Turning 50

Ah, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now.
    - Bob Dylan, My Back Pages

I turned 50 today.

When I was 10, 20, 30 and even 40, it never really occurred to me that this was going to happen.  Fifty has always been something impossibly remote, something that happened to other people.

Not that I mind, really, waking up and understanding that it has, in fact, happened to me.  Turning 50 isn't like what I thought it would be.  

For one thing, once you're here, it doesn't really seem old anymore.  Not even as old as I felt at 44, when it first seriously entered my mind that I wasn't going to live forever. At 44 I found that my life was more than half over, and what had I accomplished?  What had happened to all the idealized hopes and dreams of 18?  Of 25? Was this all I could expect out of life-- to finish my years in middle-class ordinariness and obscurity?  And then, to actually, really die? 

It seemed kind of tragic at 44.

Now it seems almost comforting.  

I think the main thing about turning 50 is that sometime during the last five or six years, it stopped being about me.  What I accomplish as an individual just isn't what life is all about.  I feel now that I'm part of this whole thing that is God's world, still learning to seek first God's new-creation kingdom, but knowing that the bits that I contribute are just threads in a vast tapestry.  And the weaver is Christ, not me.

I still probably have quite a bit of time left, after all.  I'll finish raising my kids, and maybe someday (I hope!) I'll get some grandchildren to spoil.  I'll keep helping people with the paperwork to fix their legal problems.  I'll keep reading and blogging and learning and going to church, and watching the babies in the church nursery, and I'll keep going for walks in the woods and holding hands with my husband.  And I'll realize more and more as I travel from here how impermanent it all is.  And that will be ok.

I don't have to have all the answers anymore.  I don't even have to understand all the questions.

The book of Ecclesiastes makes more sense to me now than it used to.  For one thing, Gregory Mobley's book The Return of the Chaos Monsters: and Other Backstories of the Bible helped me understand that the word translated "vanity" in that text does not actually mean "meaningless":

[Ecclesiastes] is not saying that everything is without form and void of meaning. Rather, there is meaning and substance, to everything there is a season and a time, but we see through a glass darkly. . . Our apprehension of . . . the Great Plan is ephemeral and elusive. . . We can experience these exuberances, fleeting puffs of insight about, and engagement with, the Real, but we can neither possess nor control them. . . . [Chapter 6]

Mobley translates Ecc. 3:11 like this:

The entire thing [God] has made beautiful according to its time. Furthermore, [God] has given the [ability to comprehend] chronology in their hearts. Yet humans cannot discover what God is enacting from beginning to end. [Ibid]

Turning 50, I have gained enough perspective to know that I lack perspective.  I have felt, and firmly believe, that there is a pattern to it all, but it's enough to know this.  I don't need to see the whole pattern or how my threads fit into it.  I only know that they do.

And because of this, nothing I do is actually in vain.  We are put on this earth to help one another, to live interlocking lives within the pattern, and whether the help I give is visible is not important. What is important is that there's no such thing as an insignificant life.  There's no person, whether they live for an hour or a hundred years, whose thread God doesn't see as part of an entire, beautiful weaving.

This isn't to discount the ugliness of ugliness.  This isn't about pretending that people don't do horrible things to one another, and it isn't saying that God wants these things or that they have anything to do with God's plan (see for instance Jeremiah 19:5).  But in spite of these things, God's plan endures.  In spite of these things, the tapestry-weaving continues until the whole thing is complete.

I used to feel I had to "do great things for God."  Now I understand that doing small things for God can also be great.  I used to think I had to "get a mighty vision."  Now it's enough to "see in a mirror, dimly" and to know only in part (1 Cor. 13:12).  

But I'm also glad that people who are 10, or 20, or 30, don't feel this way.  I'm glad they want to have big visions and high goals and grand adventures.  Because God does call some of us to stand out, to be instigators of whole new sections of the pattern, and if no one would step into those plans, where would the pattern be?

What it comes down to is that we all need each other.  We need one-year-olds and 10-year-olds and 30-year-olds and 80-year-olds.  We need big movers and little shakers.  We need all the perspectives from all the places, in all colors, in all different types of thread.

Because it's not about any one of us.  It's about all of us.  

And that's what I see at age 50.  I wonder what I'll see when I'm 70. . . . 

My Birthday, My Faith Story

Today is my birthday. So today I'm going to talk about my belief in God, where it comes from in my life. I don't like to use the word "testimony" because that word is so commonly used as if it were a sort of sales technique, giving a testimonial as to how well the Product - Christianity - worked for you so that others will try it. That's not the point of this at all. I simply want, on this day that's important to me, to express myself about this thing that's foundational to my own life. And that's all-- no strings attached.

