Editor’s Note: When the editors of Conversations Journal decided to do an issue on aging and passages, we knew we had in our own community a voice to speak wisely and well to us. In Emilie Griffin’s latest book, Green Leaves for Later Years, she shares wisdom from her seventy-five-year spiritual journey.

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01.  The Humbling Days

It is early in the morning, and I am grateful. Grateful that in this year of grace I took a little of my own medicine and returned with a kind of humility. Well, a kind of humbling, at least—a low-to-the-ground way of remembering what it is to begin again. And again. And again. This is the year I admitted, for example, that I cannot ever find my Bible in the early morning, because the house is filled with Bibles, and not one of them is ever the one I’m after when it is still dark and I want to watch the light come up over the trees. For me the light is Christ.

So I begin again, looking for today’s Bible reading electronically this time, pulling the day’s Scripture up from the website I have bookmarked as hodie, which is Latin for “today.” It is also the first word of the chant that monks use to open the Christmas Day antiphon at second vespers. Hodie Christus natus est. Today Christ is born.

This is the first line of Benjamin Britten’s “Hodie” in the Ceremony of Carols, that beautiful work of almost-chant that long ago swept me into the Christian life. And so each morning now this simple Latin word—hodie, “today,” “this day”—is my entrance into the beauty of the moment and the life of the Lord. Fittingly, it is in the later years that I claim this phrase as part of the day’s opening reading and opening prayer. Why fittingly? Because I am fully present in the moment, in the instant, yet by grace connected fully to the Lord. His word, my action. His touch, my word and world enough. Stretching across the globe itself by grace. My self-extended. This word, this time, this instant of prayer, my entry point into the day.

Then, through my window—dawn. I am surrounded by green leaves. Emerging from the ground as ferns, wildly successful plants that tap against my window-panes when the wind blows. Poking up everywhere, rising again like sap one forgets till spring and all comes once again alive, with Christ, with meaning, my Word, God, Lord of hope and all.

 

First light, first prayer
Now into winking blue I dive for the
first sacred word and prayer of the day:
well it’s not blue screen
(that’s a tech term, electronics, all that)
but it’s my screen
blue
deep
winking in pre-dawn light
which is
on the whole
the best time of my day with God.
(though it could be any time.
you know how that goes.)
My bell
My diving Dell
opens a path
early early
not sure when
sometime before dawn.
blue screen
for me
unlimited future
and just to make it extra nice,
the metaphor,
blue is Our Lady’s color,
larkspur,
loveliness,
joy.
Hard to explain.
you had to be there.
But I was there,
it was me
and Jesus
me and Jesus
and the whole world besides.
Heart of Christ
Extending pole to pole
and still farther
into the limitless future
of God’s love.

 

When the above text was written, it was January and bitter cold. The text for the day was from the book of Acts: “We set sail from Troas, making a straight run for Samothrace” (Acts 16:11, NAB[Scripture texts marked (NAB) are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C. and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All Rights Reserved.). I love this reading, and I love Paul’s journeys as ways into the life of God.

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02.  The Hidden Spot

Sometimes I think there is a hidden spot in the universe where God is to be found, God and the whole rest of the world besides. It is a sort of Aladdin’s cave of memory, joy, and courage where all the spiritual gifts glitter in the darkness and every jewel shines.

When I first set out to offer God the best I had, I reflected on an image: the apples of my experience ripening, falling, scattering on the ground. I pictured myself entering into my future with all the hopes and gratitude of a life well lived, trying to gather all the golden apples of the Spirit, the beauties God had bestowed on me.

The years ahead would be my new territory—years of joy and sorrow and uncertainty as the uncharted country of the heart and the Lord himself as my guide. Day by day I would follow this shadowy figure on the path. Sometimes Jesus would walk beside me; sometimes he would climb the rock just ahead and wait for me to catch up, battling with forces of fear and death like Gandalf at the crag of doom. Sometimes I would imagine Jesus as a twelve-year-old, a youth barely older than a child but already wise and able to explain to his elders the meaning of God’s plan.

That was my Jesus, and I would follow him.

I sat in a coffee house and attempted to capture—like a sketch artist who works quickly because the light is fading and the sun will soon be down—the vision I had seen, the glimpse into the meaning of existence that is the writer’s only spiritual treasure.

Then fear closed in. Fear and self-doubt, my ancient enemies: Who do you think you are, to bring the golden apples of God’s wisdom to the world? To the bystanders, the wayfarers, the random readers who riffle the pages and put the book down? Who declared you the keeper of the universe?

Then I knew for sure that the Lord was with me. At every step of the long journey that is the later years, he has accompanied me. There are many who tell me they do not know the Lord, that he has never walked with them, never offered a wafer of comfort along the hard and perilous way. And I tell them, “Wait.”

Wait until all earthly consolations and comforts fall away. Wait until the constellations that once populated the night sky fade and the universe seems to grow cold. Think, always, that when you are exhausted and drained from the long trudge of existence, there will be golden apples on the ground, scattered randomly but wonderfully ripe. Never hesitate to think, The Lord put this one here just for me. It is an old story, and the Lord never seems to stop telling it. It is a story of encouragement, confidence, and love.

I am conscious of the passing of years. As I move into the future I am conscious of all the coffee house reflections of the past—discarded pages, lists, and notes that have long ago vanished into the muddle of whatever I did to serve him, whatever I did to confront my own monsters on the crag, whatever I did to harvest the apples and scatter them to the world, to the random wayfarers with whom I stopped to share a bite.

What wisdom do I bring to the later years?

