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Are you dying gracefully? Hold on a minute. This article is not about physical dying or even about aging in the usual sense. It is a reflection on the art of letting go so as to live life more fully.
So, yes, it may have something to say about dying or even about aging gracefully. Strange, isn’t it, that the art of dying and skill in living are intimately connected.
Death to self is a whole way of life, which, paradoxically, ends up not so much being about dying as about living. Unless I die to my various strands of selfishness, I won’t really be alive to the things of God in this life.
Catherine Doherty taught me that one evening out at Cana Colony, our summer vacation/retreat camp for families.
It was 1981; I was a new priest, and this was my first time at Cana as “the” priest for the week. She said to me, “I will show you how to speak to families.”
Naturally, the families present were delighted, ecstatic, and over the top that Catherine, now 85 and not in the best of shape physically, was once again coming out to Cana. We arrived and sat down with the parents in one of the cook shacks.
The kids were playing outside or eavesdropping nearby. Then Catherine started to speak:
“Prepare your children for the catacombs!” Somehow, I knew that I wasn’t ready yet to speak quite that way. But the couples loved every minute of it; there was no apparent age-gap problem, no generation gap, vocabulary gap, world-view gap or any other gap.
There was instant and lasting communion of minds and hearts, and soon we were on our way back to Madonna House. On the way there (a distance of about 3 ½ miles {7 km}), I mentioned to Catherine how challenging the Gospel is when one reads, say, the Sermon on the Mount. It seemed impossible to live, overwhelming to think of.
Her response was immediate: “No! No! No! You’re going about it the wrong way. All we ever have to do is the duty of the moment. Whatever God asks at this moment, that is what I focus on … and no more.
“For now, it’s answering your question that I focus on. In a few minutes I’ll be at the library where the librarian is asking for clarification of a number of issues related to the library.
“Once you are settled as to questions, I’d like you to notice the beautiful red sunset over Lake Kamaniskeg to our left. To the right is the Coulas’ house; I delivered one of their babies long ago when they lived up at Marian Meadows. So many memories.
“So you see, Father, the Gospel is always possible if we pray and stick to the gift each moment is. So simple!”
I realized I needed to die to anxiety about what God might ask of me and to my lack of faith that he would be there to help me when the moment comes. All through life that’s the way it goes: only by dying does life open its beautiful mystery to us.
When it comes to aging, however, part of that “beautiful mystery” involves what aging takes away.
What will I lose, we wonder? My health? My ability to speak, to walk, to run, to drive a car? My beautiful hair? My singing voice? My ability to work? To play an instrument?
To remember where I put my glasses, my wallet, my car keys, my grandson? Will I, God forbid, lose my mind? My emotional stability? My hearing? My sight? My independence? The list goes on and on.
What is so beautiful about any of this? What is so mysteriously wondrous? Who wants to even think about it, ahead of time or on time?
What comes to mind is another story about Catherine and me, this time when I was very young in the vocation (age 25 or so) and had been the community cheese-maker for about 3 years.
In a word, I was fed up with cheese-making and all that went with it. I was longing to resume studies in a seminary and become a priest for the community.
Even looking back from this vast distance, 40+ years later, I would say that it wasn’t only ambition that was moving in me, but a genuine growth in the Spirit towards the priestly vocation in Madonna House.
But there was also some human ambition at play as well. In any event, I wrote Catherine about my plight since I believed in “going to the top” when it comes to important questions in community life!
Her response was a handwritten note on a card with the following quotation:
“Life’s purpose is to purify us, not to gratify us.”
And then came her own handwritten message:
“Peace and charity. He who desires to follow the Desired One must steep himself in little things, like planing a board well, like spending hours to make a rocking chair or a table.
“For 30 long years, so they said, that’s all he did, except in childhood he just gathered up what Joseph did not need. Yes, for 30 years, they said, he just was a Galilean carpenter … Consider who he was … and keep singing, dancing, that you, too, can do tiny, small things. Love, Catherine.”
What does a poem written to a 25-year-old by someone well on in years have to do with aging? Well, everything. Catherine, in a very gentle way, was trying to teach me that I had yet to appreciate enough the kenosis (emptying) of the Eternal Son of God in his incarnation. She was implying that I would receive from the One who is meek and humble of heart a communion with him in that kenosis.
She confirmed that in a letter she wrote to me when I did become a seminarian some time later:
“You are wrapped up in a mystery. There is no trying to figure it out. Don’t! Just let yourself float into the sea of poverty, and the Lord will tell you, slowly, where you are going …
“It is so very simple, David. You simply are living the life of Jesus Christ, which is slowly enveloping you in a bigger way … In the meantime, you have to let go in a way that is incomprehensible but constant. Check your bed; check your food; check into the light of the Lord.”
Yes, throughout our lives that ‘letting go’ is constant, particularly as one experiences the effects of real aging, no matter one’s chronological age.
Hopefully, by then we will have begun to realize that each “letting go” is also meant to be a “letting in” at ever deeper levels, the humble Christ. He seeks to live in us ever more fully, even as earthly life diminishes, till I live, not I, but Christ lives in me (Galatians 2:20).
The End
