Tuesday, February 25, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Bookshelves
Both in Austin and in Urbana our bookshelves are full. Cookbooks, like the Nero Wolfe Cookbook and The American Diner Cookbook. Autobiographies, like Report to Greco by Nikos Kazantzakis, A View from the Ridge by Morris West, The Milagro Bean War by John Nichols, which my friend George gave me three years ago.
And there are books I’ve been keeping, waiting to share with Miles and Jasper. Three volumes from my own childhood 70 years ago – The Family Treasury of Children’s Stories, and eight volumes of The Magic Bicycle by John Bibee. Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, The Cooper Family Adventures.
Those are some of the books I can’t get to except with a ladder, books stored on the top shelf of a Borders bookcase bought two decades ago when their store closed in Champaign. When I move back and forth from Texas to Illinois, seeing those books (and so many others) settles me right into home. And my mind yearns for more and more time to read, read, read!
Whenever I open a book like this, my heart opens too. I feel excited and ready to travel, imagine, understand (or fail to understand), create. Words in my inherited English language slip around like benevolent insects, whispering, crawling, investing themselves in me. I am captured daily, in a good way, a very good way.
At the big Vineyard Church down the street on Sunday, I shared in the welcoming salvo of their annual “More Love, More Power” conference, which will begin tomorrow. We watched clips of conferences from the past twelve years, sang “Worthy is the Lamb” and “Power in the Blood,” and shared Jesus’ body and blood. Lights flashed. Guitars, drums, keyboard and above all sweet fervent singing rushed through my ears, an electric flood.
Much of this astounding input gains power as I grow older, a snowball gathering shape as it rolls downhill, a growing avalanche of electric sensations and ideas and hopes and dreams.
Chaos and disaster have their own attractions, too. I remember my precarious position during last week’s winter storm, cozy and warm in my car, aware always that the seemingly solid Prius was only a thin protection against freezing rain, icy temperatures and silent, scary, gathering snow. My Toyota could fail, as had so many other cars and semi-trucks that I passed in the dark, having fallen off the road into the inscrutable ditch. My car seemed stable … it was stable, for the moment.
For the time being.
Like all of us … like me … Ron Rolheiser has been getting older. He will have more cancer treatment this spring. He continues to write, and read. Undoubtedly he is often overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of life. He plans a conference near St. Louis for this June, as he has each year for at least a couple decades. He learns from a Greek monk-dancer-lover-writer, who spoke beautifully about his own life in all his novels, including Zorba the Greek. And he shares some of what he sees with us:
As a young man, Nikos Kazantzakis once sought spiritual guidance from a renowned master, an old monk named Father Makarios. In his autobiography, he describes a conversation he had with the old monk:
“Do you still wrestle with the devil, Father Makarios?” I asked him. “Not any longer, my child. I have grown old now, and he has grown old with me. He doesn’t have the strength. … I wrestle with God.” “With God!” I exclaimed in astonishment. “And you hope to win?” “I hope to lose, my child. My bones remain with me still, and they continue to resist.” (Report to Greco, p.222)
Fr. Ron finds himself fascinated.
As we grow older, what, in our bones, continues to resist God? How is it that we switch from wrestling with the devil to struggling with God?
Don’t we expect to become peaceful as we age, patient and accepting of suffering and struggle and failure, giving God “the glory?” Of course that is one side of things. But is there another side? What about it?
We wrestle with the devil when we struggle with the weaknesses of youth, but we wrestle with God when we struggle with the angers and resentments of aging. The latter is the struggle to move beyond the death of our dreams, beyond how we have been wounded and cheated and all the resentments that come with that, so as to feel instead inside of us the compassion of God. That is the final task of the spiritual life, the movement from resentment to gratitude, from cursing to blessing, from bitterness to graciousness. And it is a monumental task.
Maturity is a fine word, describing much that, like a fine wine, ages well. But Rolheiser knows that inside himself not all is “fine.” Not in me. Not even in priests and pastors.
There is a lot of anger in us as we get older. Psychology tells us that we get our wounds early on in life, but our angers emerge later. When we are young our energy and our dreams are still strong enough to shield us from the full brunt of our wounds, our hurts, and life’s unfairness. I remember, as a young man of twenty, living in a seminary with nearly 50 young men my own age. We were all pretty immature, but strangely we lived together pretty well. Today, if you would put those 50 persons together again in the same living situation we would, soon enough, I suspect, kill each other. We are more mature now… but also full of the angers, disappointments, and resentments of mid-life. Like the older brother of the prodigal son, we are now acutely aware that someone less deserving than ourselves gets to dance and eat the fatted calf.
Rolheiser sees clearly that this is how things need to be, if we can just choose to look clearly at all sides of the lives we’ve lived. God is with us, not against us, but God doesn’t much care about our comfort. Certainly not compared to how he cares about our confession, our honesty, our ability to see ourselves through his eyes. This is a …
… critical new moment in the spiritual life. As we age and become ever more aware of our wounds, our wasted potential, and the unfairness of life, we come face to face with the final spiritual hurdle, the challenge to become mellow and gracious in spirit. The spiritual task of midlife and old age is that of wrestling with God, namely, of standing inside all of the ways in which life has disappointed and betrayed us and, in spite of that, there, understand what God means with the words: “My child, everything I have is yours, and now we must be happy!”
I am grateful for Fr. Rolheiser’s skill at sharing this balanced look toward the psychology of getting old. Impatience, frustration and anger flow in the same stream as peace, acceptance and contentment. Opposites attract, as they always have, now and forever. God gives us, his co-creators, the chance to behold what He has made, and rejoice.
(Sirach 2, Psalm 37, Galatians 6, Mark 9)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
 For the next three days I’ll be traveling from Urbana to Austin, Texas (weather and God permitting). So on Wed, Thu and Fri, February 26-28, I will post devotions from the same days in 2022. I don’t anticipate encountering another winter storm. Please pray for all of those who are on the road, including me! God bless you.
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