August 9-15

Dear Old Souls,

Thanks for undertaking these poems with me this summer!  I’ve been challenged beyond what I thought, but enjoyed the challenge and found it worthwhile.  I hope you have too.

This week’s poems were once again tough for me to understand and accept.  MacDonald has a much more deterministic view of God’s action than I do.  He poses the question, on August 11, “Why should the soul, which death shall never know, / Authority, and power, and memory shed?”  He gives this answer: “It is that love with absolute faith would wed; / God takes the inmost garments off his child, / To have him in his arms, naked and undefiled.”

I wonder what kind of experience MacDonald had with dementia among his friends and relatives.  My own experience is quite limited—although I certainly have more here at the end of my internship year, having visited many homebound people who have memory loss or other symptoms of dementia.  To me, it’s always seemed pretty frightening, and I know (by report, not by experience) that it can be deeply painful to lose a loved one in this way.  MacDonald’s contention that dementia is a path to "absolute faith" seems too easy to me, almost like the platitudes we are sometimes tempted to use at the time of a death (e.g. “God needed another angel”), and it doesn’t seem to reflect the range of experiences that people have with dementia.  I know of people with dementia who seem happy, content, and at peace; I know of others who seem frightened, confused, and bitter.  Dementia is for some people a path to “absolute faith,” but not for everyone.

The poems for the next few days—August 12, 13, and 14—provide what I would think is a more genuine and reliable source of comfort in the face of dementia at the end of one’s life.  God is all-knowing and all-caring.  God created each one of us, and knows each of us better than anyone else, including ourselves, possibly could.  God is the one who gives us life and who gives us everything about who we are.  We can trust in God to love and preserve all that is good in ourselves, for God is the creator and sustainer of our whole being.

This week more than usual the poems have explicitly treated the concerns and fears of old age.  I feel more than ever my own inadequacy as a 28-year-old, attempting to explain the work of an “Old Soul” to other souls who know so much more of life and faith than I do; I feel like you all should be explaining this stuff to me.  I have wondered from time to time in what way this Diary might speak to a person of my age.  I don’t think I’m an old soul yet; but I’m older than I was a year ago.  In these past few weeks, I’ve noticed that my hair seems to be thinning a little at the crown of my head.  It’s been hard for me to get used to this idea; I’ve always been rather vain about my hair.  I had gotten used to being an adult with a relatively stable appearance; but I continue to change.  Everything changes.  We grow older.  Perhaps I’ll go bald.  I hope that as I age I’ll grow in wisdom and in faith, but who can tell?  There is only One who knows all, and One who never changes.  May that One renew us in faith and hope each day, for as long as our days are lengthened upon this earth.

Your fellow Growing-Old Soul,

Daniel

August 2-8

I have been away with some of our young people (who perhaps themselves are old souls in many ways) on a mission trip in Duluth; I had thought I might have time for a reflection earlier this week to make up for last week’s miss, but not so.  My apologies, and here are some thoughts on the devotions beginning August 2.

The poem for August 2 was especially convicting for me.  Is God, for me, the solution to a problem, to be ignored when the problem is not presenting itself?  Is God to be called on at need and ignored when not needed?  I fear that I often treat my relationship with God in this way.  This poem uses the metaphor of a plough, as Jesus does in Luke 9:62—“No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”  May God direct my eyes and my steps and my strength to continue forward!

The succeeding poems treat the Old Soul’s relationship with God: utter dependence and connectedness.  “For sap thy dead branch calls, O living vine!” (August 4; cf. John 15:4-5).  We receive this connectedness through trust in God—“Faith opens all the windows to God’s wind” (August 5), a beautiful image if ever there was one.  But this faith is, as we know, not from us, but again a gift from God.  The poem for August 6 is a reflection on God’s care for us.  “I can well afford / All to forget, so thou remember, Lord.”  We are frail and fallible.  God is strong and unfailing and faithful.

The poems for August 7 and 8 seem to be another change of subject; how God, rather than any of our beliefs about God or experiences of God, is our source of life and ground of faith.  The last two lines of the poem for August 8 are difficult for me, but I think I understand them.  (I found the other poems this week refreshingly direct after the tortured syntax we had to struggle through earlier this summer.)  The “holy maid” is of course Mary, sister of Martha (Luke 10:38-42).  Mary received something precious by sitting and listening to Jesus.  “Yet, brooding only on that treasure, she / Had soon been roused by conscious loss of heart.”  I take this to mean, roughly, “If Mary had then gone through life only brooding on the treasure she received when she listened to Jesus, she would soon have been rousted out of her faith and lost heart.”  If anyone else understands it differently, I would be glad to know your interpretation.  “Roused” is a word I would normally use in a positive sense in a faith context (roused to action, roused by the Spirit’s moving), but it seems to be negative here.

Again, we are reminded of our dependence on God, moment to moment, for continued faith and life.  This has been much on my mind as I prepare to preach on Sunday; my text is 1 John 2:18-28, which ends—“And now, little children, abide in him, so that when he is revealed we may have confidence and not be put to shame before him at his coming.”  This abiding will continue to occupy us as we reflect on the poems MacDonald wrote for this coming week.