The Passing of Years
The popular song, "Time on My Hands," has far deeper significance than is generally envisaged. It could very well be that time is one of the greatest obstacles to happiness, and for two reasons.
Time makes the combination of pleasures impossible. Because we live in time we cannot simultaneously listen to Cicero, Demosthenes and Bossuet; because the clock of our life is wound but only once, we cannot at one and the same moment enjoy the snow of the Alps and the refreshing sunshine of the highlands of Kenya; because the heart beats out the lease on life, one cannot, despite the advertisements, "dine and dance" at one and the same time.
It is an interesting psychological fact that the more pleasurable are our moments, the less we are conscious of time. At the end of a pleasant evening with friends, or listening to good music, or being spiritually uplifted in prayer, we say, "Time passed like anything." When, however, work is a bore, visits a trial in patience and an appointment with the dentist a cross, time never seems to end. Hidden in this psychological and subjective judgment of the passing hours is already a hint of immortality and the necessity of a timeless existence in order to find perfect happiness. If the more we feel ourselves outside of time, the greater is our happiness, it follows that eternity is the one condition in which all things can be enjoyed at one and the same time. This, curiously enough, is the definition that the philosophers give of eternity: tota simul, all pleasures at once.
But in recent decades, with the decline of faith and belief in immortality, time has become one of the major causes of many psychotic and neurotic disorders. If there is no other life than this, if the daily burden of life leads to nothing more than the grave, if existence has no meaning, then time is the root of most of our anxieties. What then is life but a long corridor through which one passes closing doors, not knowing which door will be the last? Every crisis in life, every new turning in the road of existence, diminishes possibilities. The anxiety of the temporal then begins to press us down so that we are like a criminal awaiting a death sentence.
The passing parade of time, the slamming of the gates of opportunity, the calming of passions, forced retirements—all of these produce an existential anxiety which makes one wonder if it is worthwhile carrying on.
Because life does not end here, the closing of the doors of time and the burden of the years become bearable—because they lead to something better when properly utilized. That was why St. Paul said that for the sake of Christ he "glorified in his infirmities" and in his anxieties and in his sorrows. This was nothing but the continuation of the message of Our Blessed Lord: "Be not anxious." This means, "Have no existential anxiety about acquiring too much in time, for it ends and leads to judgment." So long as a man lives for treasures that moths consume and rust eats and thieves steal, there is no possible escape from anxiety and worry. We cannot cast these cares upon God, for God has no interest whatever in making a man rich. As William James once wrote, "The sovereign cure for worry is religious faith. The turbulent billows of the fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed, and to him who has a hold of vaster and more permanent realities, the hourly vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem relatively insignificant things." It is only to the extent that timeless existence, or eternity, is brought to bear upon all of our actions in time, that we become liberated from that awful, frustrating anxiety of the temporal.
Indifference
Every teacher knows that it is easier to win a mind with a mistaken interest than one that has no interest at all. The greatest of the Apostles, Paul, came to the Lord through the flames of bate, and the reason of his hate remained the reason of his love —a vivid recognition of all the Person of Christ stood for in relation to humanity. The sensuous passion of Magdalen finally swept in the opposite direction and became the supreme dedication of her love.
But what is extremely difficult for the blessings of heaven to work upon is indifference and the middle-age spread of false broad-mindedness. The Lord can do something with the obviously bad, but it is rather difficult to do anything with the obviously good. They have outlived their hot venturesome days but have not yet seen into the vanity the world prizes. They are comfortable and hence ask for no change; because they have wealth, they think that they are worthful.
Tennyson in his "Holy Grail" tells the story of such a man, who surrendered all of his high ideals and settled down to a soft, materialistic, sensual life. Originally he had set off in search of the Holy Grail, but soon wearied of the quest; finding a silk pavilion in the field and merry maidens in it, he abandoned the search. Later on, when he returned to King Arthur's court, he ridiculed the idea of looking for that great and holy thing which the cup signified:
It is a madness
But by mine eyes and by mine ears I swear,
I will be deafer than the blue-eyed cat
And thrice as blind as any noon day owl,
To holy virgins in their ecstasies, henceforward.
