Tag: G.K. Chesterton

Ways to Parse Our Lives

As I am writing this, it is the Autumnal Equinox, that moment when day and night are the same length, a pause in the steady progression to shorter and shorter days and the long night of the Winter Solstice.  One metaphor that poets and philosophers have used for our life journey is that of the seasons – Spring for youth, Summer for adulthood, Fall for aging, and Winter for the end of life.  Poets like these metaphors.  I think of Chesterton’s “Gold Leaves”:

In youth I sought the golden flower

Hidden in wood or wold,

But I am come to autumn,

When all the leaves are gold.

 And then there is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 (one of my favorites):

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

If fall is the beginning of old age, what does the equinox represent?  An equanimous acceptance of aging headed for the final solstice of death?  I just learned that Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement – a time for reflection – was celebrated yesterday and always falls around the time of the Autumnal Equinox.

And that all got me pondering how we make sense of the stages and division of our lives.  I have talked about this before in relation to writing a life review (“Feast on Your Life”).  Such a pause can be a useful tool with which to try to make sense of our past (or to realize it makes no sense).  What were the moments in your life that marked a new path?  A birthday, a graduation, a birth, a death?  Or was it something more mundane – when you started meditating, learned to play bridge, or went blonde?

How do we divide up our lives to make sense of them?  By decades, seven-year spans, seasons, locations, occupations? Or are such divisions just arbitrary?

Augustine defined seven stages (famously reiterated by Shakespeare’s Jaques in As You Like It), which corresponded to the known planets, each life stage taking some of its characteristics from the planet under which it was situated.  Old age was influenced by the distant Saturn, which was responsible for its being “cold and dry.”  In literature and legend, there are examples of three, four, five, six and seven divisions of life.  (Note: AI says that there are eight stages because it includes gestation as a stage – apparently, AI is a believer in personhood at conception.)

As I look back at my life from the age of 75, I can make all sorts of divisions.  Moving always felt like a “new” stage, as did graduations, marriages, divorces, birth of children, major illnesses and surgeries, retirement – but these are circumstantial.  Is there some kind of deeper division?  Are the real makers far more private, more interior?

Are all such divisions artificial?  Did they make more sense when we had more rituals to note and understand the transitions?  Transitions are hard.  Even if they are eagerly anticipated.

I recently read about the Fibonacci sequence in which each number is the sum of the two numbers before, a formula that makes a graceful spiral and is found over and over again in nature.  The ratio of two consecutive numbers in the sequence gets closer and closer to something called “The Golden Ratio” or about 1.618.  It turns out that many flowers have petals that correspond to such a number and it is a frequent descriptor of tree branching, water flow, and many more natural processes.   Could we apply it to the stages of our lives?  The sequence within the framework of any life would be 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89 – since the next number would be far above current longevity records, we will have to assume that the last stage begins at 89!  In some ways this works for me – at 1, I learned to walk, to talk at 2, to read at 5, to swim at 8 – you see the possibilities.  And I would also note that while the average lifespan in the US is in the high seventies, the median is in the low eighties, and the mode (the age at which the most people die) is close to that last Fibonacci number of 89.

But almost any sequence (7 years, 3 ages, 4 seasons) is worth using if it gets us thinking about what went on in our lives, what changed, what stayed the same.  And in relation to my serenity project – when were we most calm, most content?  And why?  Was it circumstances that mattered or attitude?  Such reflections are, I am told, where wisdom comes from.

Change both gives and requires wisdom; the world is changing at a frightening rate these days.  It is important that our reactions be conscious, and looking at the past intersections of life might help.

“No More Dying Then” – Resurrections of All Kinds

 

Spring is full of resurrections.  We watch trees come back to life and flowers peek through the dead leaves.  Spring brings Easter, of course, with its stories and promises of resurrection.  This Easter, I reread D.H. Lawrence’s novella, The Man Who Died, an alternate spin on the empty tomb, a lovely counter-tale about the missing body of Jesus.  In its way, it is as sacramental as the Biblical version.  Lawrence’s Jesus lies in a farmer’s yard, healing and thinking about his second chance at life, about the trap of language (“The Word is the midge that bites at evening”), and about the release of being reborn (“How good it is to have fulfilled my mission, and be beyond it.  Now I can be alone, and leave all things to themselves, and the fig-tree may be barren if it will, and the rich may be rich”).  As Jesus hides in the farmyard, he befriends a feisty cock (rooster) that throbs with life – and he heads out for his next chapter with the cock under his arm.  (A little symbolism there!)  Another kind of resurrection.

And there are resurrections closer to home.  After the close call of a cardiac arrest this winter, my husband has taken to calling this his “bonus time.”  Unlike many heart attack victims, he has not seemed to suffer depression, but rather seems to bask in this resurrection time with gratitude.  One more spring.  His appreciation of life has rubbed off on me.

Of course, resurrection does not always happen.  Our granddaughter had the hard experience this year of working over the body of a fellow choir member when he fell beside her as they processed down the aisle. She had been trained in CPR, and if he had survived it might have been a wonderful experience for her.  As it happened, he did not and the death was very hard to process.  But isn’t that why resurrections are so joyful – because they might not have happened?

There are many kinds of resurrections.  In his autobiography, G. K. Chesterton said that he became a Roman Catholic because he adored the rites of confession, penitence, and the washing away of sin, a weekly process for the resurrection of the soul:

Well, when a Catholic comes from Confession, he does truly, by definition, step out again into that dawn of his own beginning ….  He believes that in that dim corner, and in that brief ritual, God has really remade him in his own image.  He is now a new experiment of the Creator.  He is as much a new experiment as he was when he was really only five years old…. He may be grey and gouty; but he is only five minutes old.

That last bit is lovely with the vision of an oldster facing the world anew, feisty as a young lamb.

Shakespeare, as usual, has his own take on resurrection and immortality.  We think of his sonnets as love letters, but there are a very few that tackle other challenges of life.  I think most often in this regard of Sonnett 146, one of my favorites:

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
[Fooled by] these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more.

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And, Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

I like Shakespeare’s form of “resurrection” because it is an awakening to a new way of life, that not only frees us from the hold of the body and other earthly possessions, but simultaneously frees us from fear of death.  The imperative, “Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross,” could be a touchstone for one’s entire life! I love the way the final couplet takes a sharp turn from fear of death (“that feeds on men”) to a kind of immortality where death has no sting (“no more dying then”).  I might note that there was an error in the second line of the original printing of this poem, so we are left to guess what the Bard meant to say.  You will see many versions out there, but I prefer this one.

So, may we all have a resurrection of sorts this spring.  May we value properly our “hours of dross” and wash away our sins and cares.  Do you remember, as Chesterton seems to, what it felt like to be five years old in a field full of daisies and dandelions?

For perhaps real resurrection – enlightenment, peace, whatever you want to call it – comes not from rising from the dead, but from escaping from the fear of death and all the death-like things – past mistakes, regrets, losses and future fears of all kinds.   Old age brings us both closer to the brink and possibly closer to acceptance. Once we get past our terror of the end, we are the (resurrected) fearless five-year-old again.  May it be so for you.

For other kinds of resurrection, you might try my tales, “Hallelujah, It’s a Mouse” or “A Balm in Gilead.”