Souls in Full Sail E-Book

Emilie Griffin

• Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 253

Beschreibung

"We do not set out to become old. Far from it. We hardly intend even to become middle-aged. Instead we plan to live in some eternal now which will lead on to something better, something more complete than what we had before. . . . Sometime in our spiritual travels, as a complete surprise, we notice it has become winter. . . . This change has occurred, it seems, without preparation, without fair warning."So spirituality writer Emilie Griffin begins, taking us on an exploration of our later years. It is a book filled with wonderful, rich story, carefully crafted spiritual exercises and wisdom from those who have gone before us. She explores relocation, vocational changes, losing her mother, and negotiating and renegotiating her relationships with her grown children.The journey of our later years is a wondrous voyage, though turbulent at points. But it is, as Emilie Griffin reminds us, the journey we have been preparing for all along.

Leseprobe

Souls in Full Sail

A Christian Spirituality for the Later Years

Emilie Griffin

www.IVPress.com/ books

InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400 Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426 World Wide Web: www.ivpress.com E-mail: [email protected]

© 2010 by Emilie Griffin

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website at www.intervarsity.org.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Jerusalem Bible, copyright ©1966 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd. and Doubleday & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Praying and Hosanna magazines, in which portions of this material appeared in slightly different form. Some portions of this book previously appeared in the author’s work Homeward Voyage, © 1994 by Emilie Griffin.

Design: Cindy Kiple Images: © Bkaiser/Dreamstime.com

ISBN 978-0-8308-6838-4 (digital) ISBN 978-0-8308-3548-5 (print)

For William

and for Lucy, Ardis and Avery

Henry and Larisa

Sarah and Troy

Contents

Preface

1: Setting Out

2: Good Sailors

3: The Far Horizon

4: The Spiritual Life

5: Night Fears

6: Churchyards

7: Weaving Family Rituals

8: A Different Wisdom

9: Eastering

10: Homeward

Notes

Formatio

About the Author

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

Preface

On a certain day in June 1993, I realized that my life was about to change. Radically. It was the first or second day of June, a weekday, and my husband, William Griffin, and I, both writers, had been invited to address a women’s group at the Orleans Club (pronounced “Or-lay-on”). This imposing mansion with high steps, on upper St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, has a full auditorium and a fine complement of refreshments and service. It was an elegant day of blazing sunshine, a successful day in most respects. But my mother wasn’t there.

She was eighty-one, and a celebrated person in New Orleans, known as a businesswoman and entrepreneur who had founded three companies and still remained current on the tourism and literary scene. Many people called her “Helen,” as I did. Others called her “Mrs. D.” Our on-stage presentation was the sort of event she would truly enjoy, and I felt sure (I had talked to her by telephone the night before) that she would be there. When she failed to appear, the morning event went on as scheduled. Various women noticed her absence; she was a favorite guest at any occasion. My husband and I made light of her not being there. But I was concerned. I telephoned her, only to learn that she had had a sequence of seven falls. She had been unable to get to her front door, let alone to her car.

I moved in with her that day and spent the next year as her caregiver, assisted by the able and competent Edith Johnson, who was employed by my mother and us on a full-time basis. Edith had cared for my grandmother in her last illness. When my grandmother died in 1979, my mother continued to employ Edith as a companion and factotum. In 1980, when our family moved from New York City to New Orleans, Edith Johnson divided her time between my mother’s household and ours. Six months after the Orleans Club day my mother moved into our home on Prytania Street, where she remained for another seven months until she died.

My mother had been in frail health for twelve years. In fact, my husband and I and our children had moved to New Orleans because of her. In 1980 she had a brush with death. Because a concerned doctor made a house call, realized the severity of the situation and put her into the hospital for a blood transfusion, she survived. And we decided to relocate.

But once we had arrived in New Orleans, my mother, who was then sixty-eight and the chief executive of three businesses, seemed to make a marvelous recovery. For a dozen years, in spite of her disability, she continued with the things she loved—and being the person we loved.

