Turning Fifty: Coming Closer to Myself

Lord, you have been our dwelling place

Throughout all generations.

Before the mountains were born

Or you brought forth the earth and the world,

From everlasting to everlasting you are God.

You turn men back to dust,

Saying, “Return to dust, O sons of men.”

For a thousand years in your sight

Are like a day that has just gone by,

Or like a watch in the night.

You sweep men away in the sleep of death;

They are like the new grass of the morning –

Though in the morning it springs up new,

By evening it is dry and withered.

We are consumed by your anger

And terrified by your indignation.

You have set our iniquities before you,

Our secret sins in the light of your presence.

All our days will pass away under your wrath;

We finish our years with a moan.

The length of our days is seventy years –

Or eighty, if we have the strength;

Yet their span is but trouble and sorrow,

For they quickly pass, and we fly away.

Who knows the power of your anger?

For your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you.

Teach us to number our days aright,

That we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Relent, O Lord! How long will it be?

Have compassion on your servants.

Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love,

That we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.

Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,

For as many years as we have seen trouble.

May your deeds be shown to your servants,

Your splendor to their children.

May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us;

Establish the work of our hands for us –

Yes, establish the work of our hands.

The preceding Psalm [90] is a prayer attributed to Moses written some 3,500 years ago and is the oldest of the psalms, but its truths are timeless and could have easily been written less than 100 years ago. I have been reflecting on this prayer this month as I find it rich with a poignancy and a pathos that befits my “milestone” [or perhaps maybe my millstone].

The brevity of my life which vanishes like the night, the inevitability of my death regardless of how many ellipitical training sessions I perform or how carefully I watch my diet [or don’t watch my diet as the case may be], the futility of every effort to transcend my finitude, and the clarity of my failures, faults and sins that feels like a glaring exposure before a holy God – these are the blessed birthday reminders of the Jewish poet and patriarch.

The Psalmist’s somber reminders are “blessed” even though at first glance they read like a recipe for anxiety and despair. At my age, the ordinary experiences of everyday life might suggest just that. At fifty, gaining weight is easy, staying in shape is hard, losing weight is even harder. I once exercised out of vanity; I now exercise out of necessity. My biology is my certain destiny, and already my body betrays me [and has for two plus years now] – but nothing like the destiny of dust that awaits me. However skillful my future mortician, I too will revert to stardust, whither like dry grass, just as venerable old Moses did in an unmarked grave almost 3,500 years ago. My family of origin is my inherited legacy, for good and for ill. Professional accomplishments bring limited fulfillment; why did I ever imagine otherwise? Personal inadequacies unsettle me. The consequences of some life choices feel irreversible, such as tilting back 1,300 pounds of standing drywall resulting in the crushing/amputation of my left foot and ankle in 2003, moving from Hawai’i to Florida in 1995, sending my second daughter, Alli, to Venezuela in August for a two-year mission trip [What may befall her there? How can I possibly be a shield for her on a different continent? Can we really ever truly shield our children anyway?]; and my son, Andrew, why didn’t I spend more time with him doing the things he liked to do? Just how many more chances will I get to truly speak into his life? God, why doesn’t He hear your voice like his sisters do? Will he ever? Still, he hears you far better than I did at his age. Will that hearing improve over time? What can I do to adjust the tuning dial on his receiver? Sadly, a lot less than I’d like at this stage of his life. I could go on and on, but at some point the sovereignty of God is something we must simply accept at face value.

So if you live anything like a “normal life,” sorrow and heartache will visit you sooner or later, and certainly by the time you reach fifty [striking me before my tenth birthday] – whether through your parents, spouse, children, friends, boss, job, the stock market/economy, the random roll of the genetic dice, or just plain old bad luck [if a Christian can even use the word “luck”], or from what Wendell Berry once called our “irremediable ignorance.” “Life is difficult,” wrote M. Scott Peck in one of the most famous first sentences ever [The Road Less Traveled]; he too was “swept away in the sleep of death” almost five years ago from pancreatic cancer at the age of 69. So, brutal realism, modesty, and the embrace of the fleeting mystery of life all befit a man turning fifty. I resonate with the many people who quote the lines of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke about “living the questions now.”

Some people at my age resist the analysis of the Psalmist as too gloomy and overly pessimistic, and instead throttle full speed ahead as if nothing has changed. Displaced desires, reversion to superficial pursuits, social affectations, sublimation through obsessive work, escapism through play, cutting and running, and the old stodgy standby of denial are all strategies people employ to avoid the obvious [and I’ve done all these things myself over the years], that my banal, ordinary life is speeding toward its completion, and that with what the Psalmist describes as “labor, sorrow and a moan.”

One of my favorite philosophers, Soren Kierkegaard [special thanks to Mrs. Murrel McDougal, my senior Honors English teacher, for the introduction] describes in detail his own carefully crafted avoidance mechanism. Throughout his short life [1813-1855] he battled a pronounced and chronic melancholia and used his prodigious writing to both distract and protect himself. And there is no doubt that it served as a fund for enormous artistic creativity and interior reflection, as he embraced his melancholia as form of despair. Invoking a distinctly Christian audacity, Kierkegaard made peace with it, and even believed God forgave him for his proclivity to despair. Even though one might justifiably feel increasingly old and world-weary because of the litany of woes described by the Psalmist, in relation to eternity, insists Kierkegaard, one can live “forever young.” Overwhelmed by God’s love that overcame his melancholic despair, he describes coming close to his self that he had formerly analyzed only at a distance:

Alas, ultimately I know of no truer prayer than what I pray over and over, that God will at any rate allow me – that he will not be angry at me – that he will allow me to thank him continually, thanking him because he has done, and indeed, continues to do, so indescribably much more for me than I had ever expected. Surrounded with mockery; plagued day in and day out by the pettiness of people, even of those closest to me, I know of nothing else to do in my home or in my inmost being, but to give thanks and to thank God, for I understand that what he has done for me is indescribable … He permits me to weep before him in quiet solitude, to weep away my pain again and again, blessedly consoled in the knowledge that he is concerned for me – and at the same time he gives this life of pain a significance that almost overwhelms me, he grants me success and strength and wisdom in all my accomplishments … Now life is coming closer to me, or I am coming closer to myself.

Kierkegaard and the Psalmist provoke me to take inventory of my fleeting life, to seek a heart of wisdom, and to embrace rather than resist what is at any rate inevitable. In my human imperfections and limitations, they insist I can discover divine consolations.

They further point me to confidence, joy and gratitude. In a culture of victimization, it takes audacity to celebrate gratitude for life itself with all its problems. In a society that winks at greed and encourages entitlement, contentment with one’s station in life supposes a radical experience of grace. In a world of staggering pain and inequality, there is still cause to enjoy the small things that give life its meaning.

In closing, I can take solace in the fact that I do not need to be anything other or greater than my own little faltering preface – having the confidence that at some point in eternity, God will surely bring order out of my divided and piecemeal tale and write an emphatic postscript.