Wear the World Lightly

There is a story I heard once about two relatives who were attending the funeral services of a wealthy family member. One of them, with a greedy glint in his eyes, leans over and whispers; “how much did he leave?“. The other looks back and responds…”All of it“. The point of the story was that when our time comes, we don’t take any of our possessions with us.

St. Francis of Assisi, who was born into a wealthy noble family, left his life of possessions and privileges to start a monastery and live a life of simplicity. His advice to those who wanted to join him was to “Wear the world like a loose garment, which touches us in a few places and there but lightly”. 

St Francis Statue

The Alcoholic Anonymous organization adopted this teaching of St Francis and shortened it to the simple phrase: Wear the World Lightly. Their 12-step program for overcoming addiction uses lots of sayings to help people detach and overcome their addictions, phrases like: live and let live, let go and let God, turn it over, easy does it, and one day at a time.

All of these statements of detachment are not intended to send a message that we should be indifferent or dead to the world, or have no feelings at all. Rather their purpose is to teach people to face the world with a kind of mindful disengagement.

It is this “detachment with love” philosophy that can help motivate people to create a peaceful space within themselves, separated from the never-ending incoming arrows of uncertainty, fear, anger, and other painful events that plague our life. Practicing detachment helps people look past the daily shocks that occur, producing a change of attitude in the mind and a physical release in the body.

To wear the world as a loose garment is to acknowledge that the world and our life will always press at us and around us, but that it does not have to touch us but “lightly”. Most things are either outside our control or ultimately unimportant. 

We do not need to grasp, manage, dwell on or react to everything that happens to us. We can choose instead to keep the world at an emotional distance so we can stay focused on doing the next right thing. It is an attitude that can relax the body and relieve the mind of the poisonous emotions that overcome us when we are confronted by the people, places or things that beset us.

To be in the world but not of it, is to live and move through life without being emotionally attached to everything that happens. Life can get hard, but those who wear the world lightly learn how to live in the world with their hardships, neither fighting them nor being crushed by them.

St Francis was essentially encouraging us to not sweat the small stuff. To not get annoyed or depressed when life does not go your way or when you do not get what you want. When you have lived long enough you come to understand that most of the things that bother us are small potatoes. Even death apparently, which the Dalai Lama described as a simple change of clothes.

I’ve heard it said that the secret to happiness as we age “is to care less and less about more and more“. The wise elders I have been fortunate to know in my life carried that attitude with them; they tended to let fewer and fewer things bother them as they got older. It’s not because they didn’t care, most likely it was just that they discovered through their life experience that it is possible to walk away, without anger or agitation, from some things they felt passionate about – and still live.

I happened across an on-line sermon about this same topic of wearing the world lightly by Bishop Robert Barron. From a spiritual point of view, Bishop Barron also believes that St Francis’ famous statement was an attempt to teach his followers about the importance of detachment – especially from the goods and achievements of the world.

Not because the world itself is bad – there are all kinds of good, true and beautiful things in the world – but because the things of the world are not the ultimate good and we are not meant to cling to them as though they were.

There are stories throughout the Bible about the futility of clinging on to earthly power, riches and glory. King Solomon is one of the greatest figures in the history of Israel from a standpoint of wealth and power. He was somebody who had it all; nobody was richer, nobody was more famous, nobody had richer palaces or clothes. But, as an old man, looking at all the possessions he has acquired over his lifetime, he says: “Vanity of vanities, all things are vanity!“.

The word vanity in Hebrew signifies something that is insubstantial and momentary, like wind or vapor or bubbles; something that is here for a brief time and then it is gone. Solomon has experienced everything: power, sensual pleasure, wisdom, honor and wealth. He has built up a reserve of wealth through his knowledge and skills and yet when he is gone, he must leave all his property to others who have not labored over it and do not deserve it.

It is not uncommon to hear complaints like this from men as they become old and infirm; “I gave my whole life to my business, I worked hard and I made a fortune. Now I’m an old man and I’m surrounded by ungrateful children and grand-children; and I’ve done all this work and yet these people are going to inherit all my wealth. What’s it all been about“?

If you live to be old enough, at some point, you finally come to realize that everything in this world has a quality of evanescence – it disappears and does not last. It is a good thing if you have been successful and built up a fortune – but it’s not going to last. Because you are going to fade away and it’s all going to go to somebody else.

Should we just be depressed then? Father Barron says no, not depressed, instead we should be detached. Our wealth, power, pleasure and the esteem of other people. It’s good. We should take it in and then let it go. We should enjoy it the way you enjoy a firework going off. Learn to live in the present moment, savoring what we can, but then letting it go.

Why? Because we come to realize that the truly good and beautiful things belong to a higher world. We can sense them in the good things of this world but none of our earthly things last and so if we cling to them, what happens is they disappear, they crumble as we try to grasp at them. Rather see them, appreciate them and then let them go.

We can get caught in an addictive pattern when we cling to the goods of the world. You worry about them so you say to yourself, oh no I better get more. Instead, we would be wise to remember the cautionary parable of the rich fool told by Jesus:

“The ground of a certain rich man brought forth abundantly. He reasoned within himself, saying, ‘What will I do, because I don’t have room to store my crops?’ He said, ‘This is what I will do. I will pull down my barns, and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. I will tell my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.”‘ “But God said to him, ‘You fool, this very night your soul is required of you. The things which you have prepared— whose will they be?’

Luke 12:16-21

St Francis asks us to cultivate an attitude of detachment in our life. To stop clinging and hanging on to the things of the world. The more we cling to them, the more we become imprisoned by them. We’ll become bitter, angry , empty if our only focus is on the acquisition of ephemeral things. But if we practice the proper spiritual attitude of detachment and keep our eyes on the true and beautiful things that do not fade away then we will know how to handle the goods of the world as they come to us.

Fr Barron closes his sermon by emphasizing again that wealth in itself is not the problem. He points out that wealthy people can be saintly when they know how to use their wealth, how to wear it lightly and how to become generous with it. The only thing we take with us into the life to come is the quality of our love and what we’ve given away on earth. So, we should forget about trying to fill up our lives with bigger barns; true joy in life comes through building up our treasure in heaven.

The publication of this particular blog represents a milestone for me and the achievement of a goal I set for myself way back in 2013 when I posted my very first Words to Live By blog entry. I have been publishing this monthly blog for almost 10 years now and and have managed to author 100 different blog entries in that time.