I was forty-four the year we moved. The move was prompted by my mother’s frailty, but I didn’t think of it as a time to focus on mortality. No, instead I concentrated on our joyful reprieve. I was grateful for it. I was turning over a new page, opening a new chapter. I began to redevelop my life in a new setting, with different objectives. One of these was to cultivate a friendship with my mother on renewed terms of enthusiasm. I made new friends, reconnected with old friends. I got to know my husband better. And I tried, while working full time, writing books and studying theology at night, to be a good mother to our three teenage children.

And on the day when my mother couldn’t come to the Orleans Club, I was fifty-six. Twelve years had passed. How was it that I had not known, through more than a decade, that on a certain day, perhaps just a morning, everything would change?

Until then, I had felt that my mother was still in charge, because she still had such a presence and power in all circumstances. She was old, but who would have guessed it? She had such charm and authority. She radiated all the best qualities of youth and old age. But all at once, almost in one day, it seemed, I was in charge and had to move into high gear to take responsibility for her.

Other things were changing as well. Our children—Lucy, Henry and Sarah—had grown up. They were finishing college, choosing their life work. Their lives were becoming disengaged from ours. Our work lives were also changing. For a decade I had held salaried positions, both for my mother’s firms and for three New Orleans advertising agencies, where I worked as creative director and held executive roles. But now I was self-employed, building a freelance practice and intending to write books, lead retreats and focus on the spiritual life. My husband had been a freelance writer and editor for more than a decade. This new flexibility, I felt, would make sense for the years ahead.

We were getting older, and we knew it. My mother’s increasing charm and frailty were mirrors of our future. It was time to consider not so much the life journey as the end of that journey. My husband and I had been married for thirty years. My mother and I seemed to be linked; my husband traveled with us, but following at a slight distance, like a consort ship. I knew that his parents had died; no doubt he had already made the passage that we were making.

The Sea Voyage

So I came to write about the later years, my mother’s and my own. But as a spiritual writer I wanted to interpret the late-in-life passage for everyone. I wanted to voice my fears about change and also the strengthening power of the spiritual life.

I began to search for a central metaphor that would convey our life passage, the stretch just ahead, the later part of the journey. Something new was happening, starkly different from what had gone before. It was time to cut loose from what had mattered up to now. I thought: It is a voyage, but there is no map, no clear style of navigation. We have settled, figuratively at least, into our deck chairs; we have pulled the blankets up against cold and the ocean spray. We are both the passengers and navigators for this late-in-life adventure.

Ours is a reading from the book of Wisdom:

Or someone else, taking ship to cross the raging sea,

invokes a log even frailer than the vessel that bears him.

No doubt that ship is the product of a craving for gain,

its building embodies the wisdom of the shipwright,

but your providence, Father, is what steers it,

you have opened a pathway even through the sea,

a safe way over the waves,

showing that you can save, whatever happens,

so that even without skill a man may sail abroad.

It is not your will that the works of your Wisdom lie idle,

and hence men entrust their lives to the smallest piece of wood,

cross the high seas on a raft and come safe to port.

Why, in the beginning even, while the proud giants were perishing,

the hope of the world took refuge on a raft

and, steered by your hand, preserved the germ of a new generation for the ages to come. (Wisdom 14:1-6)

So, I hope to explore a Christian spirituality for the later years. The metaphor of a sea voyage really suits this uncharted territory, the uncertainty of what lies ahead. God is my guide as I steer into the unknown.

Considering the Hope of Heaven

At the same time I mean to examine the Christian hope of heaven, a promise I believe in. In various chapters I will voice my doubts and distress at the limitations of this life, the diminishment of the body and the constrictions of time. Yet I want to be open with you. I have fully embraced the Christian faith, with its promises of glory and resurrection. I am writing not to overthrow or challenge these great teachings but rather to take hold of them, as C. S. Lewis did, to see them in new ways, to clothe them in new language and new metaphors.

