Saturday, September 10, 2022
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
We’re going on a bear hunt!
I am speaking to sensible people; the cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the Blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the Body of Christ?
This is sweet poetry about food for the spirit. In my sometimes-pagan appreciation of Christian traditions, I think this is sweet poetry about food for the body as well. We’ll be eating several meals with Miles and Jasper, and in each of them it seems to be that we will all participate in the Body and Blood of Christ.
Yesterday Margaret planned to move her bed from one wall to another. In the process our somewhat ramshackle bedframe slanted on her and suddenly broke. It fell on her foot. She screamed. By the time I could help her she had woman-handled the bed off her foot, not sure if it was broken or just bruised.
We found the headboard, lovely and creamy white as it is, heavy and solid as we thought it was, in the dumpster at our apartment complex. With a little hardware it came together well, and the bed looked beautiful. There was room underneath to store extra toys and bedspreads and stuff.
No more. Now the bed sits flat on the ground, much easier to get into, much less elegant. Perhaps we’ll find another bedframe. But in the meantime Jasper and Miles will be leaping up on that bed, jumping up and down, shout hosanna! They will be participating in the body and blood of Christ, and celebrating it with all their might.
Because the loaf of bread is one, we, though many, are one Body, for we all partake of the same loaf.
Marc had surgery yesterday, a complicated surgery by an excellent orthopedic surgeon, in which several tendons that had torn away from Marc’s left hamstring were reattached. I don’t expect Marc to watch any video on YouTube of a similar surgery. He is painfully recovering, and will be for three months.
How can we celebrate this encounter with mortality?
Because the loaf of bread is one, we, though many, are one Body, for we all partake of the same loaf.
Our grandchildren are three, five, ten and thirteen. Our children are 41, 40 and 36. We all partake of the same loaf. One thing that means? We will all die. From dust we came, and to dust we will return. But children should not think of dying, nor grandchildren. It’s only later on that it becomes such a fascinating topic.
Ron Rolheiser is getting up there, a bit older even than Margaret and I. He spoke online Wednesday evening about aging. His Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio sponsors a two-year seminar called “Forest Dwelling: Spirituality for Our Wisdom Years.”
Hindu religion traditionally divides life into four stages. After years as a “student,” one becomes a “householder.” Householders amass wealth and enjoy the pleasures of life. Then men and women who seek spiritual wisdom become “forest dwellers.” Often around the age of sixty, they recognize they are entering their second half of life and get much more serious about enlightenment and spending time with God.
Where can you go after the forest? Hindus call men and women who choose to enter the last stage of life the “Holy Fool” or “Wandering Beggar.” With nothing but your begging bowl, you wander out into the world and see whatever there is to see, and then … you die. For you in these last years (or months or weeks), there are no resources available to you except those supplied directly by God.
In her wonderful essay, “The Forest Dweller and the Beggar,” Phyllis Rose contrasts the final stages of adulthood with Erik Erikson’s formulation:
Hindu religion presents life as a sequence of duties and responsibilities. Erikson, Western culture’s most dedicated theorist of adult development, presents it as an evolving inner drama with a grand finale for the deserving. I find the Hindu formulation richer throughout, but especially for the end of life. It separates the two aspects of old age—the possibility of spiritual growth and the near certainty of biological failure—and locates them in two “stages,” the forest dweller and the beggar.
In allowing for a stage of forest dwelling, about which there is something pleasantly selfish, and in admitting that there is a stage that, if it comes at all, is close to a living death, it reveals a worldly wisdom that makes Erikson’s hypotheses about integrity and despair sound like smalltown pieties.
Back in the sixties, my generation, following the lead of the Beatles, looked to India for a corrective to Western life and values. Perhaps as we enter geezerdom it’s time for another immersion in the renewing waters of the imagined Ganges.
(1 Corinthians 10, Psalm 116, John 14, Luke 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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