Christian Life

As we journey through a pastoral series under the questioning cry ‘Doesn’t anyone care?’ I want to stop by a major theme – that of the challenge of getting older.  This experience, which we all face, can be very isolating and lonely.  Many people say ‘Life begins at forty!’ - but I recall being invited to a ‘fortieth’ and knew the person was struggling with the milestone.  The person was surrounded by ridiculous cards – and all the badges attached to cards which died away after our tenth birthday, now reappear when we reach the age of forty!  The fortieth candle was the most difficult to blow out!

Today we are living so much longer and the milestones have shifted.  Recently, I heard a person in their fifties talking about approaching middle age.  I believe they were well and truly in that stable! 

I am sure we are taking a much more positive view of getting older – and many are starting to see this as positive, rather than something to be avoided at all costs.  There are at least two reasons why this is good: 

• There is an appropriate joy and significance that comes to us at each stage of life.
  
• There is no way of avoiding the process – even if the pharmacists and beauticians teach us ways of at least making it appear so!

Once again I turn to a psalm for inspiration on this important pastoral subject – Psalm 103:

“Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits – who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.”  (Ps. 103: 2-5)

The psalms have an amazing capacity to say just the right thing about a specific issue at a given point in time.  For the psalmist this is deeply personal.  It is generally considered that this psalm is a hymn to be sung in public worship, not by the choir or equivalent or the congregation as a whole, but by an individual.  Leslie, in his commentary, notes:  “It is one of the deepest spiritual utterances of individual piety in the psalms and moves in a religious atmosphere that is closely akin to the spirit of the New Testament.”

The psalm begins with a deeply personal summons to praise (v.1) and the terminology of ‘Bless the Lord’ in this context means to ‘adore with bended knees’ – and the subject of his heart is the gracious dealings of God which can be too easily forgotten (v.2).  He then recalls the ways God has blessed his life (v.v. 3-5).  In ever-widening concentric circles, he talks about Israel (v.v. 6-14) and humanity’s frailty in general (v.v. 15-18).  The psalm concludes with a still vaster grasp of the heavens and the earth (v.v. 19-22).

Psalm 103 is a high moment in the Book of Psalms which points to the mercy of God – and how he can renew our life in a deep and profound way.

As we get older, it is important to discover what is happening within ourselves.  I recall some words of an old professor who said the challenge is to face ‘the young and old within oneself’.  To blind yourself to one part at the expense of the other is to damage your own wellbeing.  To deny age can make us ‘the oldest teenager in town’, living in an unreal world, and to deny the other is to get old before our time.

The words of the psalmist, in using the illustration of the eagle, seem to resonate with the words of Isaiah:  “Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength.  They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”  (Isaiah 40: 30-31)

Let me offer some practical thoughts about how we can cope with the fact we are getting older:

We must learn how to make peace with the past 

The overriding theme of the psalm is the ‘mercy of God’, which is a factor in dealing with the past.  When you view Psalm 103 as a whole, you recognise that God is worthy of our praise because he forgives, provides mercy, is gracious and his love is everlasting.  All these aspects help us to make peace with the past.  You may wish to explore what this means for you.

The affirmations in the psalm all point to the ways in which we can see God at work within our lives and how he can help us retrace our past with both gratitude and purpose.  This may mean:

• thanking God for those who have helped us on our journey.
  
• forgiving those who have hurt us on our journey.
  
• coming to terms with our own failures on the journey.
  
• receiving God’s ultimate healing and forgiveness into our own memory of the past.

The thought of ‘renewing our youth’ does not mean that we are to believe we will be like ‘perpetual teenagers’.  Is there anything more embarrassing than the sight or sound of someone who refuses to leave the past?

‘Making peace’ with the past is a deep thought.  If given the time and the right context, there are few of us who cannot see the relevance of such a statement.  Things said and done … and destructive or negative experiences … need to be carefully re-visited and left for good!

One of the current issues that we here in Australia need to face is that this ‘young, lucky country’ has an ageing population.  It is important that we talk about it because refusing to do so is the first step to making people feel they are rejected and a problem to society.  It is a short journey to the acidic comment, “There are too many hospital beds taken up by the old,” or “They are a drain on the rest of us”.