This book takes for granted the truth of Christianity and its promises. The wrestling you will find on these pages comes from my own need to surrender, to come into a place of peace. I need to accept my own death and the death of those I love. At the same time I sense a deep joy in existence, a world continually speaking to me of the blessing of existence, the wonder of the natural world and of beauty in all its expressions.

I write to celebrate the truth of things, not so much by giving answers as by asking questions. I draw clues and inspirations from the Bible, from poets, from the wisdom of my own family and friends, from scholars now and then. As you will soon see, the book does not proceed in a linear way. Sometimes the journey moves forward by raising questions and voicing doubts. Sometimes it comes to a still point, exploring the immediate and present moment. These reflections should be read slowly and prayerfully. At the end of each chapter I suggest some spiritual exercises for the later years. Questions for discussion will follow each chapter.

In behalf of nautical and seagoing metaphors, I offer these words from Virginia Woolf:

For this is the truth about our soul, . . . our self, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies her way among obscurities, threading her way among the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, and inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports in the wind-wrinkled waves.

Why have I felt such an attraction to the metaphors of navigation and seagoing journeys? I will explore this too, to the extent that I understand it myself, as these reflections unfold.

Though it draws on personal memories, this book is not quite a memoir. It is an extended meditation, a Christian reflection on getting older. I write these thoughts not as instruction, nor as analysis, but rather as a way of coming to terms with my own history and my future, in hopes that others will also be strengthened for the journey.

On September 9, 2009, I led a discussion for a women’s group in Alexandria, Louisiana, which focused on spiritual life. At this September meeting the text in question was C. S. Lewis’s sermon “The Weight of Glory,” first preached at St. Mary the Virgin Church in Oxford, England, in 1941. As I prepared for the discussion I realized how much Lewis had shaped me over a lifetime. Among many influences, Lewis had been primary. His words and imagination had kindled in me a lively hope of heaven. “The Weight of Glory” does that. I’m not sure quite how. One way is by wrestling with the promises of faith. Lewis questions the old metaphors of the resurrected life. He questions them. Then he embraces them.

During my preparation I thought of another way Lewis has helped me. He had shown me how a lively faith may move from one generation to the next, through mentors and teachers, relatives and friends, spiritual kinfolk, all. Inspired by Lewis’s accounts of his own faith life, I write to pass on the tradition as it was given to me, but in the language chiefly of my own generation.

Like Lewis, I was blessed with a love of the “old writers,” including George Herbert, John Donne, Henry Vaughan and John Milton. You will see their influence in this book. Also, I cannot fail to mention Mildred Gayler Christian, my professor of English at Newcomb College, Tulane University. She taught me to be unafraid of seventeenth-century spelling and punctuation, entranced by the poetic depth of the metaphysical poets, challenged by the richness of Paradise Lost, by the height of Milton’s imagination and the sweep of his narrative line. Reading deeply in the old texts, I was enlivened by the faith of an earlier time and wondered how and when the fire of it would skip over the chasm of centuries to us. Ultimately I saw how important these writings remain. I am fearless about quoting them now and again. This book reflects my own twenty-first-century faith and the influence of those older writers who remain pervasively influential in our time.

Since 1993, when some of these reflections were first written, I have myself been navigating the later years.

My Mother’s Death

Probably the most significant event was my mother’s death in July 1994. No matter how much I had anticipated this change, the blow hit me hard. I must have supposed that if I had tried a little harder, cared for her a little bit better, she would not have died. I had a hard time letting go of her presence in my life, and the greatest sign of that, I think, was my inner signal to telephone her every evening. At last, after some years, it began to fade. But that inner signal was just one evidence of the closeness we had.

Dr. Howard Russell, who had been her doctor and understood many of my mother’s ideas about death, tried to console me. “I hope you know how well you have done,” he said. Just hours after my mother’s death he wanted to praise me for my strong commitment to her care. His words were comforting, but not at first. It was years before I could remember them and accept them.

