aging, isolation and a shrinking sense of what's important...

My world continues to get smaller as I age. I suppose that's how its meant to be as interests, desires, energy and needs contract - but its not how I thought it would turn out. I've seen many people grow old - I came of age living in my parent's home for the aged after all - and have presided over hundreds burials, too. My great grand-mother started a boarding house sometime before the Great Depression in Stamford, CT. After WWII, my father's mother continued that work but shifted the emphasis towards elderly and infirm men and women. By the time my parents took the business over there were only ancient women living with us as "guests." 

What a wild menagerie accompanied me as I entered adolescence! A retired doctor of osteopathy who taught me how to massage another's foot. "Madame" from France who was terrorized in her bouts of PTSD when she was certain that the fireworks from our Fourth of July were the dreaded gunshots she'd heard as a child in the First World War. A wealthy Christian Scientist whose relatives once held my parents hostage upstairs at gunpoint on a Sunday afternoon while other family members were in the kitchen negotiating with our family doctor over future medical treatments and the contested contents of a will. The kindly Mrs. Cain whose nerve damage kept her from walking but not from sharing her accumulated wisdom, candy and abiding affection. Their lives and deaths were woven into the tapestry of my teens. Same, too for the assassinations of my generation: John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, the martyrs of Kent and Jackson State, Fred Hampton, John Lennon. They have taken their toll within as have nearly forty years of ordained ministry filled with countless hospital rooms, prayers, hymns, tears, laughter and funerals.

Still, nothing really prepares you for your own ripening on the vine of life. There have been clues, of course. But as Tammie Terrell and Marvin Gaye sang before they both passed: "Ain't nothing like the real thing, baby." I knew something had shifted within when earlier this summer I didn't immediately order Bob Dylan's new and celebrated album. I love St. Bobby's work and was mildly annoyed with myself when I did nothing to get it. God knows I haven't listened to any new music since before Christmas with the exception of the online concerts of Mary Chapin-Carpenter and Carrie Newcomer. My upright bass still stands untouched after six months. And I have slowly realized that the only songs I am playing on my guitar are the ones I know well. George Harrison. Bill Withers. Lou Reed. Joni Mitchell.

Another clue caught my eye while reading the unhinged politically paranoid

commentary of an old friend about the danger of face masks: they're the first signs our society is sliding down the slippery slop of socialism. I had to shake my head in astonishment. "I know there are crazies out there," I said to myself, "but not among my buddies!" But the more I read the more absurd and frightening it became: "over four months we have given up our birth right to freedom as we trust faceless bureaucrats with deciding our fate." I kept waiting for an appeal to take up arms. "Good Lord," I said at breakfast, "I live in such a bubble!" Reading some of America's reaction to Dr. Fauci only underscores the limitations of my social engagement - a very small and shrinking circle of friends - reduced further by sheltering in place. 

But my ever-narrowing weltanschauung hit me between the eyes last night upon receiving an email from my primary care doctor. He's a trusted friend and musical collaborator whom I love and respect. Beyond professional commentary on my recent medical tests, I was stunned when he confessed: "I have not been much interested in music these days." That nearly took my breath away. Not only has music been vital and life-giving to his life until the consequences of the corona contagion claimed most of his energy, but music has been a shared window on reality for us both. We've spent hours together sipping red wine while discussing how Jefferson Airplane changed our worlds forever. Our friendship began in New Orleans on a Habitat mission trip after Hurricane Katrina. When work for the day was done, we'd take a quick shower and head into town to hear the local musical genius. And for over a decade we've played live music together with other loved ones to heal our own wounds and raise funds for environmental justice. To now hear that music has become a void in his world alerted me to a similar emptiness I have been trying to avoid of late within my own.

Living in isolation for more than four months has mostly been just fine with me. I prefer the solitude. But I am beginning to own that it has also caused some convictions and commitments to atrophy. It has exaggerated my loss of perspective and diminished my ability to sense the bigger picture. Zoom, FB and emails have their place - and I am grateful for the connection they allow - but they have clearly not been enough. Artist and theologian, Jan Richardson, put it well the other day when she wrote:

I mean, I'm used to living in those threshold-y, liminal, betwixt places,

but I am keenly aware that this is one of the longest, most stubborn between-spaces ever. Whatever these threshold days (weeks, months) are holding for you, may there be grace. May there be sustenance. And may there be, perhaps, a few angels to meet you.

BLESSING FOR THE PLACE BETWEEN
When you come
to the place between.
When you have left
what you held
most dear.
When you are traveling
toward the life
you know not.
When you arrive
at the hardest ground.
May it become
for you
a place to rest.
May it become
for you
a place to dream.
May the pain
that has pressed itself
into you
give way
to vision,
to knowing.
May the morning
make of it
an altar,
a path,
a place to begin
again.

Perhaps this cumulative loss is what inspired me to take in another live streaming musical concert yesterday afternoon: the Folk by the Oak Family Nest Fest. It was grand and I was particularly taken with a performer new to me: Kitty MacFarlane. She knocked me out.

This dawning of my diminishing world is not all darkness: it has called me to pay more to my lazy prayers and the carelessness of my inward journey. It has also spoken to my heart about my need to make an effort to reach out to reality and find ways to embrace it even in this solitude. I have been awakened, too, to how aging can accelerate all of this. This morning's poem on Poetry Unbound was Mary Howe's poignant, "My Mother's Body" and called out to me with clarity.

Bless my mother’s body, the first song of her beating
heart and her breathing, her voice, which I could dimly hear,

grew louder. From inside her body I heard almost every word she said.
Within that girl I drove to the store and back, her feet pressing

the pedals of the blue car, her voice, first gate to the cold sunny mornings,
rain, moonlight, snow fall, dogs . . .

Her kidneys failed, the womb where I once lived is gone.
Her young astonished body pushed me down that long corridor,

and my body hurt her, I know that—24 years old. I’m old enough
to be that girl’s mother, to smooth her hair, to look into her exultant frightened eyes,

her bedsheets stained with chocolate, her heart in constant failure.
It’s a girl, someone must have said. She must have kissed me

with her mouth, first grief, first air,
and soon I was drinking her, first food, I was eating my mother,

slumped in her wheelchair, one of my brothers pushing it,
across the snowy lawn, her eyes fixed, her face averted.

Bless this body she made, my long legs, her long arms and fingers,
our voice in my throat speaking to you now.