‘God Hasn’t Finished with Me Yet!’
Signposts
Last summer, I got lost in the mountains in Austria with two companions. It was towards evening, raining a bit, and the mountainside was getting treacherous; we had used up our food and water, and we were tired.
We had no idea where we were, except that we weren’t where we wanted to be. We sent up a stark prayer for help. When finally we found a signpost, we were shocked to be so far off-course. But while we still didn’t know where we were, at least we knew the path to take. I still see that reassuring signpost, a lonely sentinel on a wet and barren mountainside.
These articles on the spirituality of ageing are meant as signposts for what can be a lonely and confusing journey. They intend to offer you a focus. Even if you don’t find some of the ideas helpful, they may get you into discussion with someone else, and better ideas may emerge. Pick from these articles what suits you, as you do in a supermarket: watch ten shoppers choosing biscuits - not any packet on the overflowing shelf will do but just the right one for each. So choose what you find nourishing right now: grace comes tailor-made!
What Do You Want?
So, what do you want just now for this time in your life? Reflect on this for a few moments.
Remember the first disciples who came to Jesus: he asked them, ‘What do you want?’ If they had replied, ‘Nothing’ St John’s Gospel might never have been written. But they said, ‘Master, where do you live?’ (Jn.1:38) and that question, that desire for a signpost, changed their lives.
The Lord speaks your name and asks you now, ‘What do you want?’ Chat with him about what you want; even if you have to admit you don’t know, that’s a start. He can take up the running at that point.
The main thing is for you and Jesus to be talking to one another!
Make your spirituality personal and vibrant. Spirituality is all about God and yourself. It is about the way you live out your relationship with God. Your spirituality of ageing is unique to you. It is your privilege to work out how you can relate with God in the changing reality of your later years. These articles offer some raw materials that I have found helpful for myself, but it’s up to you to create your masterpiece!
You’re Unique!
You may perhaps know much more about ageing than I. I am seventy-two, and if I live a few years more, I will know more about what I’m talking about now, but by then I may not be able to write, so I’m putting my cards on the table and saying that this is how I see things now.
It is impossible for me to write about ageing as if ‘one size fits all’. The age groups ahead of me are the fastest growing of all age groups in the world, and every person within them is marvellously unique and different. If every baby is different, each older person is much more so, because their life history has shaped them uniquely. Ageing means different things to different people, and every person will experience the ageing process in differing ways.
So if the first article in this series was an encouragement to trust God, this one invites you to trust yourself too! Respect your uniqueness as an ageing person, develop a sense of wonder that you are becoming more and more yourself; you are mellowing in a way that is different to anyone else, just as I am. Don’t let ageing just happen to you: shape it, create it, mould it, put your personal stamp on it! Let you and the Lord work together in your senior years.
I attended a seminar on ageing many years ago – the intention was that I would set up facilities for elderly Jesuits. However, all the other participants were ‘senior citizens’ attending because they hoped to pick up some tips for themselves.
The speaker was an army officer: broad-shouldered, healthy, strong, he had a regular TV slot in which he demonstrated keep-fit exercises. He hadn’t checked out his seminar group, so he spoke eloquently about jogging, golfing, swimming and so forth.
When it was all over I asked a nun beside me how she found his presentation. ‘Oh Father, isn’t he wonderful! He could kill you with one blow!’ Doubtless he could, but that fact hardly nourished her spirituality of ageing. So again I emphasise: pick and choose from these pages what helps you to grow old gracefully.
I’m a Work of Art!
In Genesis God is portrayed as addressing his divine council and proposing calmly: ‘Let’s make human beings in our own image’ (Gen. 1:26-27). And so God does.
St Paul picks up on this: we are, he says, God’s work of art, God’s handiwork, indeed God’s masterpiece (see Eph. 2:10). But this ‘making’ doesn’t happen to us all at once. We’re not like static works of art, rather we’re in process.
You are meant to be becoming more the image of God as you age. You may say, ‘I’m no work of art. Look at me – I’m a mess.’ You may feel awful, inside and out, but the master crafter is still busy about you. What you can’t do yourself, God is doing in you, now. Creation is going on today, it is not something over and done with.
The world is a studio, and the Artist is busy about all his works of art. You may feel forgotten and therefore miserable, or you may be glad that the chisel and hammer haven’t been used on you for a while, though you know that the Artist will be back to perfect his work. You may feel like a piece of pottery in the kiln that is beginning to crack up. You may be catching on to what the Artist is about, and you just hope you’re not spoiling things and getting in the way. You may be envious of other works of art in the studio: you can perhaps see in them something they can’t see.
Let your imagination play on this image of the world as a studio, with God unhurriedly working away, creating you as his work of art today and tomorrow and the next day, till it’s complete – the piece done by the master, whose beauty and elegance he acknowledges by signing it with his own name.
Finished!
In Christian understanding each of us is completed as a work of art not on our birth-day, but on our death-day; in the emptiness of our dying God adds the final creative touch which completes us. A non-believer attending someone who has just died can say, ‘He’s finished!’ or ‘She didn’t make it!’ A believer will say instead: ‘God has just completed his work!’
Death then is not a total dissolution but rather the final stitch which completes a pullover or a tapestry, or the last dab of paint that makes a great portrait.
I stood early one morning in a town in Pakistan outside a dim and smelly shed while I waited for the local bank to open. To my amazement, out of the dark shed were brought beautiful wooden sculptures, shining in the morning sun. Was this a hint of what is going on in the world – that despite all the chaos of human lives, something beautiful for God is being crafted out of every life? Is human history a chaotic array of raw materials, out of which the beauty and richness of God’s images are drawn, each of them revealing something of the genius of the divine artist?
Conversation with the Lord
Sit quietly in your favourite place with another chair opposite you. Imagine the Lord knocking and coming in. He embraces you and then sits down with a loving smile.
You are happily surprised at how interested he is in you. But why shouldn’t he be? After all you are in a real and mysterious way the image of his Father! Ignatius suggests that at the beginning of a conversation with the Lord, we might ask: ‘How do you see me now?’ Jesus will always reply: ‘You are my beloved!’ And of course he will call you by your name (Is. 43:1).
You can chat about what you have just read, and the time passes easily…