I have attempted in this collection of postings to communicate ideas and philosophies that have helped me along the way and given my life direction and meaning. It has been a wonderful mental exercise for me and a labor of love that has helped me recognize things that make life interesting and wonderful. I hope my readers have discovered some of their own words to live by that will be of specific value to them in their own life.

In the spirit of “wearing the world lightly”, I plan to cut back on my blogging activities moving forward so that I am can devote more time focusing on doing the next right things in my life that will increase the quality of my love. I don’t plan to walk away from blogging completely though, as there are always more words to live by to be discovered and examined.

So, keep an eye out for the occasional future posting from me; and until then, may the blessings abound in your life.

There is a Season for Everything Under the Sun

One of the things I enjoy about my blogging hobby is that it leads me to discover authors who are writing thoughtful blogs on interesting subjects. I recently came across one such blog entry written by Maria Popova who was reviewing a book by Katherine May titled Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.

In her book, May writes about her experience living through a deep and disquieting period that she describes as one of the “winters of her life”. The thing about the blog that caught my attention was the author’s perspective that life is like the seasons, constantly changing throughout our lifetimes.

We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.

Excerpts from Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May

Our culture leads us to believe that life progresses along a linear scale from helplessness towards ever-increasing flourishing, but in reality life is like the seasons, operating in a cyclical fashion, with many periods of ups and downs. Imagining life to operate only in a linear fashion can be harmful when people start to falsely believe that something is wrong with their life if it does not get progressively better as they get older or when they need to take detours along the way.

If we accept that our lives are more cyclical, with periods containing many Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter seasons of the spirit, then we can become better equipped to understand that there will periods of happiness and sadness throughout our life – as well as periods of strength and fragility.

When you start thinking about periods of your life as seasons, you come to realize that people live through many winters in their lifetime – some mild, some severe – and that it is possible, like the trees, to emerge from those winters not only undiminished but ready for new growth.

It is reassuring to think that our winter seasons do not need to be fallow and unproductive and that they can be a productive period when we are given the time and space we need to go on growing. Albert Camus wrote “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer”. If we garden the winters of the soul with care, we can set in place seeds that will bloom into future summers of strength.

Katherine May makes the observation that trees enter a waiting phase during winter where the tree has everything it needs to make it through severe weather:

“Its fallen leaves are mulching the forest floor, and its roots are drawing up the extra winter moisture, providing a firm anchor against seasonal storms. Its ripe cones and nuts are providing essential food in this scarce time for mice and squirrels, and its bark is hosting hibernating insects and providing a source of nourishment for hungry deer. It is far from dead. It is in fact the life and soul of the wood. It’s just getting on with it quietly. It will not burst into life in the spring. It will just put on a new coat and face the world again.“

We all need to take an example from the trees and approach the winter seasons of our life in a similar way. Retreat, face our our sadness, let go of the things in our life that are no longer bearing fruit, be nourished by the strong roots of our personal friends and communities and get ready to face the world again.

The winter seasons of our life are usually characterized by sadness that is triggered when we experience loss of one kind or another. Those of us who have lived through winters know that there are self-punishing ways to be sad, and self-healing ways to be sad. The key to skillful wintering is to learn the difference between the two so that we are stronger when the season begins to turn – just like the branches of a tree during the depths of winter are covered in tiny dormant buds that will spring to life when the weather turns.

Since we are all certain to encounter winter seasons during our life, May concludes with a warning against judging people when they are down on their luck and experiencing misfortune. It is better she writes to encourage empathy, compassion and understanding for those that we find suffering:

Here is another truth about wintering: you’ll find wisdom in your winter, and once it’s over, it’s your responsibility to pass it on. And in return, it’s our responsibility to listen to those who have wintered before us. It’s an exchange of gifts in which nobody loses out.

This may involve the breaking of a lifelong habit, one passed down carefully through generations: that of looking at other people’s misfortunes and feeling certain that they brought them upon themselves in a way that you never would. This isn’t just an unkind attitude. It does us harm, because it keeps us from learning that disasters do indeed happen and how we can adapt when they do. It stops us from reaching out to those who are suffering. And when our own disaster comes, it forces us into a humiliated retreat, as we try to hunt down mistakes that we never made in the first place or wrongheaded attitudes that we never held. Either that, or we become certain that there must be someone out there we can blame.

Watching winter and really listening to its messages, we learn that effect is often disproportionate to cause; that tiny mistakes can lead to huge disasters; that life is often bloody unfair, but it carries on happening with or without our consent. We learn to look more kindly on other people’s crises, because they are so often portents of our own future.

This is good advice for the next time you find the seasons changing in your life. Do not despair – remember that every season can be profitable for our growth and survival. I have lived long enough to know that we can experience winter seasons during the blush of our youth and that it is possible for spring and summer seasons to joyfully populate the twilight of our years.

There is no telling when good things or terrible things will happen to us and we cannot know the entire meaning of it all, but we can know that life can be beautiful even in the darkest of seasons. So rejoice during all your seasons under the sun and remember that all our emotions and actions, both negative and positive, have important meaning and we become more majestic when we learn from them all.

An Appreciation of my Wife on her 60th Birthday

Kathleen was born in 1960, the first-born of a third generation English/Irish couple scratching out a living in the gritty suburbs of Boston. Her mother and father were young parents who never possessed adequate parental skills to properly nurture their children.

In public her parents tried to present the picture of a perfect family; but behind closed doors it was a different story. They were routinely cruel to their children, inflicting harsh punishments for minor infractions. They were driven by their own selfish desires, letting the needs of their children take a backseat.

Despite the dysfunctional home and parental episodes of verbal and physical abuse, Kate was fortunately also exposed to glimmers of light: grandparents who lived nearby to look after her when things got out of hand at home; a favorite aunt who would spoil her; treasured books that helped her to imagine a life different than the one she was living; younger siblings to protect and bond with; and a catholic elementary school education that gave her the moral foundation to understand the difference between right and wrong.

Her parent’s disowned Kate after she graduated from High School because she refused to continue letting them bully her or acquiesce to their unreasonable demands on her life.

With no family support, she managed to get by with jobs as a checkout girl at the Supermarket and as a snack distributor. She shared a tiny apartment and went to school at night when she could afford it – eventually graduating from Bentley University with her business degree.

When she got married her parents expressed their disapproval by refusing to attend the wedding and by strong-arming most of her relatives to boycott the wedding as well.

Nevertheless she persisted, integrating well into her husband’s family – who gladly embraced her, loving and treating her like a daughter. She learned important lessons about how to be a loving parent from her father and mother in law that she never acquired from her own parents.

