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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Problem of the Old is Sadness . . . But it may be a Fruitful Sadness

Problem of the Old is Sadness . . . But it may be a Fruitful Sadness

One of the most dismal aspects of modern life is the way we regard our old people; not just that we neglect them, and regard them as dispensable, but the degree in which we injure ourselves by this neglect.

We have to do without their help. We have to do without their knowledge of past events. We have to do without that burning sense of the nearness of God and the uselessness of all merely human constructions which lies in the hearts of a good many old men and women.

A very old monk was talking once to a novice. ‘I fast and pray,’ the novice said to him. ‘I keep obedience strictly. Sometimes it seems to me that our life here is just a desert of monotony. What comes next? What should I do to become other than I am?’

The old monk held up his hand. And the rays of the setting sun shone through the transparent flesh so that you could see the bones of the fingers. ‘If you want it with your whole heart,’ he said, ‘you can become all fire.’

Among us, I suppose the old monk would be superannuated. He would be labelled as an ignorant conservative if he didn’t cotton on to the new page 8 developments in the liturgy. Perhaps we will yet find a loophole in the Church’s teaching regarding euthanasia. Then we will hurry him on to the next world with the maximum of comfort and the minimum of worry. And we will have disencumbered ourselves of another saint.

I grant that not all old people are saints, though I still suspect there are many more among them than we will ever notice. The problem of the old is sadness. This was well-illustrated by a recent TV programme produced by Lord Snowdon.

It was a pleasure to know that Princess Margaret’s husband had not been submerged by the intricate ritual of our democratic royalty. He presented most sensitively the bleak nostalgias of those who do not have much more to hope for on earth. These old men and women were real people. And what struck me most about them was that they were not resigned.

Once I would have thought this a fault in them. But this was a shallow view. Why, after all, should they, who are still alive and capable of many experiences, fold their hands and wait for death just because this is the role we have designed for them? They want us to communicate with them. They want to communicate with us. The sadness of an ageing person may be a fruitful sadness.

It has been said that nobody can look at the sun or at death with the naked eye. They know that they will die; we manage to forget that we will, but never for long and never very completely. Their gradual and personal adjustment to the will of God can be for us an enormously valuable example.

I do not feel sorry for those among the old who have even a modicum of real faith in God. Why should I? In a few more years I will be in their company, unless God removes me from the scene earlier than I think likely. The time gap is too insignificant to allow feelings of special pity; and any element of condescension would be absurd. As the old are, so I will be.

My feeling is rather one of gratitude to certain old people whom I love, because they have been able to teach me a few things that I need badly to know.

As the insulation wears thin, and a man or woman cannot do all they once did physically, and the thoughts move more slowly (though perhaps at a deeper and less trivial level), and various physical pains are part of the daily process of things – as this happens attachment and obsession and irritability may grow stronger, and we wonder why the old are so intensely attached to what they cannot keep.

Perhaps it is because they cannot keep it that they care so much about it. Old age is the mediaeval part of life, the time when every crocus is new and bright, every word spoken by a friend is a treasure, simply because of the evanescence of earthly things. I have come to agree with Dylan Thomas’s request to his father:

page 9

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Old age should burn and rave at close of day.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. . . .

Old people can at last become truly themselves. Whatever true spirituality has lain in the heart, under the rubble of the world’s routine, will then rise and show itself. The old whom I know give me great joy because they are so much better than I am, though of course they generally consider themselves the worst of sinners. Through their pains God has taken hold of them; and we can see in them what they cannot see in themselves, the purifying power of the Holy Spirit taking charge of a soul that perhaps once resisted it or was indifferent.

It is the old of whom it is said in the Scriptures: ‘They shall mount up on wings like the eagles. . . .’

At the same time, there is room for a sympathetic sadness. The house of the soul that was once so well padded against the mercy-bringing disasters of God has holes in its walls now and leaks in its roof. The earth-rooted pagan in each man will resist the process of ageing until the end. And I think this is only right.

