Dear Friends,
One of our Sisters, Melita Burley, is in her sunset years. Back in the 1960’s, she and I taught at St. Agnes High School. One snippet from our many conversations which has never left me was her appreciation of the month of November. Finally in November, she mused, we have a chance to see the shape of trees without the mask of leaves.
Poetic and true. Some of the people you and I know and love are also in their sunset years and reveal the shape of their lives as their own leaves drift away. Their beautiful faces are marked by laugh lines, suffering borne, courage remembered and God ever present. All true, but there’s so much more in our friends and others who are moving on. The psychologist James Nelson gives us an insightful image when he says “Aging brings out all sorts of contradictions in human nature. You become unpredictable…all seven dwarfs at once.” Which of the dwarfs seem to be asserting themselves for your aging loved ones? In you?
Last week, Sister Susan Schantz in this space offered a similar message: this month, study trees: short and spread out, soaring and slender, willowy or seemingly staid. They will tell you about your parents, family members, long-term or recently-met friends, yourself. In this liturgical season, when we remember our beloved dead, it’s good for us to have other images of moving on in life than dying. One’s potentials and limits have mirrors in trees great and small – towering redwoods and stubby trees like Japanese maples. Look for trees that are fully nourished, grown up. Matured. Look for saplings. You and your loved ones are there.
One of our Sisters tells the story of an ugly tree that grew in the front yard of the convent. Over the course of several years, Kathy cut down this tree to be a stump, but she could never seem to get rid of its roots. Each year, new green sprouted from the stump. Finally, Kathy realized that it would be better to cultivate this seemingly unwanted tree than to let it frustrate her. It is thriving and shapelier with tender care.
What people in your life have you wanted to chop out of existence? Have you made peace with that which would not go away? Jesus told the story of a barren fig tree. (Luke 13.8) The owner wanted to destroy it, but the gardener said “Let it be for this year. I will cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it.” The owner agreed to wait. We don’t know the rest of the story, but the point is clear; accept what looks barren in our relationships. Wait. Let them be.
In our current repertoire of hymns is a refrain that never ceases to touch me: “All I ask of you is forever to remember me as loving you.” As our years and our memories pile up, we can sing this song with more meaning. We sing it to God, to our treasured family and friends. We sing it to the people we have hurt and then prayed for endlessly. We sing to our deepest selves. “For age is opportunity no less than youth itself, though in another dress. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
~ Sister Joan Sobala