Someone had once told Kate that in this life you can either choose to be a victim or a survivor; and she was determined to be a survivor – refusing to let her past misfortunes define her or rob her of present and future joy.

It is said that when a child is born, the mother is born again also. Kate got a chance to be born again – being blessed with two daughters and a son over a period of 4 years. She vowed not to let history repeat itself, insisting that she would be a different kind of mother to her children than her mother was to her.

She succeeded in this vow by focusing on her family, working long hours to create a beautiful home and doing everything in her power to make sure her children had everything they needed. She sacrificed personal and professional goals to ensure the well-being of her children and to support her husband’s rising career.

When the marriage broke apart after almost 20 years, Kate was devastated. Overnight she became a single mother of two teenage daughters and a teenage son, struggling to pay, on a greatly reduced income, all the bills that came with maintaining the lifestyle to which her children were accustomed.

She did what she could to cut expenses and protect the children’s lives as much as possible from the turmoil and disruption that typically comes when parents divorce. Though the husband and wife relationship ended up in failure, Kate did her best for the sake of her children to ensure that the mother and father roles would be a success.

It was during this time that Kate and I began dating. We found each other via an online dating app, but were surprised to learn how much we actually had in common. We were both the same age, we lived in adjacent towns, our kids attended the same Catholic school and we were both grieving from the sudden death of our imagined lifetime dreams.

We met for a bicycle ride on our first date and I was intrigued by her honesty and seeming lack of effort to impress me with her clothes or appearance. She told me right up front that I should run away from her because she had three teenage children and an ex-husband that was a cop.

Her honesty came as a refreshing change compared to my other limited dating experiences and even after one brief date I could tell there was something substantial about her under the surface that called for a second date.

I enjoyed discovering over subsequent dates the beautiful qualities about her that were just waiting to come out – her intelligence; her sense of humor; her compassion for others; and her selflessness in trying to protect and provide for her children.

I saw in Kate a unique blend of toughness and tenderness that was very appealing. She shows her personal toughness by her refusal to be defeated by the obstacles and adversities that life throws at her; but at the same time she is very tender and compassionate with the people she encounters who need love, understanding and a helping hand.

I often wonder how it is that some people can grow up in dysfunctional families and live through life changing hurts but still bounce back from those adverse conditions to live happy and fulfilling lives. I so admire my wife for being one of those people who are blessed with that kind of supernatural resilience.

It seems to be a divine gift or maybe the answer to a prayer like the one Emily Dickinson made when she was struggling with the vagaries of her life:

“Grant me, O Lord, a sunny mind – Thy windy will to bear!”

Emily Dickinson from the poem “Besides the Autumn Poets Sing”

The Lord granted Kate with a sunny disposition for sure. It is not in her nature to dwell on her troubles and disappointments or to wallow in self pity. Her tendency is to see the good in other people and to take actions that will lead to a hopeful future.

Somehow she has turned the lost battles of her life into fuel that has helped her to grow more understanding, more spiritual, more forgiving and more generous. She has managed with divine help I suppose to transform all her afflictions into a blessing. What others in her life intended for evil, she has turned into good.

She is a living testament to the adage that we are not the product of what we were, but the possibility of what we can be.

If power is defined as the ability to do good for others, then Kate has been a powerful force in the world by enriching countless lives. Her heart is happiest when she is performing acts of kindness that make life better for other people, especially her children, step-children, grandchildren, husband, siblings, nieces, nephews and community friends.

Even her job as a hospice liaison is spent comforting and assisting patients and families who are overwhelmed by the emotions of planning end-of life care for their loved ones. She was an angel to my extended family as she guided my father through his last days with dignity; and now helps my mother gracefully age-in-place in the home that she loves.

If it’s true that a life is made by what we give, then Kate has truly lived a wonderful life – and the lives of the people she has touched are so much richer for her being a part of it. Every time I hear the lovely lilt of her laughter I am reminded how much I love her and how fortunate I am to call her my wife.

So I toast my wife as she celebrates her 60^th birthday and begins what the Chinese like to call “the beginning of your second life“. I pray that the youth of her old age will be filled with love and happiness and that this blessing of her Irish ancestors will come true for her.

May joy and peace surround you,
Contentment latch your door,
And happiness be with you now,
And bless you evermore.

‘Tis a Fearful Thing to Love

I recently facilitated a memorial service for my mother’s sister who lived to the goodly age of 100. My Aunt Jeannette Marie was a loving daughter, mother to 6 children, a grandmother, great grandmother and wife to two husbands.

The Last Photo of my Mother with her Sister

She was one of those people who would light up and make you feel good whenever you were in her presence. She always had a good word for everybody and even though she suffered tragedy in her life – her first dying in a train accident when he was just 24 – it was not in her nature to complain, choosing instead to focus on her many blessings.

With her sister’s passing, my mother, at 91 years old, became the last surviving person of that close 10 member family clan she grew up with. My mother was close to her sister and loved her dearly so it is natural that she is experiencing feelings of sadness, loss and grief. Especially because she no longer has anyone in her life who she can talk to about the “old days” and all the good and bad times they went through together as a family.

To begin the memorial service, I asked my wife to recite the poem ‘Tis a Fearful Thing’ that is believed to have been written by a Jewish Rabbi sometime in the 11th century. It is a moving poem about the intersection of grief and faith and love and it is often shared by Hospice teams with the families of those who are grieving a loved one who is nearing death.

‘Tis a Fearful Thing

‘Tis a fearful thing
to love what death can touch.
A fearful thing
to love, to hope, to dream, to be –
to be,
And oh, to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
And a holy thing,
a holy thing
to love.
For your life has lived in me,
your laugh once lifted me,
your word was gift to me.
To remember this brings painful joy.
‘Tis a human thing, love,
a holy thing, to love
what death has touched.

One of the Five Remembrances that Buddhists contemplate during their meditation practices is this one:

I will be separated and parted from everyone and
everything that is dear to me

Anyone who lives long enough knows the pangs of sadness that come with loss. From the moment we are born and bond with our parents, grandparents and siblings; fall in love; marry; have children of our own—we are destined to endure the pain of losing someone we love—over and over again. My mother, at this point in her life, has had to say painful goodbyes to her husband, parents and 7 of her siblings, not to mention many close friends.

It’s enough to make you think that life is just an elaborate setup for suffering. But somehow we still manage to choose life. We choose to make friends, marry, bring new life into the world. We lose a spouse or partner and we decide to give our hearts to a new companion, opening ourselves up to more eventual sorrow. Are we in denial to think that death will not touch this new love too?

