Brendan Hoban: Confronting the realities of our final years                    

Western People 11.4.2023

On the cusp of a significant birthday, I’ve been reading the latest book of poems by Pádraig J. Daly, in Glimpsing More (Scotus Press, 2022). His day job, as we say, is a priest, a contemporary of mine, and I find that his poems resonate with me, often echoing my own thoughts.

One is a birthday poem, At Seventy Five:

I have reached my down-time

And fear the dimming of eyes,

The snapping of limbs,

The stroke while walking,

The cardiac infarct,

The ‘what?’ beyond.

How long now before I go out

Into the nowhere?

I will carry nothing with me.

It will not matter how any in the world account me.

I will stand naked before my Maker,

Abashed,

Hopeful of mercy.

A poet cancatch a moment, a mood, in a few words that might take a novelist a hundred thousand (or more) to say the same thing –  though never as well. Because for poets every word is assessed, turned over, held in balance, like a gifted mason surveying a stone’s shape, its density, its fit.

I’ve seen some of Seamus Heaney’s notebooks where his paring and trimming of words went through several refinements before what ultimately presents as effortless music sings off a page. Pádraig Daly’s poems, I suspect, have the same provenance, forfeiting anything extra to immediate need in favour of a spare, minimalist style that communicates with utter clarity, a processing through the heart as well as with the head.

Other ‘birthday poems’ follow At Seventy Five, year by year, concluding with At Seventy Nine:

My shadow soon

Will fall no longer on the street.

I do not fear extinction;

Nor any afterwards:

I trust in transcendent tenderness.

I fear only my going out

And the sweats and pains of exiting.

It isn’t only a poet who chronicles the encroachments of old age, though the rest of us may hesitate about confronting them so unsparingly and so searingly. It isn’t only a poet who records the ebb and flow of old age and who sifts, in the words of T.S. Eliot, whatever reality humankind can bear.

Old age, I find, is generally about sifting, what I throw away and what I allow no one to prise from my fingers. What’s important or significant; and what isn’t. What I need to let go; and what’s important to hang on to – maybe grimly, at times.

While ‘Waiting for the last bus’, as the writer, Richard Holloway, memorably describes what Pádraig Daly calls ‘down-time’, I’ve been reading a biography of the spiritual writer, Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest, written by Jurjen Beumer. Its subtitle is  ‘A Restless Seeking for God’ which describes well Nouwen’s long search for God, moving from the Netherlands to the USA, from Harvard University to a L’Arche community, from a monastery to South America on to his final days before his death and burial in Toronto. A philosopher, a psychologist, a theologian, a teacher, a priest and a writer of almost 40 books, the enduring, underlying obsessive preoccupation of his life was a restless searching for God.

What captivated me about Nouwen – his absolute focus, his unrelieved intensity, his unwavering spiritual quest – was that towards the end of his life he had condensed human wisdom into one quotation from St John’s Gospel: When you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and go where you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go. (John 21:18) That recurrent theme was a kind of anthem that served as a backdrop to Nouwen’s later life.

It’s about reaching a point in life when we learn to accept our natural resistance to letting go, to not wanting to control the contours of our lives, to submitting to the reality of the passing of time, of moving, as Nouwen described it, ‘from being in control to being dependent, from taking initiatives to having to wait, from living to dying’.

A key component of facing the future is an acceptance of the past – with its universal experience of falling down and getting up again – and its corollary, the futility of trying to control much of what is left of the rest of our lives.

Searching for God is about gradually discovering, as Nouwen did, that while we may search for God he was even more intensely searching for us. And what he wants us to know, more than anything else,  is that he loves us unconditionally and beyond all our imagining. The pearl of great price, as in the gospel parable of the treasure hidden in a field, is about making this truth about God a living reality in the lives we live every day.

A second key component is the grace of gratitude, the sense that everything (or almost everything) is ‘gift’ in one shape or another and that appreciation of what we have trumps the experience of dwelling on what we haven’t got – and will never have. A scene of gratitude, if placed in the context of God’s unconditional love for his Beloved  – that’s you and me – can open up a roadway to hope in our last days.

Nouwen himself discovered, after a long and difficult journey of a restless searching for God, that he had moved from being ’a teacher about love to being loved as the beloved’.

The key to our last days is about basking in God’s love for us.

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