Dante in his description of hell said that when he first entered it, he found some spirits that were neither rebellious nor faithful, but existed solely for themselves. They were "hateful, distasteful to God and to His enemies."
When these indifferent souls steal, they do not restore; when they have moral collapses, disgusting to the moral sense, they do not repent, but creep back into an old respectability; they judge themselves by the accepted standards of the group in which they move; social refinement is regarded as the flower and the aroma of virtue; secular conventions are given the force of Divine commands; and finally, they may call themselves stupid but never sinful.
Herein lies the psychological reason for the denial of immortality. Knowing that such indifference cannot escape judgment when all things are weighed in the balance, they resort to denying it. Shakespeare wrote:
In the corrupted currents of this world,
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft 'tis seen the wicked prides itself
Buys out the law: but 'tis not so above;
There is no shuffling, there the action lies in His true nature.
No one can pick up the Scriptures without reading a devastating criticism of social moral standards, as when the Divine Saviour put a harlot above a Pharisee, a penitent robber above a religious leader, a prodigal son above his exemplary elder brother. Many a tree as it stands in the forest looks fair, fine, solid and valuable, but when it is cut down and sawed for use reveals rottenness, cross grain and knots. Social conformity to low standards may give the appearance of goodness, but in the judgment of God the true character is revealed.
Middle Age
One way of telling whether we are growing old is to revisit the college which we once attended. If the students seem "much younger" than when we were there, we are in middle age. Many alumni returning on the fifteenth or twentieth anniversary of graduation often say, "Today colleges are just filled with kids—much more immature than in our day." Someone meeting a policeman on the street remarked that today the policemen are much younger than when he was a boy. There actually has been no change in the age of the policemen; there is only a change in the age of the person speaking.
One of the best correlations of age and youth was made by Saint Augustine when he wrote, "Let your old age be childlike, and your childhood like old age; then your wisdom will not be with pride, nor your humility be without wisdom." Cicero wrote about many of the advantages of old age, one of which was that the passions become milder as we learn to run better in the harness. Life, as it goes on, expresses itself less in poetry and more in prose; enthusiasms fade away into a kind of impotent prudence. Some may feel they have left their passions behind, when actually it is the passions that have left them behind. They imagine that they have mastered life, when really habits which they cannot break have mastered and enchained them.
The German poet Schiller does not altogether share this idea. He contends that it is a physiological fact that the animal nature becomes more dominant over the spiritual nature in middle life, simply because body and soul are much more closely welded together than they were in youth. The passions indeed were stronger then, and more violent, but the moral nature also had a greater resiliency and could quickly bounce back to moral values. As physical recuperation was easier in youth, so too, unless there were gross excesses, spiritual or moral recovery was easier. The multiplication of bad acts which produce evil habits, the evil habits which produce the slaveries of sin, do not meet the resistance in middle age that they did during the elastic and more morally conscious attitudes of youth.
There seems to be some confirmation of this in Cardinal Newman, who states that the generalities of people of middle age have either sunk in heavy apathy, or else are more devoted to the mere material interests of life; these, when not counteracted, make man selfish and indifferent to anything except his own comfort or his own profit.
In the more intellectual, this manifests itself in an indifference to any kind of moral or spiritual change; in the less cultured, or in the coarse and vulgar, it shows itself in a love for more violent excitement. It is particularly significant that one of the great passages of Dante is one in which he shows man encountering three animals: the fierce lion of wrath and pride; the sleek and many-spotted panther, who stands for lust; and the gaunt hungry wolf, representing avarice. All three he places in the middle region of our mortal life. Confucius said that man is governed by lust in youth, by pride in middle age and by avarice in old age. Whatever be the judgments, it is well for man to realize that be faces the final reckoning, and should say with Dryden:
Already I am worn with cares and age;
And just abandoning the ungrateful stage:
Unprofitably kept at Heaven's expense
I live a rent charge on His Providence.
