Recently, recovering after a long bout of illness, I walked into the room where my husband was working. “You know,” I sighed, “I just feel OLD.” He looked me up and down.“Well,” he said, without missing a beat, “You LOOK old.”
My jaw hit the floor, and he admitted later that the resulting playful slap he received was well deserved, as was our eruptive laughter.
We laugh a lot in our household, mainly due to my husband’s sense of humor.
It’s a trait I greatly appreciate as our children grow older, and I trust I will appreciate it even more as my husband and I grow old together.
Growing older
Growing older is inevitable for each of us, and facing our unavoidable mortality is just part of being human. Interestingly, the older we get the more childlike we become, in our physical and mental limitations, which can help us toward the goal of attaining humility in our spiritual lives.
My 88-year-old mother told me not long ago how walking across the room or getting dressed simply takes much longer than it used to.
My 89-year-old father, whose short-term memory is not what it used to be, says with a smile, “You know, it’s peaceful in here,” when he recognizes his limitations.
Their simple and humble acceptance of the crosses of aging is beautiful.
Offer up suffering
The crosses of physical and mental limitations that come with aging naturally lend themselves to opportunities for offering suffering up in prayerful sacrifice — for others, for all souls, for Our Lord to put to use as He sees fit.
It’s His way of drawing good out of difficult situations while helping us attain childlike humility at the same time.
Childlike humility
It’s this humility, this smallness of soul that demands our absolute dependence on Our Lord for every physical — and spiritual — breath we take, especially as we face the inevitability of death.
And yet, as we know, beyond death and the darkness of all earthly suffering, we are a people of hope, resurrected with Our Risen Lord after the agony of His Passion.
“See, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5).
Drawing Him closer
Growing old while uniting our suffering with Our Lord is like being a child for eternity: Becoming humble and small, recognizing our limitations, and thanking Our Lord for the grace to do so, because it’s our limitations — exteriorly and interiorly — that draw Him even closer to us.
“What pleases Him is to see that I love my littleness and my poverty, it is the blind hope that I have in His mercy . . . That is my only treasure,” said St. Thérèse of Lisieux.
“Humility and trust. This is what unfailingly makes us pleasing to God, draws down His grace upon our souls, and makes us the object of his tenderness and love,” said Fr. Jacques Philippe in The Way of Trust and Love: A Retreat Guided by St. Thérèse of Lisieux (p. 62).
No matter how old I look or feel, I will always pray for the grace to become — deep within my soul — a small child before Our Lord. And on that day He calls me home, at last, I hope to run to Him, laughing.
Julianne Nornberg, mother of four children, is a teacher’s aide at St. John School in Waunakee.