[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Still Green

We're having the first sunny day after more than a week of grey skies.  I 
walked down to the village to pick up a prescription at the drugstore, 
through a landscape that's still astoundingly green. A few trees are 
starting to turn, but only a few. The grass is still pure emerald, freckled 
with very late dandelions and the occasion clear blue of cornflowers. I 
have to say that I'm loving every moment of it.

Despite the beauty, this lasting green is not a Good Thing. I read in the 
newspaper that this failure of Leaf Season to arrive is a sign that the 
trees got badly stressed by last summer's intense heat and dryness. 
Presumably they're hanging onto their leaves trying to top up the 
nutritional reserves they need to get through their winter dormancy. 
Health, in this case, is a seasonal die-off done seasonably, and that's not 
happening.

It's in a deciduous tree's job description, at least around here, to turn 
colour, drop leaves, and spend Mud Season settling down for real winter. 
It's in our job description too -- obviously in different ways (unless you 
are personally deciduous, which, if you're reading this, is not likely). 
Unless early death intervenes, each and every one of us is going to go 
through the mammalian equivalent, and we don't leaf out again.

We spend much of the first half of our lives, perhaps even longer, with the 
deep-down conviction that old age is what happens to other people, 
bolstered by a culture that yells constantly that we can be rejuvenated; we 
just have to buy the right products, eat the right diet, get the right 
amount of exercise and we can at least stall, and maybe even stop, the 
process.  We can, of course, make decisions that will help us stay 
healthier longer, but the fact is that aging isn't a thing that happens to 
us; it's built into us, wired deep into our cells. The only uncertain thing 
is the timing.

Up until fairly recently, I entertained delusion that I was going to be an 
exception, but since my last birthday, they're beginning to die away. I 
look younger than I am, but I no longer look young. I'm beginning to see 
the first real marks of age, and frankly I hate them. If I were deciduous, 
I'd certainly have started to change colour and lose a few leaves. I know I 
still have years left, but I'm starting really to believe that I am going 
to be old.

This is one of the areas where faith supports me most. Whatever the world 
may think of aging, God has no problems with it. I am still as attractive 
in God's eyes as I was when I was a leggy 18-year-old -- perhaps even more 
so, since I suspect that God likes the marks of wisdom on a woman's 
skin.  God knows what every cell of my body has been up to in the last 
let's-not-say-how-many years, what stressors my tissues have had to handle, 
the effects of too much stress-related cortisol on my midsection, what 
causes the slight arthritic twinge in my right hip. God knows the emotion 
stowed away in the knots in my back (we're working on that).  God knows my 
smile-lines and frown-lines and the weathering of skin on my once-smooth 
hands -- the same elegant hands my sons inherited.  God sees all these not 
as the current culture sees them, as a sort of failure or defeat, but as 
the natural, inevitable marks that my life has left on my body.  A sort of 
spiritual patina, if that makes sense. Faith tells me that.

Faith whispers an even bigger secret. I carry in my bones the belief that 
this life isn't the end -- that while the transition may be difficult and 
scary, there will be a Life to Come and a physical resurrection for me. 
That may be a self-comforting delusion, as many believe, but for me, it is 
bone-knowledge. I believe that that new life is mine not because I've done 
anything to earn it, but because it's God's gift through my Lord Jesus the 
Christ; all I need to do is to lay claim to it, and it will be mine.  I 
will become, in that Life, everything that I should have been in this life, 
and much, much more.

So the prospect of age shouldn't bother me, and mostly (except when I catch 
an unexpected glimpse of myself in a public mirror) it doesn't. What 
matters isn't what my body gets up to in the years to come, but what I make 
of my soul. My job isn't to try to be young any more; it's to get belief 
out of my head and into that space behind my heart where my soul seems to 
dwell, so that even if my mind fails me, my soul will know the love of God 
and will radiate that love outward. I don't know how far I can get with 
that task, but I'm going to give it a good solid try.

In the meantime, this particular day has its very particular beauty, and 
I'm going to take my not-yet-elderly body out for another walk.  It's much 
too nice to be indoors.

******************

I'm about to hit some sacred cows, and they moo so badly. -- Phyllis 
Tickle, aka The Divine Miz T. 
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