happy Old Age person because I love and I am loved; consequently, I feel immortal. Storms and earthquakes can strike; I won’t fall. Sickness and sufferings can overflow and I won’t surrender. I will not bend. I love to be alive and to delight in breathing fresh air, and I love to see a human face. The human face opens to the radiance of the Face of Christ, my Lord and my God.
Old Age reflects security and joy. Joy and security will accumulate and will keep us awake and thankful. Old Age is not for sissies but for persons who can sit down and meditate. It waits patiently. It thinks and prays. It is a person who can withstand a rap and smile, even between tears.
Meditation will fill us with admiration and awe, not only for the makeup of our bodies, but also for every blade of grass, for sunshine, for rain and snow, for the twinkle of the stars and for human-divine communion.
Our assurance of security, of happiness is the word of God himself, Father-Son-Spirit saying,
I have loved you
With an everlasting love,
Therefore with loving kindness
Have I drawn you.
I am a husband to you,
Said the Lord (Jer 31: 3).
These words of God anchor the happiness of the Christian. Happiness is a state of permanent satisfaction in triumph, with peacefulness and security. I am a possessor of the greatest of all treasures in a “pot of clay,” as St. Paul calls our bodies.
We Old Age people are passengers in the train of life, looking out the rear, watching miles of life roll by and by. We sometimes surrender to sad remembrances of wasted days, of sins, of defeats and lost hope. We can sit analyzing, rationalizing, distributing blame to our failures in order to “accuse my brothers.” We can sit condemning others while it was our own impatience and abuse that were the cause of our ills.
I know a man of eighty-eight years Old Age. He is one of so many others around eighty and ninety. We all have shared the sweet and the sour of life, its glory and its shame. Our characteristics now are wisdom, tenderness, and joy.
At eighty-eight his body is all broken down. The real “he” is heart troubles, intestines all beat up, creating “bloating,” feet aching, head burning. He is tired; he cannot hide in a good sleep. He is beset with insomnia. He has lost one eye and his hearing. He is shut out of conversations. He cannot hear music. He stopped singing with his vibrant voice.
He cannot rest properly. The energy of his manhood has long gone. Now he cannot even walk without support. These are some of the ailments of the Old Age man I know. Others, lucky Old Age people, have no apparent ailments but we all have joy and more joy accumulating every day.
Every ailment is that bell tolling to announce that something new is in the making; something unbelievably more beautiful is soon to come— Resurrection! The resurrection is the reason for which our ailments can be carried in dignity.
Our Lord and God Jesus said, You will have pain but your pain will turn into joy (Jn 16:22).
And he says again, When a woman is in travail, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into this world (Jn 16:21).
Where there is no joy, Christianity becomes fear and therefore torture. The world is having fun; nevertheless, it is joyless. We have joy because of the Resurrection.
The wisdom of Old Age is also a perpetual reminder that God so loved human beings that he sent his Son to be one of us. God Trinity, Father-Son-Spirit, overflows to the outer sphere of his life throughout the universe. He is Creator; he is Master. He “dances” into existence the universe, earth and galaxies to proclaim that he is Love, Beauty, Goodness, and Generosity.
This is the source of the joy of every believer in God, our Lover-Father. Unfortunate are those who do not believe it. They have nothing to hang on to in this life. Joy will create a beautiful and tender smile. Old Age is all tenderness.
I love tenderly every human face that produces a smile and becomes the radiance of the Face of Christ our God. I have a strong heart which is fed by love. I shall go on smiling, singing in my heart, listening to my bells tolling, wishing to be able to dance, which my body now cannot do.
My soul is kept free to love and to sing and to dance with the prophet,
My soul shall rejoice in the Lord,
For he has clothed me with a robe of salvation, covered me with a
tunic of happiness. He has crowned me as a bridegroom
adorned me with jewels as a bride. (Is. 61:10)
I have a community, a family of young generations of men and women who are committed to serve and to love and to have the complete joy the Lord intended us to have; the joy of being free:
free to love in poverty,
free to love in chastity,
free to love in complete surrender to obedience.
Some other Old Age people have families of wife and children who also are in need of encouragement. They need stamina and a will to overcome the difficulties of life, to keep their joy whole. Old Age people are sowers of joy. Let us build others up with the good we have achieved and not destroy them with the stories of our failures.
Every one has his/her burden in life. The young and those who are not so young carry responsibilities as a heavy burden. We Old Age people have to lighten their burden with the radiance of our smile charged with tenderness and love. Tenderness and love are primary ingredients of breathing life.
Away with the doom and gloom and the miseries of age, small or heavy! Our Lord is enough security for our happiness and joy that makes us alive again, delighting in our joy that we belong to him.
As the Father has loved me, so, I have loved you. Abide now in my love (Jn 15:9).
Away with the back seat of my train of life. Old Age looks forward to what life holds and not what has been spent. We Christians want to be at the engine. I ask the Lord to strap me to the engine as securely as I can be. I want to be out in front, to see what is to come.
I want to feel the winds of change blowing in my face. I want to see what life unfolds, as I want to see what’s coming up, not looking at the past. Life is too short for yesterdays. It moves along too fast.
When the hour of departure is at hand, Old Age men and women feel ready to go. They fall quietly, gently, and softly downward. In this position, they feel more comfortable than they have ever been. They find themselves in the hand of their Maker, and their last whispers become surprisingly serene.
We are all living, we are all dying, all of us; we are sustained by grace and mercy and love. When we die, the universe hears our departure tone.
Free at last Free at last.
Thanks be to God Almighty
Free at last
But what happens to our body? The Church sings in the Liturgy of the Dead:
0 Lord my God, You have endowed me with two elements —
one visible and the other invisible.
You have formed my body from clay,
and breathed into me a soul from your divine breath.
When I consider death,
and when I think of those who are laid in the grave,
I wonder where is now that moving beauty
created in the likeness of God?
Where is the glorious form?
Where is the rich? Where is the poor?
Where is the sinner? Where is the just?
O, wonder: what happened
that we are now delivered up to corruption?
And how did death come into our life?
God alone by his will and command said:
“Thou art dust. Into the dust thou shalt return.”
That body that has been fully divinized by baptism and by a special, indeed very special, presence of God himself in the Eucharist — that body will be left to our family and friends. They will take good care of it: “Pot of clay” returns to clay.
The divinized matter of the body will disintegrate and the deliquescent flesh, divinized as it is, will become the sap of plants, to re-appear in a leaf or a flower or a tree. It will be transformed into new matter in the myriad, swarming creatures that make up the world’s diffuse subterranean palpitations and, at last, be absorbed in the glamor of the stars.
All the world will thus share in our divinization. There is no terror in becoming one with the fecund, unstoppable infusion of divinization of the universe. We commit ourselves to creation as a new life which will climb to the sun, to the stars, to all that God has done for the glorification of our humanity….
Old Age will be one at last in communion with Creator and creation!
Free at last!
Thanks be to God Almighty,
We are
Free at last!
And for evermore!
…………………………………
Born in Lebanon, Archbishop Raya, Metropolitan emeritus of Aka, Haifa, Nazareth and all Galilee, was our first associate priest and later a full-time member of Madonna House. He died in 2005.
