Stephen Ministry

Christ Caring for People through People

The process of aging can be both a challenge and a blessing, and one’s “golden years” can be framed in both ways. God gave us old age for reasons that we can never fully understand, but if we acknowledge God as the giver of old age, we are much better able to meet its challenges and be grateful for its blessings. As with many things, how we frame our attitudes toward aging makes all the difference. Richard Rohr’s September 18, 2022 devotional entitled A Ripening Mind and Heartcan help us to frame growing older in a way which brings us true Christian JOY. (Adapted from Richard Rohr, introduction to Oneing1, no. 2, Ripening(Fall 2013): 11, 12–14.)

The word “ripening” helps us move beyond any exclusive concern with physical aging, because our concerns are much more than that. If I am to believe the novels, myths, poems, and people I have met in my life, old age is almost never described as an apex of achievement as one sits atop a summit with the raised arms of a victorious athlete. It is something else, almost always something else— usually something other than what was initially imagined, or even hoped for. Ripening, at its best, is a slow, patient learning, and sometimes even a happy letting go—a seeming emptying out to create readiness for a new kind of fullness—which we are never sure about. If we do not allow our own ripening, an ever-increasing resistance and denial sets in, an ever-increasing protection around an over-defended self. At our very best, we learn how to hope as we ripen. Youthful hopes have concrete goals, whereas the hope of older years is usually aimless hope, hope without goals, even naked hope — perhaps real hope. Such stretching is the agony and the joy of later years, although one can avoid both of these rich experiences too. Old age, as such, is almost a complete changing of gears and engines from the first half of our lives, and does not happen without many slow realizations, inner calmings, lots of inner resistance and denials, and eventual surrenders. All of themby God’s grace work with our everdeepening sense of what we really desire and who we really are. Reality, fate, destiny, providence, and tragedy are slow but insistent teachers. The horizon of old age seems to be a plan that God has prepared as inevitable and part of the necessary school of life. What is gratuitously given is also gratuitously taken away, just as Job slowly came to accept. And sometimes we remember that his eventual pained response was “Blessed be the name of the Lord!” (Job 1:21). If we are to speak of a spiritualityof ripening, we need to recognize that it is always characterized by an increasing tolerance for ambiguity, a growing sense of subtlety, an ever-larger ability to include and allow, and a capacity to live with contradictions and even to love them! I cannot imagine any other way of coming to those broad horizons except through many trials, unsolvable paradoxes, and errors in trying to resolve them. The ripening of mind and heart is most basically a capacity for nondual consciousness and contemplation. So my guidance is a simple reminder to recall what we will be forced to learn by necessity and under pressure anyway—the open-ended way of allowingand the deep meaningthat some call faith. To live in trustful faith is to ripen; it is almost that simple.

STEPHEN MINISTERS Tom Clark Isabelle Connell Walter Gadkowski Andie Goodrich Shirley Hagerson Chris Jones Jack Marsh Janeen McClure Saralene Oldham Karen Parker Gary Root David Witman