Why do conscious and highly intelligent beings make themselves vulnerable to the eventual pain and sorrow that comes with losing the one you love. Is love really something for fools? Is it not insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result?

What is it that makes us choose to invest in love and life? The poem teaches us that it all comes down to love – because it is ‘a holy thing to love.’ Love, life, death and love again is what it means to be human.

The poem’s closing words reflect a profound truth that speaks to the resilience of the human spirit and the best character traits of the human species:

It is a human thing, love
a holy thing, to love what death has touched.

Love survives death. Death destroys the body but it does not touch love—or erase love. The body is impermanent but Love is eternal. We somehow know at the deepest level that life is about love. It may be that our divine purpose is to love, no matter how painful the loss of a loved one will be, and to send that love out into the heavens.

We choose to deeply love someone because we believe and trust that it will always keep us connected. Love becomes the unbreakable tether between those of us “here” and those who have passed on. It is knowing this that enables us to overcome our fear of the certainty of death and separation.

To love deeply is holy. Holy. Love keeps us connected to the Creator of all Beings, to all of those we have loved and all those to come.  Even though my mother is sad when she thinks about all the loved ones in her life who death has touched, she still feels a holy connection with them which helps season her grief with painful joy and a spiritual component of hope that leads her to believe she will be reunited with them someday in the afterlife.

Let us embrace that love which is not severed by death. Painful, fearful, a thing for fools? Perhaps. Perhaps for some, at first. But it is also a holy thing… A holy thing to love.

It’s Not Dark Yet, But it’s Getting There

I recently celebrated my 60th birthday – a moment of reckoning in one’s life when it seems appropriate to reflect on the bygone days of youth while also wondering what form life will take during the inevitable transition to old age.

The 60th birthday is considered a major milestone in many cultures. In China, someone who has reached the age of 60 is considered to have completed a full life cycle. The 60th birthday is commemorated with great extravagance because it is considered by them to be the beginning of a second life. 

When I think about it, it does seem to me as if I have lived a full life cycle. After all, what more can a man ask out of 60 years of life than to be born into a loving family; be bestowed with good health and a good education; be fulfilled with a satisfying job and rewarding career; be fortunate to find and share in the love of two beautiful women – who made me a proud father, step-father and grandfather to children who are now on their way to living out their own successful life cycles.

It’s funny to think back now of memories I have of playing the old Milton Bradley Board Game of Life in my College apartment with my future fiance and our friends. The game simulates a person’s travels through his or her life, from college to retirement, with jobs, marriage and possible children along the way. The overall goal is to retire as the wealthiest player at the end of the game.

Milton Bradley’s Game of Life

The decisions players make along the way – which include purchasing insurance policies, bank mortgages and stock investments – determine who wins the game of life and who spends their retirement days in Millionaire Estates, Countryside Acres, or the Poorhouse Farm.

Seems like only yesterday I was playing that game, but it was 40 years ago, and I realize I am now at a point where I have completed most of my personal life decisions and ought to be thankful for getting to the end with a winning hand.

I may not have retired the wealthiest man, or live in a Millionaire Estate, but I do live in a comfortable home in a bucolic setting which could easily pass for Countryside Acres. No matter what happens now, I can’t really lose at the game of life because I’ve already won – I’m playing with house money!

One glaring omission in the Life board game that I didn’t notice at the time (because no one who is young ever thinks about getting old) was that it stops at retirement – the end of our 1st life cycle.

The game does not ask the players to consider Medicare or Social Security benefits, Long Term Care insurance, Health Care Proxies, Wills and Trusts, Durable Power of Attorneys, Assisted Living and Nursing Homes, Disability, Hospice, Death, Funerals and burial decisions. All of those elements make up the domain of the second life cycle.

The unrecognizable face of the old man staring back at me from the mirror reminds me that I’m running out of time; as do these song lyrics that I find shuffling more often now in the soundtrack in my mind:

“I don’t look like I used to, I don’t walk like I used to, I don’t love like I used to. Oh… I can’t do the things I used to because I feel old”

“I feel Old” by the Heartless Bastards

“Ain’t gonna need this body much longer, ain’t gonna need this body much more. I put in 10 million hours. Washed up and worn out for sure”

“Don’t Need this Body” by John Mellencamp

“I was born here and I’ll die here, against my will. I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standin’ still… Don’t even hear the murmur of a prayer, It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there”

“Not Dark Yet” by Bob Dylan

I am beginning my journey into the realm of the second life. From what I have observed, people who first enter this realm can become bewildered and embarrassed by the onset of old age and all of the infirmities that begin to come with it.

I was struck by this paragraph from the Grace Paley short story “Friends“, because it captures the awkward unsaid sentiments aging friends can experience when they haven’t seen each other in a while:

People do want to be remembered as young and beautiful. When they meet in the street, male or female, if they’re getting older they look at each other’s face a little ashamed. It’s clear they want to say, ‘Excuse me, I didn’t mean to draw attention to mortality and gravity all at once. I didn’t want to remind you, my dear friend, of our coming eviction, first from liveliness, then from life’. To which, most of the time, the friend’s eyes will courteously reply, ‘My dear, it’s nothing at all. I hardly noticed’.

“Friends” by Grace Paley

My wife’s work at a hospice agency reminds me every week that the end comes before we know it and when it does it is usually painful and undignified. To focus only on this inevitability, however, is a distraction that diminishes all the possibilities for living a rewarding second life.

Instead it is better, I think, to focus on encouraging past research that shows people tend to grow steadily happier as they age. As the moodiness and demands of youth subsides, maturity seems to bring more contentment.

In a Pew Research Center survey, seven-in-ten respondents ages 65 and older said they were enjoying more time with their family, more financial security and more time for volunteer work, travel and hobbies. Sixty percent said they feel more respected and have less stress than when they were younger.

But there is some conflicting research on the subject of aging and happiness and some experts say contentment, no matter what the age, boils down to one thing: Attitude. They say attitude is everything and that the qualities that most contribute to feelings of contentment as we age include:

• Optimism – Older people seem to display a more positive outlook on life than their younger, stressed-out counterparts. As a person’s life expectancy decreases, they tend to focus on what makes them feel good today; rather than mulling over past regrets or future worries. They live in the moment focusing on what is good in their life rather than what has not been achieved.
• Less Want – Jackie Coller wrote: “There are two ways to be rich: One is by acquiring much, and the other is by desiring little.” The Buddhists believe that it is the human mind’s craving for things that is the source of suffering. As we age, we tend to become more comfortable and accepting of our lot in life and our role in society – thus reducing the conflicts and anxieties that come with constantly wanting to change our situation.
• Humor – Mark Twain said that “Humor is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations, and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.” Being funny is possibly one of the best things you can do for your health. You can almost think of a sense of humor as your mind’s immune system.