My parents went to church when I was very young, but later they stopped and became agnostics. I don't have any memories of meeting God in a church context at all before the age of 15. What I do remember, though, as a young child, is feeling that invisible Hands were reaching down to me in love. I remember asking my mother if she had ever felt this, and she said yes. I remember her singing to me, simple songs like Away in a Manger and Jesus Loves Me. I remember the pure, simple faith in her eyes, her voice. There was no coercion, no law, no hierarchy in my mother’s faith-- just love.

When I was a little older, my mother became convinced by intellectual arguments against Christianity and left the faith for a while. Years, later, she returned again to her earlier faith. She told me when I was grown up that she had continued to feel God's presence throughout her agnostic years. Every once in a while she would feel in her heart as if God were saying, “You’re being silly, you know. I’m still here.” In the end she listened to her heart.

However, by the time I was 8 or 9, both my parents were agnostic, and I was following firmly in my parent's beliefs-- or lack thereof. This ended abruptly when we visited Carlsbad Caverns when I was about 11. Looking at those huge caverns, so beautiful, which were there and had been beautiful before any humans even knew they were there, I had the sudden overwhelming conviction that there had to be a God. I can't explain it intellectually, really. It's just that it seemed absurd to me that something so awesomely, overwhelmingly beautiful was unintentionally so. I just knew that Someone had to have planned it, and Someone had to have enjoyed its secret beauty long before humans ever knew it was there. But that's as far as things went. I felt that there had to be a God. Whether it was the god of any particular religion, I had no idea.

When I was 15 my older sister came into my room one afternoon and said, "I've been studying and looking into it-- and I'm convinced that Jesus had to be who he said he was."

Well, I didn't know what to think-- but that shook me. My sister was someone I trusted, had always trusted implicitly. If she had come to this conclusion, then it was a reasonable viewpoint-- it couldn't just be nonsense. I had to find out for myself if there was something in it.

So I agreed to go to church with her. And when the service was over, there was an invitation to come to the front and be prayed for. My sister grabbed my hand (I wasn't at all sure I wanted to go, but I followed her), and we went to the altar. . .

And there was a Presence there. Unmistakable, overwhelming-- and It simply was there, being Itself, and what was I going to do about it?

There wasn't really a question of, "are you the same Being who used to reach down to me with invisible hands?" I knew it was. And though the Presence used no words (I still don't receive words, just impressions or deep"knowings" that I have to translate into words)-- if I could have translated what the Presence was communicating, it would have been "I Am."

Which, after all, is what was communicated to Moses so long ago.

Not that I thought about that. I didn't know the Bible. But I had met this Being at an altar in a Christian church, upon considering the option that Jesus might be who he had said he was (that is, the Son of God.) This was the same Being I had met as a child, here in this church. But I have never, then or now, been the type to rush headlong into anything. So I walked away, thinking about it. I still had a lot of questions about God and Christianity.

A week later, on Easter Sunday, I was back in church again. As we sang “Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” I felt the Presence again. I said, silently, to the Presence, “But I still have all these questions!” The very air seemed charged with fire as I felt God ask me, “Will you trust Me? Even with all your questions?”

“Yes,” I whispered. And my heart was changed. There are no words to describe what that felt like, except that I was set free of myself-- and somehow found my real self at the same time.

Weeks and months later, as I began to research and examine the questions I still had, I found answers that satisfied. Perhaps you would say that I was biased, at that point, towards theistic answers-- and I suppose that's true. But I found that the basics of Christianity could make sense to my mind and not just my heart.

It was only later that I was drawn into a coercive, law-based form of Christianity of hierarchy, control and submission. But when I finally freed myself of that, there was my old faith-- the faith of my mother, the invisible Hands of my childhood, the faith of my 15-year-old self -- waiting for me still.

So here I am, 48 years old today. Here we are, me and God. I doubt, from time to time-- as anyone must, who does not insulate themselves to never talk to anyone outside their faith community-- but I can no longer isolate myself that way. So I listen to everyone I can, as I would want to be listened to-- it is part of doing to others as I would have done to me. And sometimes when they see no sense in my faith, it shakes me. But still I am drawn to Christ like a moth to a flame. Still the beauty of Christ and Christ’s story sings in my deepest heart. In the end, I can no more deny it than I can deny my own soul.