All Gracious God, you have given me all I am and have, and now I give it all back to You to stand under Your will alone. In a special way I give You these later years of my life.
I am one of those called by You into old age, a call not given to all, not given to Jesus, not given to most in our world today. I humbly ask You, grace me deeply in each aspect of that struggle.
As my physical eyesight weakens, may the eyes of my faith strengthen that I may see you and Your Love in everything. As my hearing fails may the ears of my heart be more attentive to the whisper of Your gentle voice. As my legs weaken and walking becomes more difficult may I walk more truly in Your paths, knowing all the while that I am held in the embrace of Your Love. As my mind becomes less alert and memory fades may I remain peaceful in you, aware that with You there is no need for thought or word. You ask simply that I be there with You.
And should sickness overtake me and I be confined to bed, may I know myself as one with Your Son as he offers his life for the salvation of the world.
Finally as my heart slows a little after the work of the years may it expand in love for You and all people. May it rest secure and grateful in Your loving Heart until I am lost in You completely and forever. Amen.
Thank you very much for this prayer. Just what I need for the rest of my life :-)
ReplyDeleteWishing you a lovely day in Amman :-)
It is a lovely day here. I like the prayer for where I am in life right now. Thanks.
DeleteHow beautiful and meaningful for me as well. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteYou are welcome, Lynda.
DeleteThanks John for this beautiful gift of a prayer that expresses so much and which I found very moving.
ReplyDeleteI especially was struck by this part of ageing "a call not given to all, not given to Jesus, not given to most in our world today. I humbly ask You, grace me deeply in each aspect of that struggle."
Blessings
Thanks for your insights, Phil. The poet is right. Many people don't make it to the ageing process and some don't do it well at all.
DeleteOn Sunday, I'll be turning 65, which officially puts me in the National Library of Medicine's category "Aged." I didn't expect to have as much trouble accepting it as I do, since I was the child of older parents and my grandmothers lived with us and just about everyone I knew as a child was upwards of 60 years old. I read Cicero's "De Senectute" as a teenager, but even before that, my father used to read me the "Discourses of Epictetus" with its cheery advice "to blame not the gods nor man, but await your death in patience." Now I'm definitely going through the old approach/avoidance thing and I find myself relating more and more to the lines from "Old Man River" about being "tired of livin' and fear'd of dyin'." Seeing my children getting older (my thirtysomething son just called me to say he had noticed his first grey hairs---it seems like just yesterday that he was a baby!)is hard. Seeing my friends dying is even harder. Another one just the bad news tonight that her breast cancer has recurred after seven years which lulled her into thinking she was cured. Age and death may be inevitable; dying slowly in torment is not.
ReplyDeleteI wish I could be as philosophical and graciously resigned as Ms. Hanlen. I don't even aspire to be like some of the great saints who actually sought out and seemed to enjoy suffering, like St. Therese who complained "I have reached the point where I cannot suffer because all suffering has become so sweet to me!" I hope I can at least get to the point reached by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel at the time of his fatal heart attack, "For the just man, it is a privilege to die."
Sixty-five is not what it used to be. People are discovering new careers and interests in life that they've never been able to explore before. Life is to be lived as fully as we can. That means we celebrate well and we mourn fully. We give ourselves as much as we can to our emotions - not to act out of them, but to keep them fresh so we can choose wisely and freely. Growing old is hard. Life passes by and we learn we have much less control than we thought we did. At least we as Christians believe in the afterlife and the glory of the world to come. Imagine if we didn't have that. This is a good time to remember our loved ones and our own mortality. We are always put in proper relationship to God when we do so. I empathize with your pain. Life is challenging.
DeleteBy the way, Happy Birthday! Sixty-five is something big to celebrate.
DeleteThanks for the encouraging words and birthday wishes. I realize that nowadays 65 is not what it was in the days when threescore-years-and-ten was the outside limit of life. But it is definitely getting in sight of the finish line, and many of my friends have already crossed. I suppose the thought of "eternal life" is a hopeful one for most people, but for someone who finds existence itself painful, it is hard not to fear that it will just be one more thing to endure without even the hope that "even this will pass away." Presumably it won't be just an infinite extension of time as we know it now. "Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it entered into the mind of man to consider what God has prepared for those who love him." Since we can't really imagine it, I try to think about it as little as possible. I am trying to regard it sort of in the light of your St. Teresa quotation--that whatever it entails, it is apparently God's will and so I have to try to make myself go along with it, cheerfully if possible, not because I have any real expectation that it will please me, but because I exist to please Him and if whatever He decides to do to me makes Him happy, it should ipso facto make me secondarily happy too, because I love Him. Does that make any sense? In any case, it's the best that I can do and I don't have that many more years to work on developing a better attitude.
DeleteAh, tell God what you want and desire. God's will is mostly found in our desires. Next week I include a posting about the end-times.
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