About a dozen years ago I heard a Catholic therapist say on the radio that “aging is one of God’s gifts to us.” If at 75 we still looked as well and felt as well and could do all the things we could do at 25 equally well, none of us would ever be prepared for death. Instead, we get to see and feel and experience what is happening to us and are reminded every day that the end of our life is approaching.

I was thinking about that after watching the presidential debate last Thursday night. Seeing our President stumble through his prepared answers was deeply troubling. It was troubling because it created doubts about his ability to lead the country, but also because it forced us to think about our own possible future. To be fair, there are plenty of videos of Donald Trump losing his train of thought and failing to makes sense. And, to be fair, President Biden’s slow start may have been partially because of cold medication that he was taking. So, maybe there is nothing to worry about, but maybe there is.

It should not be a surprise that a man in his early eighties should have difficulty recalling facts quickly or find himself confused when the subject changes rapidly (How many elderly people do you see on Jeopardy?). Nor should we be surprised that an old person would not be as alert late in the evening (The debate started at 9:00 on the East Coast) than during the day. If President Biden continues to be a candidate for President and is reelected, the people who manage his schedule are going to have to be more realistic about his ability to bounce from one meeting to another and to bounce from one part of the world to another. The same is true if Mr. Trump is elected, since he is only a few years younger.

The debate brought to light a much deeper issue: our culture’s inability to honestly face aging, which is also a spiritual issue. The Jesuit scholar Walther Burghardt wrote a book called Seasons That Laugh Or Weep, which deals with the various stages of life. He points out that “We live in a culture that canonizes youth and beauty, activity and productivity, power and sexual prowess . . .  The only old age we accept in America is an old age without change or limits or loss. If this be ideal old age, it is a tragic ideal; for it is not our ordinary experience. . . . The point is, aging need not be an enemy. The Christian Scriptures will not accept the more classical idea that adult maturity is a finished state, that at a certain point, at the peak of physical and intellectual manhood or womanhood, you are the complete person, you have it made, you have reached perfection. No, life is an endless pilgrimage; the Chrisitan is a pilgrim, a wayfarer. The perfection of a Chrisitan man or woman is total conformity with the humanness of Christ—and that is a ceaseless process, never achieved here below. Essential to the pilgrimage is kenosis: you have to let go. For the journey to go forward, to move ahead, you have to let go of where you’ve been, let go of the level of life where you are now, so that you can move on.”

In their bookHarvest Us Home, Rea McDonnell and Rachel Callahan offer us an image of Christ to embrace as we deal with our own aging or the aging of loved ones. “Our society tends to discard the weak and powerless. Like Paul’s Corinthian community, many of us may find the powerlessness of Jesus just as much a stumbling block as did the first-century Jews, may find the weakness of Jesus just as much stupidity as did the first-century Greeks. Yet Paul wanted to preach Christ, not the wonderworker, but the crucified.  . . . We who build up our social credentials and powerful connections, boast of our wealth and fame, might prefer to be identified with the powerful Son of God rather than with the sweaty, tormented man from Nazareth stumbling on his way to crucifixion. It is hard to look on the powerlessness of God embodied in Jesus. Our looking away may stem from fear, even hatred of weakness in ourselves, our leaders, our God. We tend to dismiss the powerless. “Yet the foolishness of God is wiser than our wisdom and the weakness of God is stronger than our power” (1 Cor 1:25)

The point that both books are making is the aging is a school of letting go, We can either go along with the curriculum, or we can get stuck, idealizing the past and holding on to it tenaciously. As we look forward with some trepidation about who will lead our country for the next four years, we might reflect on the wisdom of one of our country’s founders, Benjamin Franklin, who even at an early age composed his epitaph: “The Body of B. Franklin, Printer, like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding, lies here, food for worms. But the work shall not be lost, for it will, as he believed, appear once more in a new and more elegant edition, corrected and improved by the Author.”

                           Fr. Joe