Nothing more than the wisdom of dwelling in the present moment. No more than the courage of God’s promises. Nothing more than the perseverance to walk through sorrow. No more than the unlimited future of God’s love.

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03.  A Conversation between Alan Fadling and Emilie Griffin

Alan Fadling: Emilie, the subtitle of your book is: “The Spiritual Path of Wisdom.” Would you share with us something about your own spiritual path?

Emile Griffin: Well, the spiritual life is really the most important thing to me. It’s part of my self-understanding. Henri Nouwen has helped me a lot here. He was always dealing with stress. I love the story he tells about himself when he went to a monastery to be quiet. They gave him very simple tasks to do. Later, he met with the Superior and said, “You’re wasting my valuable intellect. I could be in the library, and you have me baking bread.” The Superior said, “Henri, I think you should stay with the manual labor and avoid the library.” Nouwen was outraged. The fact is that we ourselves cannot always see what others—spiritual directors and teachers—can see so well. Wisdom tells us we always need to begin again. We must learn to be one of the least and the littlest.

AF:     Thank you, Emilie. As someone who has taken a few steps into my fifties, I found Green Leaves very helpful. I wonder what you have hoped that readers in different generations might gain from it.

EG:     It’s funny, surprising, to think of Jesus as a teacher about old age because, of course, he died young. Still, I find him to be our principal teacher always, even though we might expect to learn more about aging from people like Abraham and Sarah. But Jesus teaches us deep wisdom. For example, the whole Sabbath question constantly recurs, but I rush around on Sunday and find myself exhausted on Monday. But then I say, “Oh well, then Monday will be my Sabbath.” I really need a Sabbath when I’m truly resting, not working, able to listen to the Lord.

Jesus certainly had times of exhaustion and difficulty. I think about him on the cross. Scholars worry about his last words. What did he mean when he said this and that? I thought Dallas Willard was really good on this. He once said that there are times in your life when you feel that God doesn’t care about you or has left you in a bad space. You feel forgotten, that God will not return and that you’re going right down the chute. I think that is what anxiety is. Dallas helped me to see that as an opportunity for grace.

Anxiety is one of the great enemies. We worry about the stress of our workload. We feel that we must do more or the world will not survive. We have a sense that everything is laid on us, but it really isn’t. Wisdom remembers who God is, how loving and faithful he is. Of course, it’s all in the Psalms. Eugene Peterson constantly reminds us that the Psalms are Jesus’ prayer book. The good news is that Jesus’ teaching was rooted in the Psalms and the Prophets. He didn’t just talk about perseverance. He lived it.

 

AF:     Emilie, what you say about anxiety brings to mind a line from your book where you mentioned your “ancient enemies of fear and self-doubt.” I have sometimes described my own longtime enemies as anxiety, fear, self-doubt, and low confidence. It would help me to hear how your struggle with these enemies has changed over the years, if it has.

EG:     Well, when you’re young you assume that you’ll become less worried the longer you live. When I was in my twenties, I imagined how “together” things would be in my thirties when I might be married and have children. I kept imagining some future moment when everything would come together. For example, I was at a women’s study group yesterday, and we were all talking about how we had imagined that when our kids were grown up we would just sit in a chair, read, and relax. And then we were all there laughing hysterically because our schedules are relentless. We are scheduled to the hilt. The challenge of remaining before the Lord continues throughout our lives.

Living in the exact moment that we are in right now is a matter of surrendering to grace, because we want to be in charge of the agenda. I like making lists. Tomorrow I’ll do this and that. I cross off the things I’ve done. Being organized like that certainly isn’t a bad thing, but the tendency to be over-controlling is. So, for example, one of the groups I’m in is a Bible group, and it’s a group where they prevent me from volunteering. They say, “No, Emilie, we’ve got that covered. So-and-so is doing that.” This is because they know me. They know that I’ll say, “Oh, I can do that,” and, of course, I can do a lot of stuff. What I need most, though, is not to do a lot of stuff but to have moments that are full of a holy emptiness before God. I need to simply enjoy who God is, to know that God is there, to feel God’s love.

 

AF:     As I hear you talking, this “childlikeness” theme of Jesus comes up for me, and it strikes me that instead of childlikeness, we seem to be culture obsessed with youth. Jesus’s idea of childlikeness and our culture’s idea of youth aren’t the same, are they?

EG:     No, they aren’t. I remember, for example, that when I was forty I was afraid that I was already too old. I was working in the business world with an ad agency. Once you were over forty you either had to own your company or forget about it. We were afraid to be forty. Well, I’m way past forty now, but I have learned something. The whole life cycle is a beautiful thing. It’s part of the wisdom of the Lord. I can learn to let go and be a child. That’s so different from clinging to your youthfulness. Childlikeness grows out of trusting and relaxing.

You may know that I have a physical handicap. One of the things that I have to do is help people who worry about me to relax. I know they’re worrying about me, but they’re also worrying about themselves. They think, “She’s going to slip! She’s going to fall!” and suddenly I’m surrounded by six or seven people asking how they can help me. I want to tell them, “Be at peace. It’s okay. I’m going to be just fine.”

 

AF:     That sounds like quite a challenge. As we close this conversation, I wonder if there was anything else you wanted to say about Green Leaves that I didn’t ask you about.

EG:     Mainly that my book is not entirely about the later years. Some have looked at the book and said something like, “This would be good for my seventy-year-old grandmother.” As in all of my books, I really just wanted to address the key question of how to live well in the present moment, regardless of our age. The natural wisdom of how to live, how to get older well, and how to continue to be a child even as you age is really God’s wisdom. The Lord wants us to understand how to be well, how to be alive, how to be fresh and new, and how to experience the “green leaves.”