One thing I remember about her passing: the notes she left behind with instructions for how we were to mourn. She asked for a “Gilbert and Sullivan funeral,” creatively organized by the Griffins. What in the world did she mean? How could we respond to one of her last wishes?

In my view her request for a Gilbert and Sullivan kind of mourning had something to do with the cheerful confidence of her faith. It wasn’t so much that she loved Gilbert and Sullivan’s many light operas. She was sending us a message, to celebrate her life, to be joyful and not saddened by our memories.

During one of several funeral services, our son, Henry, honored her Gilbert and Sullivan request. He made a recording of instrumental Gilbert and Sullivan tunes. And he played it for the assembled mourners. While it was playing he gave a charming recollection of his grandmother and her influence on him. He really captured the high imaginative style of her personality. Everyone was touched.

Since then, our lives have changed. My children have left home and married. My husband and I moved from the house on Prytania Street (often mentioned in these pages) to another house on Cadiz Street in uptown New Orleans. We were dealing with many unforeseen circumstances and lived in the Cadiz Street house less than two years. Within a year, our older daughter, Lucy, invited us to move closer to her in Alexandria, Louisiana, and we accepted gratefully. So we sold the Cadiz Street house and then moved to Curtis Drive in Alexandria.

We have lived a decade in this new location. I have been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a disease which has slowed me down a bit, but hasn’t defeated me. Now I walk more slowly, and I use a cane. But I continue to write, to travel and to speak. I have been grateful for the grace to continue doing the things I love. Especially, I am grateful to my husband, William Griffin, for his constant support. He makes it possible for me to continue in my work and to transcend obstacles of illness to the extent that I can.

“You look great,” people tell me. And I believe them.

Some of the reflections in this book were prompted by the impending death of my mother. Others were written later. We have outlived her. Yet her presence and influence remain. Since her passing in 1994, many other, and younger, friends have died. I do not always mention them by name. But they are part of my consciousness—and my need to cling to the Christian hope of heaven.

Souls in Full Sail

In a very short and very wise book on the spiritual life, Abandonment to DivineProvidence, I find these riveting words: “The present moment always reveals the presence and the power of God.” The author of this small treatise helps me to conceive a spiritual destination: to let the wind of the Holy Spirit carry me forward till my soul is in full sail. How amazing to feel so connected to an eighteenth-century French Jesuit. We are centuries apart but of the same mind. He weaves together a spirituality of the immediate moment with the theme of advancing in the journey. He chooses the figure of a voyage. “Our souls steadily advance, never halting, but sweeping along with every wind.” Such a lovely objective: souls in full sail. “Every current,” writes Jean Pierre de Caussade, “every technique thrusts us forward in our voyage to the infinite.”

I continue in the voyage, looking for a Christian spirituality of the later years.

1 Setting Out

The Surprise of Getting Older

We do not set out to become old. Far from it. We hardly intend even to become middle-aged. Instead we plan to live in some eternal now which will lead on to something better, something more complete than what we had before. This movement from present to future is a sequence that can hardly be orchestrated. Instead it has to be lived. Cultivating simplicity, we confront the mystery of how things happen, of actual occasions, droplets of time and experience flowing past the sides of the ship as we knife forward into dark seas, seas without a map. We stand at the bow and feel the lurch and the swell. The sea is in our faces. We move, not knowing how, from one zone to the next.

Sometime in our spiritual travels, as a complete surprise, we notice it has become winter. The waves crashing over the deck are icy cold and gray. For the first time we know we are not going to become old; we are, without perhaps fully admitting it, already old. Youth and middle age are behind us. This change has occurred, it seems, without preparation, without fair warning.

My friend John Chase was a humorist. “The reason why I’m not doing so well at being old,” he said in his eightieth year, “is that I don’t have any practice.”

But haven’t we been preparing all along? Haven’t our lives up to now given us some kind of practice?