Old Age
Age has many purposes that are good and holy. The Old Testament makes old age the reward for obedience to parents. Saint Paul speaks of age as a merciful gift of Providence to enable us to do penance for the sins of youth. Age also becomes the fountain of wisdom and experience from which the young may drink. Michelangelo, who lived to be almost ninety, often used to repeat his motto as he chiseled marble that almost spoke: "I still learn." Cicero claimed that age gave stability to reason by the quieting of passions. Almost all fruits grow sweeter as they approach the time of plucking. Age is more merciful than youth. It was the young men who counseled David to be cruel; the old counseled him to be merciful. Those who have the faith and live virtuously dwell in radiant expectation of the glory that is to come.
And so one might go on enumerating the advantages of age as Cicero did in his work, On the Old. But here we come not to the subject of age, but rather, how rarely those who reach. old age ever change from an earthly to a divine life. A famous Protestant preacher once said, "I have been twenty years in the mystery of the Gospel, and I do not believe that I could enumerate three persons over fifty years of age whom I have ever heard ask the solemn question: 'What shall I do to be saved?'" The Jewish prophet complained of his people, "Gray hairs are here and there upon him, and yet he knoweth not." This unconscious loss of life is pitiable, the approaching of the bar of justice and the refusal to set accounts in order.
Tempests are visible in their destruction; so are the violent outbursts of the passions of the young. But sometimes there is the dry rot which undermineth all within; such is often the unrecognized deterioration of those who have lived in doubt, skepticism and faithlessness until the whole fabric collapses. The shutters of life were pulled down upon a heavenly city during youth and now there is not the strength to lift them. The real peril of age is that it may board windows that open on the Light and then claim that there is no light. Gray hairs are invoked as an authority on worldliness and godlessness, while a creeping paralysis leaves the soul untouched though "one rose daily from the dead."
There are three great passions in man which impel him to excesses in his desire for things that are good. These three are lust, which the modern world calls sex; pride or egotism; and avarice or greed, sometimes called security. Though they are not limited to any one generation, each has a tendency to be stronger in different periods of life. Flesh dominates youth; egotism and struggle for power are apt to determine a man's middle age. Avarice, or greed, is generally the sin of old age. The piling up of money becomes a kind of immortality; by making himself secure in this life, one unconsciously believes he is procuring security for himself eternally. Youth is apt to be a spender; old age is more inclined to be a hoarder.
Such a life then becomes so materialized that there is never a thought of what is immoral or wrong. Rather there is a tendency to confuse having and being. Since he has worth, he believes he is worth. Indifference so possesses the soul that there is neither God nor Baal. As Francis Thompson put it:
So flaps my helpless sail,
Bellying with neither gale
Of Heaven
Nor Orcus even.
The best way to enjoy old age is to see in it a time for making up for the sins that went before, and living in hope for the joys that lie before one. But this takes Faith!
Moral Landscapes
A person may say, "I am not as holy as I once was." This self-depreciation may, in some instances, be true, but there also may be considerable added enlightenment through the lapse of years. We become more humble and, therefore, more dissatisfied with ourselves; we pass through certain emotional stages and probably equate them with genuine holiness and with spiritual twinges. But may not this growing sense of imperfection be a sign of the perfecting of our spirit, in the sense that the faults once latent are now discovered? The clearer eye detects deformity and the finer ear the discords. It is very much like watching a sculptor at work; when he first touches the block of marble with heavy strokes he appears to mar the marble, and yet in the end a glorious statue rises under his hand. So the blows of God and the trials of life seem to spoil our ease; yet in the end, they work toward a beautiful harmony of spirit.
From a psychological point of view, there may be vain thoughts concerning the past. Distance has a softening power. Those things which appeared lovely at a distance cannot stand up before an immediate gaze. One of the great missionaries of the Middle Ages came to his vocation by following the sprightly walk of a young woman whom he saw on the street. He quickened his pace and finally caught up with her and spoke to her; when she turned her head, she revealed the face of a leper. It was this close view which inspired him to dedicate himself to the lepers and the poor.
