Being Old

Recently I helped move my wife’s grandma into her new assisted living facility. It is a nice place, and the folks who live there seem to be pretty satisfied with it. It got me thinking though. I suppose, barring some unforeseen circumstance, I will be old someday. How do I want to do it?

I have written before about how old people seem to me to be more than young people. Young people seem like blank slates, older people seem like they have become something, or are on the verge of becoming something. The awesome old people that I have known have been ten times more awesome than any young person I have ever met. I end up coming away from them with an impression of almost unbelievable power.

That is such a lame way of putting it. I feel like a level 20 warrior encountering a level 90 mage. I feel like a white belt meeting a grandmaster. I feel like a sapling in the shadow of an ancient oak tree. This isn’t physical strength, obviously. It may be my imagination, but I feel as if the physical weakness and the tremors, the big ears and wrinkled skin, were just a husk or a shell, like an egg, and a mighty mythical creature was hatching before my eyes. Or maybe they are just a disguise, given to a special operator in denied enemy territory. Or perhaps the shriveled body casts a shadow more massive than I am myself.

They are warriors. Old people at their finest are among the most powerful warriors in the spiritual warfare. A life spent in prayer, self-sacrifice, learning or serving or any one of a million worthy pursuits is going to craft a hero. Their bodies shiver and fade and waste away while their souls rock the spiritual realm, just on the other side of the curtain, and demons gibber and shriek and shrink away. I see all of this quite clearly, without being able to see it, if you understand? Just as I see the table in front of me, and yet know it to be composed of mostly empty space. I can see the relationships and interactions between molecules in my mind, while seeing the table with my eyes.  Old people are real power, even, or perhaps especially at their weakest.

I feel like we waste that power in America. It is not surprising. For one thing it is a natural result of the fact that we have no concept that we are even in a spiritual warfare. A fight for eternal life or eternal death rages all around us on every side and we yawn and change the channel. Of course if we are not on a battlefield, why should we care that we are keeping our greatest fighters on the sidelines, isolated from all the novices and newbies?

I think part of it came about because of the concept of retirement in America. Somewhere along the line we came up with the notion that a person should be able to work for a certain number of years and then be done working and be able to relax and enjoy themselves for the rest of their lives. A few rich people did it, and then a few more, then it became part of the American dream, and now virtually every American considers it an inalienable right, up there with life, liberty, etc. There is a provincialism in this view which ignores or overlooks the fact that throughout the whole of human history this concept was an unreality.

It reminds me of the parable in Luke 12:13-21. The rich fool laid up treasure for himself and decided

he was going to sit back and live the good life for many years. Little did he know that his soul was required of him that night.

I only know one person in my family who ever retired, and that was my mom’s dad. I asked him about it once, and his advice to me about retiring was: “Don’t.” He advised me to find a good job that I loved doing and keep doing it as long as I could.

I do not mean that retiring is bad. It can be a very good thing. There are two specific issues that I think we ought to avoid though. The first is thinking of retirement as a right. It is not. Nothing that has been denied to almost every human being that has ever lived, and is patently unnecessary for the living of a happy, holy life, can possibly be considered a right. It is a privilege and a gift if it happens, and if it doesn’t (as our current economic trends might bring about) we have no reason to feel ill used. Secondly, retirement should not be about entertainment.

I remember a Sunday Mass on June 6th a few years back. It was the commemoration of the D-Day invasion of Normandy, and since this parish was right outside Fort Bragg it boasted four parishioners who had jumped into Normandy on June 6 1944. One was an old Sergeant Major who, when his name and rank were called, stepped out of his pew, came to attention, and double-timed it to the front of the church. A lady a little to the right and ahead of me distinctly said, “Awwwwww! They are so cute!”

To my recollection that was the only time in my life when I have wanted to climb over a pew and slap a woman in church.

I hate it when people talk in condescending, exasperated “baby-talk” to old people. I hate it when people dismiss them. I can imagine when I am old and stooped and likely fat, and some young nurse says to me, “Now don’t you worry about that, you’ve done enough in your life, why don’t you just relax and let us take care of everything?” I will probably see red and blow up on her: “Look here, you young whipper-snapper!”

It takes a long time to develop a great fighter. The level of closeness and intimacy with God which makes a real hero of the spiritual warfare is ordinarily only developed after many years of failure. To me it seems that our culture says to people who ought to have reached that level, “Well isn’t that nice, you made it to retirement! That’s cute. Now go amuse yourself with RVing or reality TV or bingo or something until you become senile and die. We’ll try to visit you sometime.” Madness! Just at the time when, for most of us, we have finally become wise enough and patient enough to begin the real work of prayer and teaching, we are suddenly irrelevant?

No! If retirement happens it is not an opportunity to veg out for the rest of my life. It is a God given opportunity to get to work on things that really matter, things I didn’t have time for before because I was busy earning my bread in the sweat of my brow. You expect me to spend 65 years building myself with prayer, study, work, self-discipline and self-sacrifice and then be thrilled that now I can finally watch “The Price is Right” all day without interruption? Insulting!

Does not one of our poets say:

“Old age hath yet his honour and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.”
Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson.

And another:

“Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion”
East Coker, T. S. Eliot.

So I have become determined to be awesome when I am old, which starts by living as fully as I can now. I have also become determined to enable old people to be awesome, as they ought to be, by respecting them, first and foremost. No condescension, no baby talk, just straightforward talk. I will ask for their opinions and listen and weigh them carefully. I will not dismiss them because they “don’t understand what the modern world is like.”

Most of all, though, I will ask them to pray for me. I have always felt that the prayers of children and old people are especially powerful. I want them to know that I know that they are still valuable, still powerful, still contributing to the victory of the kingdom, far more now than in their younger and stronger days. I want them to be able to find meaning in their weakness, so I will ask them to offer them up for me.

After all, it would be a pity to see all that raw spiritual power going to waste. God knows I need it.