Even though humor improves people’s overall quality of life, it is a hard habit for some people to adopt and practice. They take life too seriously and find it difficult to laugh at themselves or the frequent absurdities that make up our daily life.

In the novel East of Eden, John Steinbeck writes about an encounter an overly serious young girl has with her wise old Chinese friend:

“Do you think it’s funny to be so serious when I’m not even out of high school?” she asked. “I don’t see how it could be any other way, ” said Lee. “Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn’t in time.”

“East of Eden” by John Steinbeck

With all this in mind, my simple goals for pursuing a second life filled with contentment are:

• to stay optimistic (60 may be old, but it is the youth of old age!)
• to want less (have few desires, be satisfied with what you have!)
• to cultivate my sense of humor (like George Carlin who joked when he turned 60 years of age that he was only 16 Celsius!)

If I am able to a accomplish those goals then maybe I will be lucky enough to feel like Ben Franklin who, at the goodly age of 84, wrote these words as he was preparing for the end of his remarkable second life…

“Let us sit till the evening of life is spent; the last hours were always the most joyous. I look upon death to be as necessary to to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.”

Taken from “The First American – The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin” by H.W. Brands

“They are so happy, they don’t know how miserable they are”

On a snowy January day this past winter, while minding the fireplace in my living room, I found myself watching the movie/musical The Fiddler on the Roof.

1971 Movie Poster of Fiddler on the Roof

For those of you unfamiliar with the movie, it is set in 1905 Imperial Russia, during a time when the Jews were being persecuted and evicted from their homes and villages by pogroms enacted by the reigning Tsars.

In the story, Tevye, a poor milkman and patriarch of a family with five daughters struggles to maintain his Jewish religious traditions in the face of outside cultural influences that threaten to disrupt and break apart his family.

The first time I watched the movie I was in my 20’s, too young and inexperienced in the ways of life to appreciate the wisdom and insights that were subtly portrayed – especially by the character Tevye.

Tevye is poor and uneducated, but he dreams every day of becoming rich and respected. While doing chores in his barn, he breaks into a song fantasizing about how good his life would be if only he was a wealthy man.

He imagines he would have the best house in town, his wife and children would strut like peacocks around town in the finest of clothes and servants would prepare rich foods for them to feast on every night.

But what Tevye craves most is not money – it is knowledge, wisdom and the respect of his close knit Jewish faith community:

“The most important men in town will come to fawn on me. They will ask me to advise them like Solomon The Wise – posing problems that would cross a rabbi’s eyes. And it won’t make one bit of difference if I answer right or wrong – when you’re rich, they think you really know. If I were rich I’d have that time that I lack to sit in the synagogue and pray and maybe have a seat by the eastern wall, and I’d discuss the Holy Books with the learned men seven hours every day… and that would be the sweetest thing of all.”

Song lyrics from “If I were a Rich Man”

Tevye concludes the song with an appeal to God – one that is universally recognizable to many people who wonder about their lot in life: “Lord, who made the lion and the lamb. You decreed I should be what I am. Would it spoil some vast eternal plan if I were a wealthy man?”.

Despite Tevye’s frustration with his lowly station in life, the townspeople and movie viewers eventually come to respect him because of the authentic and intimate relationship he has with his God and because of the love, mercy and compassion he shows to his daughters.

Those qualities come into sharp focus as Tevye struggles with the fallout from a marriage agreement he has arranged for his oldest daughter Tzeitel. In Jewish tradition of the time it was customary for a father to choose a husband for their daughters. Tevye is pleased with himself because he has made a profitable agreement for his daughter to marry the rich, widowed village butcher.

When he goes to share this good news with his daughter, he is dismayed to learn that she is horrified at the thought of marrying the butcher and she begs her father not to force her into the marriage. He further discovers, that she has secretly pledged herself to marry Motel, the poor town tailor, who comes rushing in at the last moment to ask Tevye for his blessing to marry Tzeitel.

Tevye immediately refuses to give his permission. It is absurd for a couple to arrange a match for themselves. It goes against all tradition! Marriages must be arranged by the Papa! This should never be changed! Motel cannot support his daughter! He is only a poor tailor!

But Tevye begins to reconsider and soften after Motel shouts out “Even a poor Tailor is entitled to some happiness“. He stares into the eyes of his hopeful daughter and the poor tailor and sees the unmistakable love they have for each other, he tells himself that Adam and Eve had no matchmaker except God and he reasons that even though the tailor has absolutely nothing; things could never get worse for him, only better.

Tevye finally relents and gives the couple his blessing, accepting that his daughter is not ordained to have all the comforts in life. His willingness to forsake the rigid strictures of his community traditions and instead see the young couple through eyes of mercy and compassion becomes a grace-filled moment in the movie and a lesson for all of us that stubbornly cling to beliefs that are not based on love.

Two yeas later, we see Tevye delivering milk to his community while talking to God and updating him on the status of his daughter’s marriage.

“Motel and Tzeitel have been married for some time now. They work very hard and they’re as poor as squirrels in winter. But they’re so happy, they don’t know how miserable they are.”

This moment exposes the close personal relationship Tevye has with his God and the comfortable way in which they converse – as though God were just a friendly companion walking with him. Tevye never walks alone because God always walks beside him. It also reveals Tevye’s joy at the success of his daughter’s marriage and his belief that he made the right decision in giving them his blessing.

Tevye’s observation that the couple is so happy, they don’t know how miserable they are struck a chord of recognition with me. When I married my wife Elaine in the Summer of 1982, I was no more than a boy of 22 years old and still in College. We had no idea what was ahead of us. We had only part time jobs, a beat-up car, no savings and I had never been on a plane or traveled anywhere outside of New England.

We were poor as Church mice but we thought life was grand because we had each other and the bright prospect of our whole life in front of us. We saw everything in our life with new eyes and each milestone we shared was a thrill that made the bond between us stronger.

We started with nothing, but we didn’t mind because we loved each other and we had the support of our families who had shown us the blueprint for a successful life and given us the strong foundation we needed to succeed. The good things we had blinded us to the material deficiencies in our life.

Life changed fast for us – within a couple short years we had good jobs, a brand new home, a new car and a beautiful baby daughter. We gradually began to acquire all the trappings of material wealth that are associated with middle class families in America.