We are not mere passive clay in God’s hands. We human beings live to die; but it is our job, too, to fight to live, not despairingly, but to make use of the lives God has given us. Why pretend to be already in Heaven when we are still on earth? Our Lord dreaded death, though He knew He had no sins of His own to expiate. Why should not we, His brothers, dread death, too, acknowledging that God’s mercy will bring us through the dark river, but not denying for a moment that it is dark?

I fear a little for those among the old who are content with a sentimental spirituality that sees all things bathed in light, especially if that light comes from a stained glass window rather than from the Sun of the living and the dead.

Those pictures that Rembrandt made, in dark colours, showing the holy endurance of old peasants – how they delight me! These people had been weathered by life. The sign of the Cross was the only sign they knew. And how they put us to shame with our endless intellectual chatter and our arguments about the degree of authority that the hierarchy may legitimately exercise.

If that authority was wrongly exercised in the time of Rembrandt, it did not prevent his subjects from becoming holy. Perhaps in arguing about it we may forget to imitate them; and that will be our grievous loss.

The miseries of youth and the miseries of age have this difference – that the young are often buoyed up by a spurious moral hope. There is perhaps no young man who does not think he will be twenty times wiser and freer than his father, and no girl who is not convinced that she will be twenty times page 10 more successful than her mother in establishing an intelligent, harmonious home. It is quite natural.

To the young it appears that it is the vices and stupidities of others that prevent the world from becoming a fair imitation of paradise. But the old have learnt (unless they are incapable of learning) that it is their own faults which have always thrown life out of gear. They know they are not Christ betrayed by Judas but Judas betraying Christ.

This situation is more cheerful than it sounds; for the first view is an illusion and the second the only sound basis of spiritual growth. Perhaps I mean only that the young are often unconsciously arrogant and the old unconsciously humble.

The choices tend to narrow. I have heard it suggested that old men become either obsessional or saintly. Perhaps they become saintly struggling against their obsessions. These obsessions are of two general kinds – the obsessions of the flesh; or the obsessions of disappointed friendship and ambition.

It is true that quite a lot of old people are mercifully delivered from the pressures of concupiscence. The hope of this type of deliverance makes many of us regard old age as an expected sanctuary and refuge, our Mount Zion where at length we will be able to serve God in peace. But there is also the fact that degenerative changes in the body make self-discipline more difficult. The temptations of early youth may return again, just as brutal and discouraging, and the old person may cry out – ‘Why? Why?’ – to an apparently indifferent Creator.

This kind of obsession does not normally involve the will to any real extent. Its true character is one of affliction. I am thinking of those among the old whom we so mistakenly refer to as ‘dirty old men’ – people who may well deserve the greatest charity and respect, if the truth were known to us, because they are suffering a most intimate form of dereliction. It is a little different, however, with the obsessions of disappointment.

Old people have to pay for the faults of spiritual emphasis made in earlier life. It is the Marthas rather than the Marys who find old age an unbearable constraint, because their activism has been such as to leave no room for contemplation. This can be true even in the case of earnest Christians. And one of the saddest things in the world is to see an old person whose whole life has been absorbed in material ambitions suddenly left standing, with a death to face whose meaning he or she finds incomprehensible, without faith, without hope, without consolation.

There is nothing one can do about it except to be friendly and to pray. The doors of the soul have been shut from the inside. The windows have been boarded up. But God’s action does not cease or lessen; and no doubt in His mercy He uses the very pains of disappointment and loss as a means to waken the soul and turn it, however unconsciously towards Himself.

The case of the open-minded agnostic is quite different. I remember page 11 hearing an elderly man of my acquaintance say, after a member of some religious cult had called at his house and tried to convince him of his spiritual ‘errors’: ‘They’ve got no right to do it. If a man’s making his own way home, up a track that he knows, what right has anybody else to tell him he’s on the wrong track?’