P D James’ novel “The Children of Men” is in two parts, “Omega” and “Alpha”; the End, the Beginning.  You may argue it’s the wrong way round.  I do not disclose the plot of the book if I say that it is about an ending and a beginning.  Life is about endings and beginnings.

C Day Lewis, after watching his son play his first game of football, saw him walk away with the other boys, and he wrote a poem called, “Walking Away”.  The final verse sums up his pain:

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still.  Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away;
And love is proved in the letting go.

We help each other to make peace with the past by listening to each other’s stories.  Sometimes we believe it is important to record our stories and not just those of the famous and what the world calls ‘successful’.  It is only by being willing to recall painful experiences or re-visit memories that still trouble us can we begin to handle the past creatively.

Oscar Wilde in the brilliant “The Importance of Being Earnest” says, “Thirty-five is a very attractive age, London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.”

Not all the world centres on our generation. There’s a lovely story of a tourist who said to one of the monks guiding them around the ancient Tintern Abbey, “It’s a pity that you built it too near the main road!”

The psalmist has struck a rich vein in linking forgiveness of sin, inner-healing, redemption in the deep places, with love, compassion and the renewal of life, bringing satisfaction, joy and purpose.

Be content with now and at home with yourself 

Mid-life can bring panic with it.  It was Thomas Merton, the Christian monk, who wrote these words, “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going, I do not see the road ahead of me, I cannot know for certain where it will end.  Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.”  All of this can sound very depressing; except he concludes: “I will not fear if you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”

As we face getting older, it is not a time to become despondent about all the things we ought to have achieved but did not.  It is a time to become who we are.  This process of aging should not mean we are concerned to prove whether we ‘can or cannot’ on any particular issue – for life is much more about who we are.  There is an appropriate grace for every stage of life and mid-life is no different.  We need to be the person that God is calling us to be in Jesus Christ.

Just consider your life for a moment; one of the ways you can feel renewed and strengthened in the way the psalmist reminds us is to be at home with ourselves and to rest secure in the confidence of faith.  Just ask yourself – Have you been blessed?  Have you achieved anything?  What are your strengths and weaknesses?  Your ultimate calling is to hand these things to God and look to the future with a sense of God being with you.  Christian self-identity is nowhere better described than in Psalm 8, where there is the exploration of the purpose of a human being.

One aspect of life that is hard to handle is when we are continually dissatisfied and reaching out for something better which ever eludes us!  This is where the word ‘content’ has a quite specific relevance.  Contentment is most often disturbed when we look at others and feel somehow that we have failed – and they have ‘achieved’ more than we.  I am certain some of the most discontented and dissatisfied people in life are those who have been given opportunity, status and standing.  An unhealthy drive for success is often germinating in the person whose life is not ‘content’.

It is probably true, as we reach midlife, we begin to realise that we are not going to break world records, paint Mona Lisas or become the absolute top of our tree.  We can either live with this or become insufferable!

What about the lesson to be learnt from a trip for your morning newspaper … Have you noticed how the distance to the newsagent’s shop is further as you get older? – and what’s more they seem to have put a hill in there that wasn’t there a few years ago.  What’s even more difficult is that the newsagents themselves don’t speak as clearly as they used to … and, when you get the paper, the newsprint is so much smaller!

Is the simple answer to give yourself more time, a hearing aid and even spectacles.  I can remember my first visit to the optometrist – and them saying to me, ‘I think you might need glasses.  It often happens to people of your age.’  (I was but 43!)

How we journey through life can be characterised by a comment found in The New Statesman:  “Definition:  I am a traveller, you are a tourist, they are trippers.”  We travel on a journey through life and are always in part tourists, visiting, observing and learning and we are never too old to learn.

An American visitor to a European stately home came across a sundial.  Her companion explained that the sun caused a shadow to be cast from a metal blade across a slab, enabling people to work out the time.  Her response was, “Whatever will they think of next?”

Be open to what God wants to do with the rest of your life 

When people talk about a mid-life crisis they are often referring to physical and emotional changes, both large and small.  But there can be faith changes too.  Many people have found that while they are being challenged in a physical sense, God enables them to recommit their life in a new and quite wonderful way.