There is a challenge for couples as they grow older and more established to still remain grateful for the simple things. Once you begin to take for granted all the little things that first made you happy – and start thinking instead about all the things you don’t have – there exists a danger of developing a miserable attitude because you don’t recognize how good you have it.

The lessons I learned from watching the Fiddler on the Roof is to always look at each day with new eyes, to break away from past traditions that are preventing me from growing in grace and to seek out a more intimate relationship with my higher power – one that will support and comfort me as I navigate through the trials and tribulations of my life.

Whatever stage in life you find yourself in, may you too learn to find happiness in the simple things and always maintain that youthful wonder at the magic of being alive.

“And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths”

An essay written by Susanna Schrobsdorff  and published in the January 22, 2018 edition of Time Magazine tells the story of two widows who found solace with one another despite the grief and sadness they felt over the loss of their spouses.

The two widows were Lucy Kalanithi, wife of Paul Kalanithi, and John Duberstein, husband of Nina Riggs. Both Paul and Nina published memoirs in 2016 (titled When Breath Becomes Air and The Bright Hour) – about the emotions they were experiencing while struggling to cope with their terminal illnesses.

The essayist described how the ache of loss runs concurrently with gratitude in the two complementary memoirs. The author of each book expresses a thankfulness for the love they have accumulated but at the same time describe the acute pain they feel at the thought of leaving it all behind. One emotion enables the other.

Edel Rodriguez for TIME

Susanna wondered how the two widows, Lucy and John, who became acquaintances and close friends throughout the process of publishing and promoting their partner’s memoirs after they passed away – and who are now planning for a future together, must feel as they tour together reading the words written by the two people they loved so profoundly.

“Perhaps their old lives seem woven into their new life, one love spilling into the next, families merging, past and present overlapping. All of it can exist almost simultaneously. The laws of time are so easily warped.”

A lot of people attempt to make a clean start when beginning a new relationship, trying to leave old baggage behind. They worry that holding on to the past will prevent them from living fully in the present or that it will hinder them from strengthening the emotional bonds of a new relationship.

I have learned from experience that leaving your bags behind is not really an option nor should we want it to be. My perspective is informed by the parallels my life has had with the story of this surviving couple.

My first wife suffered from Breast Cancer and passed away at the age of 45 leaving me and my two young daughters to mourn her loss. By good fortune and divine grace another woman came into my life, kind and loving, with three young children who was recovering from a different and maybe more traumatic kind of loss, the painful divorce and breakup of her family.

We met at a time when we were both hurting and vulnerable but we began to heal our emotional wounds gradually by consoling one another, by being generous and understanding, and by concentrating on things our partner needed instead of focusing on our own sorrows.

Rather than trying to erase the baggage from our past – and the more than two decades of loving memories spent raising our families that went along with it – we embraced it, weaving the lessons of our past lives into our new love and using our past experiences to form a stronger bond together.

Walt Whitman recognized that we are the product of everything that came before us when he wrote “And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths“. I am the person I am because of the people that came before me. They struggled and they prospered and they transferred their life’s lessons and blessings to the next generations so that we could benefit.

They are no longer here but a part of them lives in me and in you. “Death” is merely another word for former life—or, more precisely, another word for forms of life that have now sprung into endlessly transforming other forms of life.

What a shame it would be if we failed to propagate the beauty and sadness we have experienced during our past lives into our daily life. Doing so would make us less alive. Life is richer when we share the joy that we experienced from the past and we become more grateful for our blessings when we think back to the aches of sorrow we experienced in our past life.

While talking about mourning for her mother, my daughter once said to me that “Learning how to accept endings is an essential part of living“. There is much wisdom in that sentiment I think. We must accept endings as they are inevitable – death and life are an endless process, inseparable from each other. By taking the essence of those we have lost and making it an essential component of our daily living we honor best the lives of those who have passed on.

So if you are wise, you will take the accumulated baggage from your past, weave it seamlessly into the fabric of your present life and share it with others – so that when it comes time for you to leave, you will know that you contributed to growing new life.

In the spirit of the upcoming Holiday Season, I will close with a passage written by Paul Kalanithi, the dying father, who knowing that his eight month daughter would not remember him, wrote her this touching note to read someday in the future:

“When you come to one of the many moments in your life where you must give account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that doesn’t hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied.”

May your presence too always bring joy to the world and may those you love carry it forward with them to fertilize new life.

 

Parable of Perhaps

My town has what is called a Transfer station where residents can bring their home trash and recyclable materials to be collected for proper disposal. This is one chore that I actually look forward to every week because it gives me an opportunity to stop and peruse the on-site Book Swap Shack. It is typically stocked with an eclectic mix of adult and children’s books that reflects the diverse reading habits of our small community.

I have picked up – and dropped off –  many books over the years in that messy little book shack and I have discovered topics and titles that have served to send my mind wandering off in interesting and unplanned directions.

One such book I picked up last year,  “The Wheel of Life and Death” by Philip Kapleau, combined historical writings of Eastern and Western religious literature to examine how death, if viewed as an extension of life, can become a joyous occasion.

The book explains that our past actions influence not only our present life, but also our future death; therefore life and death are interrelated and desiring a good death highlights the importance of living a good life. With this in mind, the author explains that practices such as suicide, euthanasia, and pain-doping are obstacles to achieving the good death.

The book provides practical guidance about hospices, organ donation, living wills and funerals – along with helpful advice on meditations for the dying, ways of consoling the bereaved and checklists of things to do following a death.

The parts of the book that I found most appealing, however, were the supporting stories and perspectives on life that conveyed the wisdom of numerous authors, including Tolstoy, Socrates, and Ghandi.

One such story that I call the Parable of Perhaps is about a farmer who is trying to understand the meaning behind a series of sudden events that happen to him. I often think about the lesson of this parable whenever I experience unexpected misfortune or sudden good luck in my life.

Parable of Perhaps

A man’s horse broke out of his barn and ran away during the night. His neighbors came over to console him saying that it was very unfortunate he lost his horse. The farmer said “Maybe”.

The next day the farmer’s horse returned bringing with him seven wild horses. His neighbors then said how very lucky he was to gain seven more horses for his farm. The farmer said “Maybe”.

On the following day his son tried to ride one of the new wild horses and was thrown and broke his leg. “O how awful!” cried his neighbors. “Maybe” answered the farmer.