Loving Old People

The people I first loved were old. Their faces were creased and lined, crisscrossed by cobwebs of experience. Even so, they were mostly merry. My grandmother’s eyes were brown; her style was mischievous. My great aunt, my grandmother’s younger sister, who was almost as close to me, had eyes of china blue. Gray-haired when I first knew them, they gradually went white. A dignity, there from the first, grew sharper and more definite. What I remember most about them, however, was laughter.

So in the daily round of childhood, the routines of mornings and evenings, my grandmother Lucy and her sister Eula became my evening stars, my bright example of being old at its best. I thought they were old. In fact, they were women in their early sixties then. They were able-bodied, energetic, vigorous. Yet they were people of a time gone by. They could remember how things had been once, in some former era I longed to hear about. They were charmers, spellbinders, storytellers. I loved to hear them talk, and their talk was always intermingled with a kind of prayer. They were the ones who taught me to pray, intertwining prayer and storytelling at bedtime, in a way so enjoyable I hardly ever wanted it to end. But more than that, they taught me prayer by example. Each morning they devoted time to Bible reading; at any time in their conversation, it seemed, a Bible saying could slip naturally in.

My mother went out to work. Along with my father, she was one of the breadwinners. My grandmother Lucy, whom I called Nui, was my primary caretaker for that reason, the one who was there when I fell or scraped myself or got in trouble somehow. A great intimacy came about because she was always there. Eula, who lived just a few blocks away, taught me to read when I was too young for school. Eula was a schoolteacher who believed in early reading. She herself had learned to read at age four, bored because her older sisters and brother were at school. While her mother did the mending and handwork, Eula sat nearby, coaxing her mother to teach her the alphabet, and scrawling the letters with a piece of slate. She was determined! Because Eula opened the world of reading to me, and the world of spiritual life, she became a lifelong friend.

What literary people they were! I remember how much both Nui and Eula loved nursery rhymes and loved to read them with me. It was part of the Englishness of my growing up. Admittedly, we had been Americans for many generations. (My first American ancestor, John Ogden, had come from England in 1640.) But in some ways my family retained an English sensibility, a link with the past, with generations of people handing things down: thimbles, traditions, family stories, customs, loyalties, ideals. I remember sitting next to Eula on her upstairs porch, flooded with love and sunshine. She taught me how verses galumphed; she made it exciting to read. I remember vivid moments: wicker porch chairs with chintz-covered cushions, frosty glasses of root beer, a china sugar bowl shaped like a pig, Dick and Jane seeing Spot run. I remember straining to form words in my mind; I remember breakthroughs, light dawning. Many years later I saw it all happen again, when my own children learned to read, their small faces bending close to the page, frowning to work out words from baffling letter squiggles. Most of all I remember the triumph, the joy: Eula’s, my children’s, my own. Learning to read set us loose on an adventure of mind and heart.

Still another white-haired figure was my cousin Lalita Tenney. Lalita was a nurse. And she was exotic, foreign, having been born in Belize. Lalita spoke English with a Spanish accent. Around her cheerful face was an aureole of white hair under her starched white nurse’s cap. When I grew old, I wanted to look just like her. I am told she took care of me when I was an infant, in Touro Hospital, New Orleans, where I was born. I don’t remember that. What I do remember is that she nursed me through pneumonia when I was hospitalized at age nine.

I remember clouds of moisture on the plastic walls of my oxygen tent, sealing me away from the world. I remember the fear. I remember taking penicillin (an experimental drug in those days) around the clock. Also I remember Lalita’s golden smile breaking over me like morning.

So began my fascination with older people; and the fascination grew. I spent many hours with my older relatives: long enough to notice that old men colored their hair with funny-looking tints; long enough to notice the tight, artificial blue-gray curls that old women wore home from the beauty parlor; long enough to notice the eccentricities of the old, little lapses of memory (“Now, where did I put my glasses?” “Wasn’t my shopping list right on this table?” “Let me see, what was it I came in here for?”).

