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“You make me better today…”
What does progress look like in the later years of life? That question – or variations on that theme – haunted me throughout the season of Lent.
In our materialistic society, we so often define progress as a promotion, a better job, a bigger house, or a newer, flashier car. But Jan and I, in our senior years, have moved to a smaller dwelling, one we do not own. We still have two cars, but are not sure why.
As I come to terms with our move into a senior living community last year, I keep asking, “What’s next? What am I called to, now, in these later chapters of my life?”
I don’t yet have clear answers, but I want to share two quotations I’ve recently heard or read, quotations that somehow speak to my questions.
The first is from the early desert fathers. “Serapion … traveled once on a pilgrimage to Rome. Here he was told of a celebrated recluse, a woman who lived always in one small room, never going out. Skeptical about her way of life — for he himself was a great wanderer — Serapion called on her and asked, ‘Why are you sitting here?’ To which she replied, ‘I am not sitting; I am on a journey.’”
Could it be that the progress I am called to is not outward, but inward? Not a wide journey, but a deep one?
The second quotation, from Thomas Merton, suggests that such an inward journey can bear surprising fruit. Living in solitude, Merton mused, “Solitude … that excludes everything else but solitude is worthless. True solitude embraces everything, for it is the fullness of love that rejects nothing and no one, and is open to All in All.” He adds, “A solitude that is not simply the wide-openness of love and freedom is nothing.”*
What is true progress? Perhaps it is one more step, or two, on the deep journey toward awe and wonder, toward the fullness of love.
Better today. Than I was before. Perhaps that is true progress.
--Bill
*A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals, ed. Jonathan Montaldo (Harper-Collins, 2005), p. 159.
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