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Saging

 I have mentioned Lauren Winner’s Mudhouse Sabbath before. The book has a number of poignant and insightful observations. The following is appropriate for our community because many of us share the reality of being older than the average American. In the chapter on aging, Winner writes this:

The elderly are asked to age well, and the communities that support them are asked to help them do just that. (Rabbi Zalman Schecter-Shalomi has dispensed with the gerund “aging.” He speaks instead of “eldering.” I’ll admit a certain squeamishness with the term—it strikes me as a little twee, and every time I think of it, I have to adjust. But there is something vigorous about it too. To age is to be passive, to sit like a bottle of wine—you just sit there and time passes and age happens over you. To elder—or, in another of Reb Zalman’s clever infinitives, “to sage”—is to try to shape the last years of one’s life with intention.)

Aging is not just a process of physical decline. It can also be a time of the kind of stripping away that fosters spiritual depth, spiritual incline. The Hebrew word sayvah, gray—as in gray hair—is etymologically connected to the word for repentance, teshuva. The process of aging, then, is the process of setting wrong things right.” (p.98-99)

As we together age, do we also help each other sage? When you and I spend some reflection time, are there things that we might set right through the lens of maturity and increasing Christlikeness? Similarly, are there things that you and I need to let go of, relinquish, to forgive?

Are there, conversely, some directions, some areas of life--of real Life--that you and I can begin to step into, to accept, to allow to wash over us? 

This week of peace, what reverberations of forgiveness, reconciliation, of grace might we individually and collectively set in motion in our lives, our families, and our communities? What areas of growth, open doors, of opportunity might we enter with new vigor and intentionality?

 Winner, Lauren. Mudhouse Sabbath (2007). Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press.


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