September 20, 2021
Onlookers might not know this about me, but I have a fairly active compliant streak in my being, as befits the eldest daughter in a 1950s vintage Catholic family. We didn’t look at all like the TV commercial families, but God knows we tried. So when Erickson speaks about elders and living into transcendence, God knows I will try to do that as well.
According to Erikson, transcendence is an older person’s moving past concerns about body image and physical limitation, social isolation and past regrets to an acceptance and appreciation of limitations, solitude, and peace as one grows closer to death. These themes are emphasized in the later theory of gerotranscendence, developed to give caregivers an understanding of the “old old.”
However, my County Tyrone forebears on one side and the Norman Scots on the other side won’t let me go into the “gentle night” (“do not go gentle into that good night”, Dylan Thomas) of that kind of transcendence quite so easily, or perhaps not at all. To be fair, perhaps I haven’t given Erickson a fair chance. God knows, I would love to have a sense of proportion about my world, as though my upraised arm were not the only thing that keeps the stars in their orbit or my children from losing their battles against a challenging and intolerant world. (Exodus 17:9-13) But my “day labor” is not yet totally denied light (“On His Blindness,” John Milton), and there is much to rage against on this earth. As I sit down to write, NPR is broadcasting a program on the devastating and foreshortened life that Haiti sugarcane workers lead to keep sugar in my food. I wonder how I could help them. I keep flying after one need – – adult literacy – – after another – – prison inmates, against the day when I will be completely unable to minister in any way at all. If non-transcendence is wondering whether God and the world will get along without me, that’s an embarrassing piece of me these days, with so much need everywhere I turn.
But there really is more. My roots are in this world, right now, today, rather than in the cool calm of solitary contemplation of my death. My focus these days is on the crowded birdfeeder outside my window… In the odd-looking but delicious orange–sized yellow eggplant fruits that now drip from the dying seedling I rescued from the 99 cent store… In the pleasure my Alzheimer’s neighbors and their “minders” take from the splashing in the crowded birdbath outside my window. The 125 fruit trees nurtured for the 110 years of Pilgrim Place are heavy with fruit this season, and we have enthusiastically added a new goal for the money we pruners will raise with the proceeds– economic diversity for this “white bread” community. I can’t let go of my sense of responsibility for the trees and the people, and my joy that people who have worked so hard for justice need worry no longer at the end of their lives.
One of my earliest memories is my mother sitting in an old rocking chair reading to us from our favorite children’s book, “The littlest Angel.” Now no doubt in some circles theologically passé, that unfolded my atlas of places where God appears and things that God cares about. Every once in a while, I look over my shoulder and wonder if I’m doing “it” right. The other day, I took to my peer review partner my fear that a client and I weren’t being serious enough, that we laugh so much. He wisely observed, “That’s how God gets to laugh, when you do.”
No, I cannot bear to “transcend.” God gets to worry about my children when I do, and it’s God’s chance to marvel at the dimensions of the nearby mountains because I do. How would God know the warmth of Phoebe on my lap if it were not for me? Who will mourn the 35-year-old, imprisoned for more than half her life, who died before she learned to read, her only wish? Who will tell her story? I do want to have a sense of proportion, a long view. But I am angry about that injustice. I want the “I live on Tongva land” sign on my fence to mean something now!
I am not afraid or foolish. 15 years or so ago, I joined a tour group on the climb to the top of Mount Sinai. All night I toiled with many hundreds of other pilgrims in total darkness up perilous foot-high steps. An hour before dawn, I could go no further, so crawled to a sharp precipice overlooking hundreds of miles of solitary desert. At first, I was heartbroken, having feared that, like Moses, I was unworthy to reach the “promised land” at the top. But as I lay watching the mountains in the far distance, first dawn, and then sunrise broke over the entire expanse of that wilderness. I remembered Teilhard de Chardin’s Mass over the universe: “Over every living thing which is to spring up, to grow, to flower, to ripen during this day, I say again the words: this is my body, and over every death force which waits in readiness to corrode, to wither, to cut down, speak again Your commanding words which express the supreme mystery of faith: this is my blood.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Hymn of the Universe “Over there, on the horizon, the sun has just touched with light the outermost fringe of the eastern sky. Once again, beneath this moving sheet of fire, the living surface of the earth wakes and trembles, and once again begins its fearful travail. I will place on my paten, O God, the harvest to be won by this renewal of labor. Into my chalice I shall pour all the sap which is to be pressed out this day from the Earth’s fruits.” Page 19