The next week soldiers came to conscript the young men of the village to fight in a war but the farmer’s son was not taken because his leg was broken. “How wonderful for you!” said the neighbors. “maybe”, said the farmer.

The lesson is that we cannot know the outcome of the things we experience in this life and whether they will turn out good or bad or both. What appears “good” to us today may be the cause of some future misfortune. In the same way, we may look back tomorrow with appreciation at something “bad” that happened to us today.

To illustrate, I can relate a series of events from my own life. When I went off to College I was a quiet boy lacking in confidence as I took my first steps toward independence. I became attracted to a beautiful girl who I met in one of my classes but I felt that she was out of my league and would never be interested in going out with the likes of me. Over the course of time I noticed that her and her friends were particularly interested in the members of a certain on-campus fraternity and they encouraged – even dared me to pledge the fraternity.

I really didn’t want to join this particular fraternity, as it had a reputation for harsh hazing practices and crazy campus stunts, but I signed up to pledge anyway, hoping it would encourage Miss-Out-of-My-League to look my way.

The hazing that occurred over the two week pledging period was even worse than I had imagined, but I managed to survive the ordeal and to my great excitement also to win the first of several dates with that prized girl.

I approached the first date with nervous anticipation and high expectations but it didn’t take me very long to notice that her beauty did not extend to her personality. It became obvious to me fairly quickly that she was self-centered, shallow and somewhat mean-spirited. I was not surprised or disappointed when she broke up with me after a couple weeks of dating.

I joined the fraternity for the wrong reasons, but when I think back on it I realize that my involvement with the club had the unintended effects of helping me to become more social and to gain the self-confidence that I was lacking – so much so that I eventually rose to become President of the Fraternity where I used my position to begin to modify some of those “harsh” hazing practices.

But even more important, my membership in the Fraternity made it possible for me to meet a Sorority girl, one who was beautiful both inside and out, who would eventually become my wife and the mother of my children.

So, in retrospect, the decision to join the Fraternity that I thought would be a “bad” experience, turned out to be good not because it won me a date with the girl (which turned out to be “bad”) but  because it helped me to gain confidence and lifetime friends and started me down the path that led to the true girl for me.

Some Eastern Religious philosophies teach that assigning events in our lives to tags like “good’ or “bad” is a prescription for suffering because these ideas just cause us to fear events that may never happen in the future or lead us to disappointment when events do not bring us expected good fortune.

That is why Mindfulness meditation practices instruct practitioners to look at events in their lives objectively and unemotionally as neither good or bad. If we can detach ourselves from these tags then we can better focus on the moment and not expend energy wishing things were different or worrying about events whose outcomes can not be known.

Taking this approach to its logical conclusion, we should also consider death, not as the  ultimate “bad” event in our life and something to be feared – because we cannot know what lies on the other side. Maybe it will be good…

Life While-You-Wait

Ever since my favorite musician Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, I have made it a point to become familiar with the work of some of the past Literature Prize winners – which led me to discovering the poet Maria Wislawa Szymborska, the 1996 award recipient.

Szymborska was born in 1923 in a small town in Poland and came of age during her country’s tumultuous struggles against Hitler and then Stalin. During the war she received her education in underground classes and later obtained work as a railroad worker, illustrator, essayist and translator. She published her first book of poetry in 1949.

She lived in Poland her whole life becoming well known and beloved within her country, but it wasn’t until she was awarded the Nobel prize that her work became widely translated and known internationally.

The Nobel committee called Szymborska “the Mozart of Poetry” and her work is known for its economy of words and exacting personal standards. When asked why she had published fewer than 350 poems during her 63 years of writing , she said: “I have a trash can in my home”.

Poetry may not be popular today, but I think it plays an important role in helping to make the private world public, in enhancing our understanding of life and in unmasking the sentiments that often go unsaid. We don’t always realize what life consists of until poetry tells us.

An example of how a poem can provide a glimpse into the hidden essence of life is Szymborska’s poem “Life While-You-Wait” — a bittersweet reflection about how our destiny is formed from life’s string of unscripted moments and split second decisions made on the fly – without time to think about the consequences of our actions.

LIFE WHILE-YOU-WAIT

Life While-You-Wait.
Performance without rehearsal.
Body without alterations.
Head without premeditation.

I know nothing of the role I play.
I only know it’s mine. I can’t exchange it.

I have to guess on the spot
just what this play’s all about.

Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,
I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.
I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.
I trip at every step over my own ignorance.
I can’t conceal my hayseed manners.
My instincts are for happy histrionics.
Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.
Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.

Words and impulses you can’t take back,
stars you’ll never get counted,
your character like a raincoat you button on the run —
the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.

If only I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,
or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!
But here comes Friday with a script I haven’t seen.
Is it fair, I ask
(my voice a little hoarse,
since I couldn’t even clear my throat offstage).

You’d be wrong to think that it’s just a slapdash quiz
taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.
I’m standing on the set and I see how strong it is.
The props are surprisingly precise.
The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.
The farthest galaxies have been turned on.
Oh no, there’s no question, this must be the premiere.
And whatever I do
will become forever what I’ve done.

Like Shakespeare telling us that  “All the world’s a stage“, Symborska in this poem masterfully reminds us that our life is the ultimate Improv act because nobody knows the script, what role we will be asked to play or how the story will end.

Life comes at you fast and we have to quickly decide, without the benefit of rehearsal, how to respond to the daily events of our life that are unpredictable and often beyond our control.

The decisions we make on the fly often have lasting consequence and we don’t get a chance to edit the past as Oscar Wilde recognized when he wrote “No man is rich enough to buy back his past”.

I wish I could take back some days of my past. Those days when I know that I got it wrong and those moments I squandered because “stage fright” or “extenuating circumstances” kept me frozen.

I played the roles that were mine to play and I’m happy for a lot of the things I think I did right. But looking back I ask myself if I was too comfortable being a “supporting actor” when I instead could have had a starring role had I lived more boldly.

At my age I know that I have more days behind me than ahead of me, and even though there is no way for me to go back and change past regrets, I can remind myself that today is a new premiere and that what I do today “will become forever what I’ve done”; therefore I will do my best in the days left to make the non-consequential moments consequential and to make what I do worthy of remembrance.

 

“If your soul has no Sunday, it becomes an orphan”

While attending mass on Father’s Day at our Catholic parish I noticed frenzied activity occurring in one of the pews near the front of the church. An elderly woman had passed out during the service and it wasn’t long before a crew of veteran EMT professionals arrived at the church to care for the poor woman.