Carol Ann Morrow was a sister of the church for 23 years and she wrote, “When I was in the throes of mid-life, I had a dream.  I was in a dark and foggy cemetery, a place of sadness.  Someone familiar to me had been buried there and I had come to mourn.  A large stone, strangely out of place, jolted my alertness.  My soul saw that it was a stone that had weighed heavily on me for years:  a rock of guilt, of rules and controls, of heavy expectations.  Who had been strong enough to dislodge such a heavy weight?” 

She talks about lingering there for some time, before concluding, “… I turned from the disorder and the darkness; I felt like skipping and running to tell someone – as though this were indeed good news – that the stone had been removed!”

Her dream is real for her, but for all of us the stone is moved from the tomb of Jesus and his risen presence can be the beginning of a whole new way of looking at life.  You can be renewed at different stages of life.  Perhaps you are ready, in some new way, to come to terms with what God wants to do with the rest of your life.

One school memory I carry with me are the poems of Robert Browning.  In his immortal ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’ he writes:

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made;
Our times are in his hand
Who saith ‘A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid.’

Does God want to do something fresh with your life at this time?  The biggest frustration is when we hold onto what we have always done.  A new beginning is possible through Jesus Christ at any point of life.  In the same psalm – in verses 15 and 16 – we read what may feel like the most depressing of verses, often read at a funeral service.  In point of fact, the sentiments have to be read against the context of God’s timeless grace.

In the same sense that it comes as a wonderful surprise and blessing to know we can receive from people whose physical abilities are limited and whose years are great, so it should encourage us with the thought that we may always be able to bring blessing, however great our years.

Fred Pratt Green lived until he was 97 and was a prolific hymn writer.  In his final years as a Methodist minister and preacher, he lived in a Methodist Home for the Aged.  He penned a book of poems called “The Last Lap” in his early years at Cromwell House and, in the introduction, he wrote, “When we had to move out of our own home and seek security in a Methodist Home for the Aged, I had already decided that my writing days were over … as soon as I settled into this community of old people, with its deserved reputation for caring, with its variety of personalities, sharpened rather than blunted by old age … I began to feel the urge to write which I thought I had lost for ever.”

His poem “The Paradox of Age” is powerful:

The average age here is eighty-seven;
I am in my eighty-eighth year.
The paradox of age fascinates me.
For the purpose of this discussion
We can be divided into three groups:
The Seventies, the Eighties, the Nineties.

The Seventies, relatively, are young,
They should be our eager activists;
The Eighties, mature and experienced,
The leaders of our community;
The Nineties, in feebleness extreme,
The chief objects of our compassion.

Of course, it is not like this at all!
The Nineties are quite resilient;
Our oldest inhabitant, at ninety-nine,
Walks round the garden without a frame;
Our best speech-maker is ninety-five.
Age, here, has little significance.
                                                      
Mozart was a mature musician
At fifteen, or earlier, Hardy
Wrote his best poetry in old age.
Today, remarkably, I feel younger
In some ways, than in adolescence.
Tomorrow, I may need a wheelchair.

If our youth is to be renewed like that of the eagle, it will not be by returning to the past, but by realising his present grace today!

One of the most wonderful passages in scripture is found in Luke’s gospel when Mary and Joseph take the child Jesus to the Temple to be offered to God, eight days after he was born, in accordance with Jewish law.  At the heart of Israel’s faith and national identity, this new King comes in vulnerability, incognito, unrecognised except by two faithful, senior people, Simeon and Anna (Luke 2: 25 and 36). 

Simeon was old and devout and was awaiting the deliverance of God’s people.  Twice Luke tells us this man is inspired by the Holy Spirit (v.v. 25 and 27).  He takes the child in his arms and praises God … and declares that the child will be the salvation of Israel (v.30).  Simeon also tells us that what is happening is for the Gentiles as well as for Israel.  It is no wonder that Mary and Joseph are amazed (v.33).  The significance of Anna (v.v. 36-38) is that she is a woman whose credentials would not be taken seriously in a court – but, great in age and devout in spirit, she witnesses to Jesus Christ.

At the coming of the Saviour, God chose not only the wise and the shepherds, but also two of God’s saints to witness his gift of love to the world.  The Song of Simeon can be traced back to as early as the fifth century as a part of Christian liturgy:  “Lord, now let your servant depart in peace.”  This is the gift that unites all people.