Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.--Mt. 16:25 (NAB)
January is my busiest month of the year at work, and it shows in the fact that it's been over a month since I last posted to this blog! Although I stuck to my resolution not to work on Sundays, I was working such long hours the rest of the week that other things that I hadn't gotten to often got pushed to Sunday. And then last Sunday, Feb. 1, with the last of the Jan. 31 deadlines met, I just crashed. After coming back from Adoration shortly after 1 p.m., I napped for 3 and a half hours--and had absolutely no trouble getting to sleep that night!
I've also fallen way behind on weeding. I did manage to get a few bags of books and trinkets off to the St. Vincent de Paul store today, but I've got a whole lot more weeding ahead of me. Please say a prayer that I can accomplish everything the Lord wants me to accomplish in His timeframe, by His power, and in His peace.
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When I was studying gerontology, one of the authors that I read said that the main "task" of the aging is to deal with loss--loss of career, loss of friends, loss of health, loss of home, and finally, loss of life itself. In this author's opinion, how successfully an elderly person dealt with aging was really a function of how successfully he/she was able to deal with loss.
I think that there's a lot to be said for that theory, but with one important difference. For a Christian, that's actually the major task of all of life in this world, not just the last stage. "Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it." (Mt. 16:25; see also Mk. 8:35 and Lk. 9:24)
How does a person, elderly or otherwise, successfully deal with this great task of losing all to find the One who is All? I don't pretend to be an expert by any stretch of the imagination--my own life has been a giant hot fudge sundae compared to many people I know--but I offer a thought or two for you to take to prayer.
I think one important factor is where our personal identities lie. To the extent that we take our identities in anything tied to this world--careers, possessions, friends, health, life itself--we will struggle when it's time to give those things up. We need to plead for the grace to take our identity only in our relationship with the One who is both with us in this world and will be with us in the next, the Lord of both the living and the dead, Jesus Christ. If we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, as the author of Hebrews exhorts us to do (Heb. 12:1-2), we will find ourselves able by His Spirit to do as He did: "For the sake of the joy that lay before Him He endured the cross, despising its shame..."
Many, many years ago when I was a drama major (over half a lifetime ago now!), we studied two plays by Eugene Ionesco, a major playwright in the "Theatre of the Absurd" movement, in which the characters approach the issue of death in different ways. In Exit the King, the once-powerful King is being confronted with the reality that his kingdom is crumbling around him and his death is imminent. While his second wife tries to sympathetically keep him in denial, his first wife tries to get him to face facts, telling him, "You should have been preparing for this moment all your life." As more and more of even the immediate surroundings start fading away, the King is left on his throne with just his first wife trying to help him get ready. Then she, too, disappears, and the King is left sitting mute on his throne until he finally fades into the gray mists.
Contrast this with an earlier play, Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It. In this play, Amédée and his wife are in their apartment discussing a corpse in the other room. It isn't clear how the corpse got there, but it is growing and causing mushrooms to sprout all over the walls of the apartment, so it can no longer be ignored. After a lengthy discussion, Amédée decides he will have to "take the bull by the horns," so to speak: he's going to drag the corpse from the apartment and dump it into the river. Once he gets it outside, though, he gets tangled up in the legs, at which point the corpse, like a giant parachute, floats away, taking Amédée with it. His wife shouts after him that all the mushrooms in the apartment have bloomed into flowers, and fireworks go off in the sky as he departs.
Ionesco is not writing from a Christian worldview, by any stretch of the imagination. (It is interesting, though, that the name of the character who stops denying death, confronts it, and leaves, in a sense, in triumph is Amédée, the French version of the name Amadeus, which means "lover of God" or "beloved of God.") Yet even a secular playwright can perceive on a natural level that there are different ways of dealing with the issue of death, one of which is more positive than the other.
How much more should this be true for Christians, who can proclaim with St. Paul, "Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." (I Cor. 15:55-57)
Dear Lord, apart from You, we can do nothing, least of all deal with loss and death. But with You and in You, nothing is impossible. Please give us the grace to let go of all, even life itself, in order to embrace You who are Life Eternal. By Your grace, power and love, may we witness to the world the joy and freedom that comes from knowing, loving and serving You, the Lord of the living and the dead. We ask this of the Father by the power of the Spirit in Your most precious name, dear Jesus. Amen.