The attending priest temporarily stopped the service and asked the community to pray in silence while the EMTs tended to her. I was struck while praying for the woman that she was stricken on the church’s feast day of Corpus Christi – a day where the Gospel reading for the mass includes these comforting words:

“I am the resurrection and the life. The person who believes in me, even though he dies, will live. Indeed, everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” John 11:25-26

As they wheeled the gurney holding the unconscious woman away, I wondered to myself who would take her place in the pew next Sunday if she did not recover. It is something I increasingly ask myself as I witness the gradual decline in attendance at church and the disproportionately higher numbers of older worshipers attending mass relative to the number of young families.

A 2014 Pew Forum survey on church attendance confirms what I have been witnessing with my own eyes over the last 30 years.

• One-third (31%) of Americans report being raised in a Catholic household, but only about one in five (21%) Americans currently identify as Catholic (and only 15% of  young adults aged 18-29)
• For every new Catholic convert, more than six Catholics leave the church (nearly 13 percent of all Americans now describe themselves as “former Catholics.”)
• The median age of Catholics attending mass has increased to 49 years old
• The fastest growing religious segment is the unaffiliated – those who do not claim to belong to any religion. They now comprise about 23 percent of the total population, and an even larger 39% of young adults

A small segment of the unaffiliated were labeled “rejectionists” by the survey; these are people who do not practice religion and who agree with the statement “religion is not personally important in my life and as a whole religion does more harm than good in society.”

A larger portion of the unaffiliated portray themselves instead as “seekers“; people who acknowledge the virtue of religion yet claim they are “spiritual but not religious“. The survey concluded that “The bulk of the unaffiliated are not carrying on faith traditions or seeking different types of spiritual activity. Most don’t give a lot of thought to religion and God in general”.

It is not surprising that many young people are not attracted to the Catholic religion given the patriarchal and hierarchical organization of the church, the publicity surrounding the clergy sexual abuse scandal and the negative religious treatment of gay and lesbian people.

To be honest, there have been periods of time in my own life when disillusionment with Church policies and the pressing concerns and desires that comprise daily living resulted in me drifting away from the church and becoming a non-practicing Catholic.

After these brief times away, however, I always found myself returning back to the church when I realized that the other things I was pursuing in my life did not bring me the spiritual satisfaction that my soul was seeking and that it received from belonging to a Church community. In my experience, religious faith benefits the soul as education benefits the mind.

Albert Schweitzer, the famed theologian,  philosopher, physician and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize once wrote; “If your soul has no Sunday, it becomes an orphan“. I understand the sentiment he was expressing because I did not feel right when I stopped practicing my Catholic faith. I felt like something was missing, like an orphan without a home.

With the general decline in Church attendance, how will future generations learn the moral lessons that the church instilled in me from an early age? Lessons like those below that have guided my steps and provided me with a strong foundation for my journey.

• God loves us and the purpose of our existence is to know, love, and serve Him
• All people have dignity and worth
• We are called to be compassionate to society’s  poorest and most vulnerable
• God is merciful and forgiving – we should be too
• Look for the best in people and do not judge them
• Marriage is not just a legal agreement, it is a holy sacrament
• The virtues of humility, generosity, self-restraint, patience, kindness and diligence can overcome the sins of pride, greed, immorality, envy, over-indulgence, anger, and laziness
• Great value can come from adversity and suffering
• Death is not the end

These to me are the important lessons that I learned from being raised in the Catholic faith tradition and it is the people who live according to these teachings that are the true treasures of the Catholic church.

There are other ways to learn these life lessons outside of the church. I know this is true because some of the finest people I know did not grow up in a religious household and do not belong to a religious community – yet they are still a beacon of light and goodness.

I do not know how these remarkable people came to be the way they are, but it makes me hopeful to think that basic moral values are an integral part of the human spirit and that our hearts will be restless until we seek them out and find a way to give them a home either inside or outside an established religious community.

 

So, regardless of whether you are religious, non-religious, spiritual, or skeptic; my prayer for all of you is that you find what your soul is seeking – a good home.

“love that well which thou must leave ere long”

I was browsing a local magazine called Parable and I happened upon an article on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, written by Gary Bouchard, the Chair of the English Department at Saint Anselm College.

Because of the sonnet’s lyrical and artful meditations on love, death, and time, Professor Bouchard felt it to be the closest thing to the perfect poem that he had ever encountered. He asked readers to consider their own accumulating years, and those of their loved ones, and to read the Sonnet imagining that they were speaking to their parent, spouse, child, grandchild, or a dear friend as they were about to leave you.

Sonnet 73

by William Shakespere

That time of year thou may'st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by-and-by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire 
Consum'd with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Shakespeare, and the generations of humanity that preceded us, considered recognition of our own mortality as the beginning of wisdom. Sonnet 73 captures in a profound way the relentless effects time has on the physical body and  how the recognition of our inevitable death serves to strengthen our love for those we love most in the world.

The sonnet speaks not of the actual moment of death, but rather of a time just after sunset – when the sun has vanished – but there is still some light in the sky, a time when the cooling air alerts us to the rapid onset of darkness and when we know how quickly sleep; or death’s second-self might be upon us. 400 years later, Shakespeare’s kindred spirit Bob Dylan would refer to this period in life as the time when “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there“.

The sonnet also highlights the paradox of our physical existence. The very wood that fuels a fire become the ashes that choke it off. Just so in illness and aging, we are done in by the very things that once nourished us. The hips and knees that helped us run become our daily aches. The heart that kept us living for so long, becomes a source of worry as it weakens.

Everybody encounters sorrow. If you live long enough you too will be witness to the twilight fading and leaving of those you love – and when our own time gets near, we must say goodbye to all those we hold dear. It is during these times that perceptive souls will “love more strong” the people which we “must leave ere long“.

I witnessed the slow decline and early death of my wife to illness over a three year period and I can honestly say that during that difficult time together our love for each other did grow more strong and each good day toward the end felt like a precious gift.

Likewise, towards the end of my 87 year old father’s life, every meeting with him felt like it could be the last; and each parting embrace was thick with untold meaning and love between a father and a son that cannot be expressed in words – we would look deeply into each other’s eyes and he would say “Goodbye, my boy”.

We ought to treat each meaningful parting in our life as a kind of prayer. Especially if it is a leave-taking accompanied by illness and evident aging. No one knows when we will see the ones we love again.

Acceptance of the fact that that our lives will fade or are fading – like the leaves on the trees, like the light at the end of the day, like diminished flames – should deepen our gratitude for the great gift that is our life.