I recently celebrated my birthday. Now that I’m past the fifty-yard
line of life and heading to the end zone, I can no longer deny that I am
aging. When I was in my twenties and thirties, I could ignore the
subtle signs of the advancing clock, and in my forties, platitudes like
“forty is the new thirty” provided a flimsy veil of denial that I was
growing older. However, when you hit your fifties, your children are
grown, you are now called grandma, and conversations with friends
gravitate toward aging parents, physical ailments, and possible
retirement dates, there is no denying the obvious: I am getting older.
Many of us take a passive approach to our advancing years, believing
that how one ages is out of one’s control–that it’s something that just
happens to you. Others go into warrior mode and fight the “dying of the
light” with hair plugs, Botox, and sundry other remedies in an attempt
to vanquish the inevitable. This birthday spurred me to examine how I
wanted to age. I decided I didn’t want to take the “curl up and die”
approach and surrender to Father Time, but I also decided that I didn’t
want to take the “aging rock star” approach and look foolish trying to
cling to my youth at all cost. So how to approach this process of
growing older? The second chapter of Luke’s Gospel provides the
prescription. This last line jumped out at me as this chapter concludes:
And Jesus increased in wisdom, and age, and grace with God and men.
It may seem odd talking about growing older when considering the
immortality of Jesus. Though human and divine at the same time, Jesus,
nevertheless, did age in body as is evident from his progression from
birth as an infant to his culmination as an adult man in his thirties.
Therefore, Jesus knew what it was to grow older, and as in all things,
He provides the example for all humanity. This verse from Luke is His
prescriptive on aging, and it implies that it should be an active,
deliberative process that includes three aspects.
The first aspect is to grow in wisdom. To age following Jesus’s
example, we must actively pursue wisdom. What exactly is wisdom?
Proverbs 9: 10 tells us that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of
wisdom.” Fear in this sense does not mean wariness of God, but of a
healthy knowledge of His magnificence and our place and God’s place in
His grand design. To acquire wisdom is not to gain knowledge but to be
always persevering to know God and know ourselves in relation to Him.
The second aspect is to grow in age. While we know that Jesus
advanced in years, many commentaries say that this phrase actually means
to mature. Not only did Jesus grow in wisdom, but he flourished into
our Savoir. What does it mean to mature? It means to become what God
intended you to be, to embrace and fulfill your mission on earth. So, we
are not only to gain knowledge of God and ourselves, but we are also to
channel that wisdom into serving God by becoming exactly who He
intended us to be.
Finally, we must grow in grace. Now, if Jesus is perfect, he could
not have grown in grace as we usually think of it. Most biblical
scholars take this passage to mean that Jesus performed greater and
greater works for men and for God. Therefore, to follow in Jesus’s
example, we must continue to acquire knowledge of God and ourselves and
strive to fulfill our mission on earth. However, unlike Christ we are
not perfected in grace. As such, we must rely on God to help us do
greater and greater works in His name.
So, our golden years are designed not to be a passive time of
acceptance of the elapsing years or an unreasonable attachment to bodily
youth, but to enjoy a dynamic time of continued growth and development.
We are to continue our run all the way to the end zone—perhaps with
flagging physical strength and failing breath—but, nevertheless, with a
vibrant spirit filled with wisdom, maturity, and grace.
This originally appeared on the Catholic Writers Guild.
