Weathered Body, Shaping Spirit
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by Tilden Edwards
weathered pilingsshaped by wind and wave
new beauty revealed
Amidst the open expanse of sand on a Florida beach, I spied a strange shape in the distance. As I walked nearer, it turned out to be an aging pier reduced to its weathered pilings. Something about it was very inviting. I decided to lay my blanket down nearby and let it keep me company for a while.
Waves and winds had worn away the pier's floor. No longer could it keep feet dry and boats tethered. But it was not useless now. After all, it had drawn me to it, in a way that a functioning pier would not have. And it drew seagulls as well, who rested contentedly on its pilings like children sitting on grandparents' laps. No longer was the pier conformed to the exacting utilitarian purposes that others had demanded of it. It had taken on its own unique form, and a kind of mysterious beauty was revealed in the gnarled, weathered stumps. The pier could just be itself now, shaped only by sea and wind, free from what others once had made of it, free therefore from the constrictions of its functional given name, "pier." This was its new value: just being what it was, a reality far more than a functional pier, a kind of open wonder inviting others to come near, appreciate its being, and perhaps secretly learn from it about their own nature.
In a culture that prizes controlled functionality and surface beauty, it is good to have weathered piers around to draw us deeper. It's also good to have weathered people around--people who have embraced the grace of aging along with its pains and limitations (maybe even tasting these as part of the grace at times). Such people can draw us toward the heart of life. They can show us how to simply be with what is, with trust and appreciation and a gentle acceptance of our limitations. Yet they inspire our courage, too, when they discerningly call injustices and falsehoods around them for what they are. Even as they may continue to actively engage life, a sense of the intrinsic worth of sheer beingness can shine through their wornness and, like the pier, reveal a mysterious beauty.
Their slowed steps can have the effect of slowing down our minds and inviting us to taste the fullness of the present moment. When graced by the freedom to give themselves more easily to spontaneous loving and truth-telling, so much the more precious they become to us who are more captured by ego-securing images of ourselves and are not yet so free.
"Even though our outer nature suffers wear and tear, our inner nature is being renewed day by day" (2 Cor. 4:16). That is St. Paul's witness to the continuing promise of aging. Our souls are given room to soar in special ways that they did not when we were at a younger, more pressure-filled age. Jesus' call to the spiritually truth-seeking old Pharisee Nicodemus (John 3:5) "to be born of water and Spirit" we can read as the call to awaken to our own true being as eternally valued offspring of God rather than ephemerally valued functionaries of human society. In this awakening we find ourselves more able to approach what is and what comes to us with a more trusting lightness. There is nothing ultimately left to fear.
My hope for myself and all of us as we grow older is that we will be graced to find such trust penetrating the sometimes scary, painful side of aging. Then we will join those spiritual elders whose trusting way of being witnesses to the One who values us infinitely and who ever flows through our changes. One of those elders, St. Augustine, came to name this divine flowing through our years as Beauty in his poignant exclamation, "Late have I loved Thee, oh Beauty so ancient and so new." Like the seasoned pier, we can willingly let ourselves be shaped by the divine water and wind that are ever offering themselves as architects of our lives. As we yield to these purging and shaping forces in our aging, we will come to radiate the larger mysterious Beauty ever yearning to be manifest in each of us.
© 2008 The Shalem Institute.