Learning To Let Go Of The Struggles And Embrace The Mysteries
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Unsplash photo by Tim Wildsmith.
(OPINION) Shortly I’ll celebrate another birthday. I’ve been writing newspaper columns since I was in my early 30s — which was so long ago I can hardly remember it. Pretty much every year along the way, I’ve tried to use my birthday as an opportunity to take stock.
I think about how or if I’ve changed over the previous 12 months, or 12 years, and ask myself why I’ve changed if I have, and imagine to what extent I might progress beneficially in the days ahead.
Here are my thoughts this year.
Firmly in senior citizen territory now, I find myself unattached to nearly all the things I thought were important when I was young. As I’ve said before, and as countless others have said before me, getting old seems to be mainly about letting go, about learning — slowly and unsteadily — to hold all things lightly.
You finally see that everything on Earth, including you, is momentary. As Isaiah put it, “The grass withers and the flower fades.” You see this because you’ve lived long enough to lose what you once held dear — childhood friends, health, jobs, family, maybe even your sanity.
You’ve seen wars start and end, presidents come and go, the hottest trends cycle around and fall from favor and then return a decade later.
You’ve discovered that half the truths you once held as inviolable, those truths on which you would’ve staked your life, turned out to be false — or at least they were embarrassingly simplistic. The good guys weren’t nearly as good as you thought, and the villains weren’t always so bad.
Truth becomes more nuanced in your latter years, less an either/or proposition than a yes/and. You find that opposing propositions can both be right at the same time. Your universe becomes more quantum than linear.
You find that in the end, it’s all a mystery anyhow.
The headlines don’t get you wrought up much. As the late John Prine sang in “Hello in There,” his classic song about an elderly couple, “All the news just repeats itself, like some forgotten dream that we both seen.”
But here’s a surprise: so far, I’ve found each of these revelations totally, wonderfully, joyously liberating. I wish I’d known all this 40 years ago. I could have saved myself and others around me a truckload of anxiety.
I grew up as the hyper-responsible firstborn child in a family steeped in legalistic, works-oriented religion.
What a relief to discover, even if the discovery came late, that I don’t have to fix everything. Or anything. Or myself, for that matter.
The world doesn’t depend on me.
To steal a line from Richard Rohr, the Catholic contemplative, I don’t need to defend my turf anymore, because I no longer have any turf to defend. The pressure is off. I don’t have to be right. I don’t have to be respected. I don’t have to win prizes.
One of my favorite answers nowadays is, “I don’t know.” And furthermore, I usually don’t even care.
This does make it harder to practice my two vocations, writing opinion columns and preaching sermons, because I no longer hold many opinions.
Most of the opinions I do express I intend to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. That is, I don’t mind to say, “This is what I believe about such-and-such.” Or, “This is how I’d probably handle that problem.” Or, “This is what the Bible says … to me.”
But those are only personal descriptions. I’m just explaining, “Well, this is how I see it, at this moment.”
I don’t think you should necessarily see it the way I do. Because I might be wrong. Probably I am. Your experiences and preferences may differ. However you choose to go about your life is up to you. God may be doing a different work in you. After all, he’s a great big God with a great many people to tend to.
I have no desire to write a prescription for your “right” path, even though I’m OK with giving you a snapshot of my own. Do with that snapshot as you will. Use it if it helps or ignore it if it doesn’t; I’m fine either way.
How much of this constitutes spiritual growth on my part and how much is common among the old, I can’t say.
I can tell you this: It sure makes me happy. Yeah, occasionally I lose my bearings and relapse into my old ways of trying to perform and fix and achieve, which always leaves me discontented and miserable for a while.
Mainly, though, I’m simply grateful for whatever health and life I’ve got left, grateful to meditate on the word of the Lord, grateful for the warm smile of my wife.
I’m happy to just be — to be whoever this is God has created me to be.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.