This morning while making coffee, I became aware of an almost imperceptible glimmer of optimism lurking within me. I was only half awake, so my defenses had not yet reported for duty. I caught the feeling, held onto it for a moment, and felt a pulse of energy. I found myself taking a mental inventory of all the things I might do with this glorious day.
This optimism has not been my usual approach to life of late. Over the past months my energy and joie de vivre had buckled under the emotional load of the world’s many woes. I tried to remain above the fray and avoid the polemics in our church and country, but I lost my ability to listen charitably to differing opinions and thoughts. I lost any sense of kindness. Simultaneously, I was coming to terms with my own aging, as well as accepting illnesses in people that I love. I lost hope.
I couldn’t blog because blogging required gumption and digging deep. Then there were the post-blog anxieties to avoid…where I would continually check to see if anyone was actually reading it. The more hits it got, the more I felt like Sally Fields at the Academy Awards when she said, “and I can’t deny the fact that you like me…right now, you like me!” Oh, the ego bruising.
These past months I retreated to an interior room where I convinced myself that my advancing age gave me permission to dial down the passion and concern I felt for the culture wars roiling both in the church and society. I told myself, “You have done your bit. Let it go. Enjoy your grandchildren, take up drawing, and stay home and out of the fray as much as humanly possible.” I stopped listening to news, stopped blogging, and planted flowers. As life became more insular - more beige, I found myself attending Sunday mass out of habit but with little enjoyment.
Then lo and behold, a moment of grace happened this morning.
I define grace as an infusion of purely unmerited divine love. Writer Anne Lamott has a great take on grace: “I do not understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.”
I’m not convinced that this nugget of grace, which I seized upon this morning, is going to completely turn me around, or that my joie de vivre is back in perfect working order. But I know that my encounter with grace this morning left me in a different place than it found me. For the first time in months, I have written a blog. (I find myself hoping, now that I have confessed my egoic tendencies about “likes,” that in the future I will be able to take them with a grain of salt.)
Whether or not I return to a heavier news cycle or manage another blog post is yet to be seen. I do hope and pray that I won’t ever again use my age as an excuse to check out of life. Age has its perks. It comes to us at the intersection of years of experience and the delicious extravagance of time for deep reflection. I can enjoy grandchildren, draw, plant flowers, and still work for a kinder more compassionate way of life for us all.
Jesus assured us that God’s love is always both unmerited and unconditional. Sounds like a good place to start.
This is beautiful Clare. Getting pushed to the side as we get older is part of the process. Learning how to accept it with grace and understanding is the hard part.
God’s grace will get us through. We just have to recognize it in the small things.
Claire, what you blogged captured my experience also. Thank you for articulating it so beautifully. Each day is a new adventure to find hope, joy, and grace in the midst. Some days it is harder than others but it is a quest. I know some people have the privilege to walk the Camino, but I have had to learn the lessons right here in my home. What do I need to surrender? Who do I meet along the Way not in person but through the news, texts and emails? How do I receive them? Do I passover to their experience with an open or judging heart, allowing their experience to open my eyes, heart and hands or not? I am…
Relief! To hear you were only going through a spell; aging will do that..
We need you moments of grace so, slow down, dawdle with the grandkids, plant flowers (or cook, like i do). whatver you need, take it. Just dont give up on the rest of us who are also aging, frustrated by the snails pace (church, politics, whatever) and know that sometimes I realize I may not (probably wont) be around for the nezxt whatever and it catches my breath too. I want to be here now and then. So I will try my best to be here now, and pray for then.
... it looks like a yellow onion to me!
F.
Thank you for sharing this, Claire. I too am struggling with my once-loved joie de vivre and over the past few months, feeling like my sense of self is no longer important. Lots of questions have surfaced with few or no certain answers. I am happy for you that you gained that moment of grace and hope you will have many more. Do share when you do.
What I have learnt about my journaling is that I write not because I want to have it read. I write because I have something to say, something of mine which I will like to see in words. It’s part of my relationship with the universe, an exchange, like my breath when I…