G’Day Fear – My Old Friend

I happily belong to a suite of personality styles that have developed lifelong strategies against focusing on fear as their constant background noise. Hence, when Joan Chittister identifies fear as a theme that confronts the adventure of ageing, I am in familiar territory.

The experience of a diminishment of mental, physical and financial capacity is indeed something I carefully watch and monitor. The exercises and engagements I employ, however, have a life and meaning within themselves – they are not merely the means of holding off the inevitable disintegration of capability. Accordingly, I continue to engage with deep-level work in pastoral and spiritual care for which I am trained and called. In retirement, I still meet with and serve a range of individuals, groups, and communities. Several continue to require administrative and organisational skills and a need to keep up with technical developments. Cognitively, socially and aesthetically the world continues to spread before me and I am enriched (and hopefully enriching)

What I must continually discern is how much of this is living the meaning of such engagement compared with shouting defiance into the wind of looming decrepitude. I have seen too many instances of old warriors refusing to hand over responsibilities to their successors, grimly protecting their decaying citadels.

I am grateful to be part of a group of peers who are alert to both the risks and opportunities of this phase in life and are adept at calling one another out.

Chittister summarises both burden and blessing for fear.

A burden of these years is that it invites the possibility of giving into the fear of invisibility, of uselessness, of losing our sense of self and human obligation. Fear tempts us to believe that life is over – rather than simply changing.

A blessing of fear in these years is that it invites us to become the fullness of ourselves. It comes to us in the nighttime of the soul to tell us to rise to new selves in fresh and exciting ways – for our sake, of course, but for the sake of the rest of the world, as well.

The word of Jesus centres me well when he says “… unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24 NRSV)

This is the antidote to fear.

George McDonald puts it this way, “Age is not all decay. It is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within that withers and bursts the husk.”