God in all things, including ageing

by Josie Smith.

There are many good things about being very old.    One develops a recognition of one’s own weakness, of the need for help, and (if one relaxes into it and stops being frustrated because things are not as they used to be) one is prepared not only to accept such help but to ask for it where appropriate.  

There is a certain wry enjoyment, too, to be had when during a telephone call to some organisation one is asked for date of birth, as often happens.   Supplying this, together with name, address, NHS number, hospital number and all the other necessary details, is no problem.    (But never bank details, and I have my own polite but firm way of dealing with cold callers, who inevitably ring at mealtimes.)   Reaction from the other end is usually incredulity that one is still compos mentis, living independently with no domestic help, and in charge of one’s own financial affairs and general decision-making.    Not to mention using a computer, though certainly with less skill than my older great-grandchildren who seem to have been born hard-wired into their Devices.

I recognise that I am extremely fortunate in that my brain appears not to be as old as some of the rest of me.    I gave up driving a year ago in the month of my 93rd birthday while awaiting serious surgery, and am effectively housebound.   But inside, I am still ME.    A friend in his forties said recently ‘I can’t imagine what it must be like to be in your nineties!’  There I have the advantage.   All the people I have ever been, at whatever age, are still in there as part of the ‘me’ I am now, as are all the people whose influence has contributed to what I have become, and I know well how it feels to be fortyish.    

 I have been an ecumenist ‘from my youth up’, realising that whatever my Wesleyan Circuit Steward grandpa had to say, my lovely Roman Catholic next door neighbours were not dangerous!     I also recall incurring the displeasure of my Methodist Local Preacher and Son of the Manse husband once, by attending an interfaith service.    This was many decades ago, and I insisted that we all needed to follow our own consciences, not that of others however dear.   Not quite as long ago I had the privilege of presenting a series of radio programmes in which I explored the beliefs and practice of local faith groups with their leaders and lay members.   None of us has a monopoly of truth.   I have felt closer to some open-minded friends of other faiths than I have ever felt to some fellow-Methodists who have closed minds.    We can listen to those who experience life within different traditions, and we might learn from them – God’s thoughts are always higher than our thoughts.

I now attend (when a friend takes me) an Ecumenical Partnership which delivers both comfort and challenge, both learning and loving.   We also have a close relationship, and, sometimes, shared worship with the Quakers along the road.     An hour of mostly silence is a very different sort of worship from our usual pattern, as ours is for them, and both are appreciated.

And I believe increasingly in the unity of all things and all people.     I still have a tattered cutting from the Guardian from the then science writer from many years ago, observing that as quantum physics had revealed the inseparability of all matter however far apart it has become geographically, this could be a profound revelation for theology too.  

Over the years I have come to understand (and the more I ponder it the more obvious it seems) that as God created all things ‘from nothing’, then all things come from the ‘God substance’, and we are all – trees, grass, whales, people, slugs and wasps and the very earth we walk on and eventually return to – not just made in God’s image, as we are assured, but eternally part of that very God who is our Father and Who is in us, whether we accept that or not, and however far we have moved away from the original pattern.    And we can never ‘flee from God’s presence.’

So though I find world news unbearable, and weep with and for all those who suffer for whatever reason, I know in my bones that we remain children of God, not by adoption but because we are born in the image of God.    Those who find God in nature are partly right too.    But ‘partly right’ is all any of us can ever be.

And may we, like our friends the Quakers, look for and find ‘that which is of God in everyone.’