Ageish

Honoring the season of my birth, now long ago when there were some in this land who still liked Ike and grease in the hair was desirable and applied with adolescent hands. My lifespan has been an age of apocalypse: I recall well a group of us sitting on the banana seats of our stingray bicycles, leaning reflectively on our butterfly handlebars and doing the arithmetic necessary to determine how old we all would be in the year 2000. As that age would be somewhere in the 40's we snorted and, before pedaling off, agreed that we would be dead of old age by then, if we made it that long. Either the murky eschatological menace of the calendar year 2000 would strike or, more likely, someone here or in the Soviet Union would "push the button" and the mad array of nuclear missiles would bring life on earth to an end. What did it plant in our callow, sweaty, scabrous young souls to live in this catastrophic shadow I wonder? I am still too close to the question to have more than a lingering shadow-sense that I had best keep holding that question and let it trouble. In an age wherein apocalypse has taken other forms: climactic change, the revival of European land war, the unendurable wealth gap wherein our cities fill, like a bowl under a dripping faucet, with the houseless and the desperate: The question begs even more persistently. And the creeping desperation among those who find privilege in question giving wicked life to the persistent zombie of right-wing fanaticism, violence and a death-loving idolatry of guns, support of a blatant con man and disgraced ex-president who nevertheless represents something to the enraged and the terrified. But today a respite, the sound of gulls even through the closed windows, the heartbeat of the Pacific in its muffled but powerful beat outside the walls. Grateful for a life that has already gone on far longer than those wonder years ever imagined possible. Grateful for friends come, many gone, a few remained. Grateful for a life-companion, for fascinating adult children each of whom go about doing good in the world. Grateful that, as a young Merton wrote in the selected reading for today, I too have a vocation nurtured by Scripture that still gives me moments of sensing fire and music beneath my feet. Grateful for the transforming power of gratitude itself.