And I must say I agreed with him heartily, and would still have agreed if his unwanted caller had been a Catholic. The human soul, if it is awake at all, has an instinct that turns it towards God as a life nears its end, though in ways which an explicit believer might fail to recognise. Yet the signs are evident – a greater gentleness, a reluctance to pass judgment, a troubled quietness that is not in any sense anguish but rather an inward struggle to sort things out.

We are sometimes deceived by the superficial appearances of extreme age, when the bodily faculties are in abeyance and the mental and spiritual faculties seem to have departed. We are deceived because we have forgotten what newly born children are like. The very old are being prepared by God for death, which is birth into his final kingdom.

I am subjectively certain that deep in the souls of those very old people whom we – poor foolish activists! – consider feeble-minded, the unhindered power of God is at work, moulding and simplifying such souls in preparation for that birth. When bulbs go under the ground in winter all that we can see is a few blackened leaves tossed and battered by the rain. But the life is not there. The life has gone back into the root. This is how I believe it is with the very old.

Nevertheless we must acknowledge that the old quite often exhibit to us a foretaste of the Resurrection. They can be such vivid people, if faith is strong in them – so free, so courageous, so unsentimental, so intellectually active.

When the Child Jesus was presented in the Temple, Simeon and Anna were there to receive Him and to rejoice in the coming of the Messiah. And the song of Simeon was not merely his own song of gratitude but the voice of a whole people speaking through the mouth of one old man. The souls of Simeon and Anna were the eagles of God, detached and charitable, afflicted and joyful, able to see Christ’s divinity under the equal reality of His humanity.

If, indeed as our melancholy atheists surmise, death were a final end and old age no more than the running down of a biological machine, how can this brightening, this strengthening, this late springtime of the soul be accounted for?

We saw lately the bright, benign, flexible strength of an eighty-year-old man shining on us from the Chair of Peter, before Pope John left us to go to the arms of his Master. It was a sign to us of the inward health and strength of the Church; and also a sign that youth and age both belong to God.

After Pope John’s death, a relative of mine wrote from England, and said page 12 that his manner of death had been a great consolation to her and freed her from all personal fear of death. ‘Old age is a marvellous time,’ she said (I cannot vouch that those were her exact words, but the next phrase is hers entirely) – ‘because the golden years are all ahead.’

The deepest problem of the old is most often loneliness. To an extent this is unavoidable, since many of their strongest friendships may be with people already on the other side of death’s river. They may have no difficulty in believing that those friends are waiting for them; but they cannot hold them by the hand and tell them that they love them and be consoled by them. To have friends among the dead can, of course, be a spiritual advantage.

I have often felt that my dead friends were a kind of spiritual bridgehead; that they made the prospect of death infinitely less formidable, since my eyes would open at the moment of that new strange birth to see their faces as well as the dazzling face of God. But there is another side to the problem of loneliness.

We might form guilds to visit old people who have no friends left on earth. We might do a hundred things. But none of these things will be a substitute for the communal life which our modern technological society is progressively destroying. When the old are sick, they go into hospitals where there are no familiar faces. When they die, they die in the company of nurses – or even nuns – who did not know them when they were younger and to whom they are up to a point strangers. To die among strangers is a sad thing. In the old pre-Christian communities it was regarded as a thing more terrible than death itself.

Let us look then at this society we are helping to manufacture. Never mind our technological achievements. Is our society, from a communal point of view, inferior or superior to the network of relationships that operate in an undeveloped African village? Do we share our crises with one another? Do we have the leisure and the spiritual capacity to help our neighbours through their emotional difficulties? Do we prepare for death as a communal as well as an individual event? Do we encourage our elders to share their dearly-bought wisdom with us? Do we step easily across the gap of generations?

If our answers to all or most of these questions are provisionally negative, then might it not be worth our while to be less fatalistic about it. Men get the society they deserve. If our pursuit of material security is making us neglect communal values, then let us slacken in that pursuit and try to build up true communities. I do not suggest that we should ever invade the privacy of the old. But let us keep them at the top of our list of potential friends.

Old friends are the best friends; and when we make friends with the old we may often be making friends with the friends of God.

1968 (564)