When I Am Old: Acceptance and Panic As Time Goes By.

“The glory of the young is their strength; the gray hair of experience is the splendor of the old.”--Proverbs 20:29

When I am old….

I’m not quite sure who wrote the supposedly inspiring line, “When I am old, I will wear purple!” but if I were them, I’d definitely add a few caveats.  Like, when I am old, I will wake up and feel pain in places previously pain free and then think, “What the hell is that?”

Or when I am old, I will read stuff about how folks much younger than me are thinking or living or doing in the world, and I will admit, “The world is not really mine anymore—and that’s ok.” Or, when I am old, I will finally and begrudgingly sign up for membership in the American Association of Retired People but then delete all their annoyingly daily emails without reading, because, hey, I’m not that old! Or, when I am old, I will meet for a yearly New Year’s reunion breakfast with the guys I hung out with in high school and then I will thank my God for blessing me with such good friends at that tender time in my young life. 

When I am old….when you are old.

It escapes no one, this aging thing, the clock of existence and time just ticking away, no way to turn back the hands. The truth is that the amazing and miraculous body and mind given to us by our Creator has an expiration date, a “use by” date. At some point, in the days ahead we will just not wake up one morning or we will take one final breath in our favorite chair while reading or at the end there might be hospice and cancer or maybe an accident and then that will be it. You get the picture. Accepting this fact of our mortality is, perhaps, the biggest part of getting old, the most challenging spiritual and emotional hurdle we leap over—or maybe just go around.  

Because aging either makes us panic or accept. Or more likely both.

Panic and do kind of stupid things like Botox injections or dating well below your age (that’s just creepy) or dressing ‘young’ and still looking old, or resenting the young because they don’t believe what we believe so let’s just make sure they won’t get their chance to run the world. Won’t get power until they pry it out of our wrinkled, knobby, blue-veined hands. Talking about you Election 2024! And you too, Rolling Stones….are you still rolling!?!?

Aging gives us the grace to accept just where we are at, to make peace with age, actually thank God for the gift of our maturation, our ripeness! “My name’s John and I’m 63 years old!”  “HI JOHN! Welcome to AA, Aging Anonymous.”

Recently I was with a group of old friends and colleagues, all of us thinking about and trying to figure out this whole aging thing, what it means for us spiritually, our relationship with each other and God. This gang of clergy—who have served churches, and colleges and hospitals and at home; we have met two to three times a year for almost 30 years now. There’s a gift of aging with old and dear friends. They love us in spite of ourselves and because of ourselves.  They’ve stuck around to be witnesses to our lives.

My friend Sarah said that aging is about both knowing more and knowing less. Knowing more because of life and professional experience but also knowing less and facing into the complexity of life not with hubris but instead humility.  Aging can teach us that there is often more wisdom in saying “I just don’t know” rather than insisting “I absolutely do know!”  

When I am old…when you are old.

Beyond wearing purple, what might God be telling you to do, with the precious God-given time that you have left on this beautiful and broken blue marble spinning in space? For no matter what our age, God is always inviting us to ask ourselves, who will I be in my time, and for this time, with God’s gift of finite time?   

The adventure of aging is finding the answers to those question.         

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.