Turning 61

It was my birthday on Sunday 19th May. I turned 61. ‘You’re getting old!’ my daughters said. They spoke with laughter, but I detected in their voices some sadness and regret.

Later that morning, I was at church. It was Pentecost Sunday, commemorating the morning, fifty days after the first Easter when Jesus’ fragile and uncertain followers were energised by the welcome invasion of their whole selves by the Spirit of God. ‘It’s the birthday of the Church,’ said Duncan our minister.

If 61 is borderline old, the gentleman sitting in his wheelchair near the front of the church most Sundays is seriously old. He is clearly frail, yet his gentle face is radiant with the light of an inner joy. ‘You’re a sermon in yourself,’ I said to him, the words coming to me as I held his hand in greeting.

Inevitably when you reach your early 60s you look ahead, and wonder. Sometimes, when I take this forward look, I am afraid – of illness, of physical weakness, of the dementia which stole my mother’s mind in her final years, of death itself.

At this age also, you look back and discern in, or more likely impose, a pattern on the events of your life creating a story which makes sense of your existence.

I acknowledge that one key factor in my life has been the proneness to melancholy which has been part of me since childhood. This depressive tendency is very helpfully controlled by medication, yet it often makes its presence felt so that I see life through a lens of sadness.

The presence of this indwelling melancholy has meant that I have not made my way through life with confident passion and a consistently energetic vision. Life has often been a matter of simply making it through the day, taking life a step at a time, doing the next thing my heart seemed to call me to.

My guiding principle has been a commitment to choosing joy – believing, and reminding myself that the lens of my sadness distorts the landscapes of reality, and choosing not to heed the voice of melancholy, but to live in the light of joy I believe is always with me even though I do not always sense it.

But there have been many experiences of heart-deep joy. The joy of times when I have felt healed and whole; the joy which meets me in music, in words, in writing; in still summer evenings, in the love of my family and friends, in the sense that God is with me and God is good.

And I have been much blessed in life: blessed in the gift of wife and daughters, a fulfilling job, people who understand and accept me. Blessed by the God who is the anchor, the rock, the sustainer, the source of all joy.

I am never done asking questions about the Christian faith. There have been times when I have come close to walking away from it, and yet I have always found myself drawn back to affirm that something unique, something decisive took place that first Easter – that Jesus died, and rose from death – and that the Spirit came at Pentecost.

I have chosen faith as I have chosen joy, choosing to believe that whether or not on a given day or week or month I experience the reality of God, God remains with me.

I guess looking ahead into old age may be particularly challenging for those of us with a melancholy disposition. As for me, I simply trust that in the future as in the past I will receive from God the grace and courage to keep trusting God.

The day before my birthday Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks published a thoughtful piece in The Times. He wrote ‘To believe in divine providence is to trust that God is interwoven in our lives. This does not make suffering less painful. But it opens a door which leads us to the light. It helps us live a life that is an answer to God’s call.’

This means, says Sacks that the question we should ask in each situation in life no matter how difficult is ‘What am I now being summoned to do?’

As a Christian, I believe that strength both to ask that question, and to live the answer to it is found in God’s Spirit, the one who is perpetually giving birth. Each day, each minute is birthed by the Spirit, as is the moment-by-moment courage to choose faith, to choose joy, to be an answer to God’s call.

And if, when I am seriously old, the sermon of my life radiates just a fraction of the joy I saw in my friend on Pentecost Sunday, I will be well pleased. 

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 30th May 2013)