Perhaps not every child is so surrounded with grandmothering and grandfathering figures. (Among the grandfathering figures, I have a sudden vivid picture of my paternal grand­father, E. G., dapper in his straw hat, three-piece suit and high-top shoes; and Eula’s husband, Oscar, a university economics professor, generally at work among his books or deep into the newspaper.)

Loving Old Places

I was an only child, bookish, thought to be gifted, often lonely. I learned to amuse myself with crayons and paper, with modeling clay and blocks, with books most of all. I loved old places and the formality of the past. Often, because my mother worked and was, for much of my childhood, a single parent, she took me with her to places where she was on assignment. In this way I became the one child most in attendance at meetings of the Louisiana Historical Society, where almost everyone was old.

The meetings were held at the Cabildo, one of the historic government buildings of New Orleans, beside the St. Louis Cathedral, near Jackson Square. In the Sala Capitular, where the society often met, the Louisiana Purchase had been signed. In an adjoining room was a death mask of Napoleon, and the walls were lined with portraits of the early Spanish governors of Louisiana.

To me, the building and the society’s members both seemed ancient. The Cabildo’s staircase, with its wide steps, was sinking into the soft Louisiana earth. The structure seemed none too secure, it smelled of mildew and the past. Child of the imagination that I was, I loved it all. In this place I could walk into some bygone time. Raised in the English tradition, I was drawn by the French and Spanish past, dazzled by flags hanging high in the old cathedral. Here it was possible, like children in storybooks, to travel back in time.

So, in this way I came to cherish old age. To me, older people were bearers of a colorful past, heirs to the customs of another time. Mrs. Henry Landry de Freneuse I remember as my earliest example of what it was to be Creole. I remember her in formal black dresses, wearing a lace mantilla, a fringed Spanish shawl, pearl-decorated combs, using a fan. Later, when I discovered Jean Giraudoux’s play “The Madwoman of Chaillot” I knew that I had met his madwoman and her cohorts before. It was at the Louisiana Historical Society.

Perhaps the most glamorous event of all was the gala banquet held on the evening of January 8 each year at Antoine’s Restaurant to celebrate the American victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. In those days few children attended this formal affair; I was one of them. It was hard to stay awake through the long-winded formal speeches with their endless repetition of the well-known facts about the Battle. But I loved the ceremony, the formal dress with decorations, the Spanish and French national anthems played by string ensembles. I felt that I was at the center of an ancient, noble and cosmopolitan culture. Everyone there, except my mother and me and one or two others, was honorably, visibly old. So in my storybook way I fell in love with old age, in the same way that I seem to fall for lost causes and forgotten heroines.

Secrets to Tell

The old have secrets to tell us, if we only could learn to listen. Children and the old have something in common. God is very fond of them! The Bible leads us to believe that God protects and loves those who are most vulnerable, showering special gifts on them. Children and the very old are in cahoots. They are in possession of secret codes to the meaning of existence. That is why (no doubt you have noticed) they get on very well.

When I was nineteen I played an old lady on the stage. I was Mrs. Hardcastle in a college production of Oliver Goldsmith’s eighteenth-century comedy She Stoops to Conquer. I loved acting, but more than that I loved becoming old in my imagination. I moved easily into Mrs. Hardcastle’s vanity, her gossipy ways, her badgering, her ridiculous flirtations. I learned how to punctuate her funniest remarks with a flutter of her outrageously large fan; I learned how to settle onto a bench with arthritic discomfort and ill ease. Mere slip of a girl that I was, I enjoyed becoming old.

I remember being made up for the role and seeing the lines traced onto my face by an expert makeup artist. He explained to me as he did so where the shadows should fall and how the muscles of the face would change as they grew old. I smiled at him while he educated me.

However much we flirt with it, teasing and pretending our way through such a life change, we do not in reality want to be old. Yet our future is calling to us. I remember thinking (when the time came) what a grand old lady I would be; I coveted the beauty of old age; what I wanted was the peace, the charm, the wisdom, the surrender that certain old people seemed to possess.