Loving Age

Dear All,

We are developing an alternate conception of the aging process.  It is not one of ascent and decline but rather what Elizabeth Bishop called, "endless, endless assent."

The light poems of later age, which Seamus Heaney wrote about, the later Yeats for instance, the cut-outs and images of the older Matisse, all radiate the lightness of the Tibetan monks who throw off forms and traditions like confetti.

For our central meditation this week, we've been looking at the lesser known of those two annunciations in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke, the one to Zacharias and the one to Mary.  When Zacharias rejects the angel's announcement about Elizabeth's unlikely pregnancy with John the Baptist, Gabriel's first response is to prove the truth of what he has foretold, not (as we would) by appealing to any outward evidence, by declaring who he is: I am Gabriel, who stand in the presence of God.

A possible use of the ever-increasing spiritual energies of age is to notice that the world is proved, guaranteed, underwritten, not by its physicality but by its word-likeness.  The reality of yourself, and of the apparently physical world, and of anything at all, lies in its being the declaration, the word, of a being or beings. 

May we all age so as to know this more and more frankly.

all blessings to all,

Michael