Moral landscapes are something like physical landscapes; that is why we believe that in retrospect the rough has become the soft, and the harsh the sweet. It could very well be that the disgust with which men feel the shocks and buffeting of the generation in which they live makes them falsely conclude that past days were better. One notices this in the recently dead. How quickly the defects and the failings and even the vices of the dead seem to fade away with the passing of life. When friends and relatives were close to them, they saw faults. When they look at them now as those who have passed, all of the hidden goodness begins to appear.
One notices this in the stories of the saints of the Old Testament as compared with references to them in the New Testament. Those who were not too conspicuous as unblemished mirrors of sanctity, such as David, who committed adultery; Rahab; Moses, who killed a man; Abraham who lied twice about his wife—all of these are praised in the New Testament. It was the distance from their lives that, to some extent, added a luster which was not actually present during the days of the flesh. As one historian has put it, "The more carefully we examine the history of the past, the more reasons shall we find to dissent with those who imagine that our age has been fruitful of new social evils. The truth is that the evils are, with scarcely an exception, old. That which is new is the intelligence which discerns them, and the humanity which relieves them." Probably there are no new things happening in the world. There are only the old things happening to new people.
Our Accountability
At the end of every day a slip is pulled out of a cash register, on which is written the debits and credits of the day's transactions. Each year the income-tax bureau reviews the statements of its citizens, making judgments on the honesty and dishonesty of their returns. The rooming after excessive drinking, the head with its hangover makes a judgment on intemperance, as during the night the sick stomach passes judgment on the food that was not good for digestion. As audiences make judgment on a play by their applause, so there is to be a final accountability for the thoughts and the words and deeds of every human heart. In vain is it to be expected that we who pass judgment constantly on others should not pass in judgment ourselves.
It will be very difficult for us to give an account of others in strict justice, but in a general way we render more judgment on others than we do on ourselves. To judge others keeps us at the circumference of life and away from the center.
But there come moments, at night or when alone or in the silence of the country, where we cannot help but pass judgment on ourselves. But those whose consciences are no good avoid this by immersing themselves in externals. Hence the reluctance of such persons to be alone with themselves. They hardly ever enter into themselves, and partly because they have no center of personality. They search for constant distractions, or something "to make one forget," anything to keep the wound below the surface, and the memories from flying upward into consciousness.
Even this very tendency to deny guilt or to suppress it, or to ridicule the fact of sin, is in itself a fear of judgment. No one is supposed to speak today of a man giving an account of himself to his Creator, any more than he is supposed to speak of cancer. And yet Daniel Webster was once asked, "What is the most important thought you ever entertained?" He replied, "My own individual responsibility before God."
Each man shall one day give an account of himself to God. Many do not want to hear about this; like Louis XIV, they do not wish death to be mentioned in their presence. All the veils which hide us from each other, or from ourselves, all the false excuses we have had for our sins, all the blame we thrust on Oedipus and Electra instead of ourselves—all these will drop away at the glance of the Divine eye. Nor will the accounting be arbitrary, capricious or external. It will be self-registering, automatic—we shall see ourselves as we really are. It is not the fact that God is going to judge us some day that is frightening; it is that our daily living is forging the judgment.
But here is the consolation: Scripture tells us of the dual role that Our Blessed Lord plays. He repeatedly affirmed that He was not on earth to judge the world, but to be its Redeemer, its Saviour, its Advocate. Later on, He said, at the end of time. He would be the Judge of all men. This is the season of mercy; later, the winter of accounting.
A criminal rejoiced on discovering that his judge was once the attorney who defended him. But when the judge took his seat on the bench, he said to him, "When I was an attorney, I defended you, but I am no longer your lawyer. It is now not my business to defend. It is my business now to judge. I shall hear the evidence, but then I must deal with you in keeping with my oath of office."
While we are alive, Christ is our Advocate and Defense Attorney. When we come to the end of life and the great scroll is unrolled, then He becomes the Judge. To those who have lived well it will be like meeting a Judge Who is an old Friend, and from Whom we have nothing to fear.
Taken from Guide to Contentment by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.
This item 1422 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
