On Turning 50: Or why it is so much better than a number
“Blessed be those who have loved you
Into becoming who you were meant to be,
Blessed be those who have crossed your life
With dark gifts of hurt and loss
That have helped to school your mind
In the art of disappointment.”
– John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us
“We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are, to see through plastic sham to living, breathing reality, and to break down our defenses of self-protection in order to be free to receive and give love.”
– Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water
There are two ways to think about one’s age, it seems to me: as an absolute reference point against which you measure your relative worth—relative, that is, to every other person in the (western) world who has reached this age—or as an orchard that grows from season to season into maturity.
Allow me to explain.
When you’re 13, you’re officially a teenager, at least in the sense that the twentieth-century invented an idea that had never existed in human history, called “teenager,” with certain ostensibly inalienable rights and responsibilities and pleasures that would have remained utterly foreign to thirteen-year-olds in the 18th century, or 13th, and long before, and whose supposition of “normal” life for 13 to 19-year olds is virtually impossible to escape, like a kind of irresistible gravitational force, unless you choose to live it out as Ben Cash hoped his children might, for better and for worse, in the movie Captain Fantastic.
Or when you’re 21 in America, you can drink and go to war and make your mark in college. Unless you don’t and you squander those years, or meander aimlessly through them, or do what you were supposed to do, on account of your family name or because the high school yearbook had predicted, nearly universally, that you would do so, without any clear idea how your degree program relates to your truest self.
When you’re 25, you’re making something of yourself in the world; unless you’re in graduate school, like I was, and you’re still getting little letters, like A, B and C, that measure your worth and that, on occasion, result in surprising verdicts, such as a C in a course on Prayer, as it did for a poor guy a year before I arrived. “I got a C in prayer.” Such a funny statement.
When you’re 30, you’re either “someone” or you’re “old already.” Jesus was 30 when he began his public ministry, Luke 3:23 tells us. He was, it seems, just the right age, not yet “Someone,” nor old by any means.
When you’re 33 and you’re a Christian, you might think, “Look at all that Jesus accomplished by this age. I sure have a lot of catching up to do.”
When you’re 40, you’re making your mark on the world (or not), with a family (or not), with a profession that you’ve begun to master (or not), with a place of stability and maturity and honor in the community (or not).
When you’re 50, you’re in the thick of “middle age” (another 20th century invention), or what some regard as the “prime of life,” and have become a Person of Distinction, with a resume that publicly testifies to your good value to society. (Or not.) Your children are transitioning out of their teenage years into their college years and beyond, or, in my case, are five and ten years old, respectively, and you’re now one of “those” dads.
When you’re 70 or, if by reason of strength, fourscore years of age, as the King James puts it, you’re an “elder” and you have achieved a measure of prestige, power and position. (Or not.) You have become a Person of Wisdom and seek to bless and to empower the younger generation, unless you still feel like you’re seventeen, or maybe twenty-five, on the inside and are terrified that people will discover how very little wisdom you have to offer others and you worry that you may have squandered your life, and you feel persecuted by a merciless regret that remains largely invisible to others.
Phaedra Taylor, “New Year’s Eve,” detail from Prayer Cards for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany.
The point is this: the way that modern westerners judge the point value of each “big number” is decidedly artificial, an alien category to previous centuries of human history, and, in certain instances, guaranteed to become a crushing burden that feeds upon an insatiable appetite to discover one’s worth relative by the achievements of one’s peers.
Human history has not always thought thus.
In tribal societies, for instance, only a few rites of passage marked the natural and social order: birth, puberty, marriage, death. In the guild system that dominated the Middle Ages, the stages of apprentice, journeyman and master framed one’s vocational place in society, or at least for a certain class of citizens in what we now know as Europe. In Gordon Smith’s scheme, which he articulates in his marvelous book Courage and Calling, one’s life involves definitive transitions from childhood to adolescence to early adulthood to mid-adult years to senior adult years, or at least for certain cultures in the west, not necessarily in the east.
For Shakespeare, all the world was a stage and all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances/And one man in his time plays many parts/His acts being seven ages. (And, for the most part, he’s not far off the mark in his late sixteenth-century, sevenfold narration of a human life.)
The hope, for many in our world, it seems, is that they will have accomplished enough by the time that they have reached their so-called middle ages in order for people to stand back and say: “That so-and-so certainly is impressive. They’ve made something of themselves—by their age, that is. Take note, young people. There goes a person of repute.”
Such measurements, and others like them, show very little interest, however, in the acquisition of wisdom or depth of character, neither of which are the automatic birthright of age, neither of which are obtained without pain, meaningfully experienced.
St. George’s Church, Thriplow, England, a 12th century church where we worshiped on my birthday.
But what if age were not a punctiliar marker of relative accomplishment and more like a gradually unfolding thing? What if it were more like, say, an apple seed that is planted in the ground and that, a handful of seasons later, grows into a sapling, then into a juvenile tree, and finally, after seven years or so, develops into a mature fruit-bearing tree.
And what if there were certain seasons where the apple tree did not produce much fruit, but continued to press on, knowing that a new season would eventually come and new fruit would be borne, perhaps only a small number, but still it pressed on, glad simply to be alive and to be itself, but not alone, because over time apple seeds will have fallen into the earth and carried along by the air or by birds into the surrounding ground in order to give birth to new apple trees.
And what if one’s true self was not like one, single apple tree, but like a whole orchard and each person was its own unique fruit, perhaps a species of apple, or a completely different genus of fruit, and each grew in its own characteristic way: apples mostly like other apples, oranges like mostly other oranges, and so on.
And while some seeds grew quickly, other grew slowly and unevenly, but no one kept count, really, because the point was not to become the same exact thing at an exact point in time but rather to keep at it, to keep sinking roots deeper into the earth, to keep opening up one’s leaves to the sun, to keep drinking in whatever nutrients came one’s way, to keep resisting the forces of frost and disease and insect infestation and the rest, to keep becoming one’s God-ordained truest self and to know that the point of it all was to become an orchard that brought joy and life and goodness to others, and nothing more.
And what if none of it was a competition with absolute winners and absolute losers?
What if no one ever compared oneself to others in a way that resulted in a wounding loss of worth. What if each cheered the other on and did one’s level best to encourage good growth, even if it was slow and irregular growth, in one’s fellow orchards.
And what if some apple trees lay dormant for a season, or two or three, while other trees blossomed and thrived, yielding an abundance of fruit.
And what if some trees actually died, like my beloved pink lemon tree, which I had hauled around the country with me for nearly twenty years, did in the winter of 2021 during the deadly freeze that crippled my part of the world, and whose death left me with a gnawing grief that I could not shake for months.
But in the end, as an orchard-self, the point of it all was faithfulness, not strict metrics or maximal productivity. The point was perseverance, not supreme fecundity. The point was to keep choosing life in the face of death, not a life without deaths.
What if the point was to be fully alive—or as alive as one could manage in the face of entropic forces that always seem to find a sneaky way to steal, kill and destroy all signs of God’s goodness in one’s life.
What if being fully alive wasn’t confused with being a Person Of Distinction that demanded others’ attention, unless one were taking the mickey out of the whole game in order to embrace the absurdities of life with good humor.
Taking my rightful place alongside the busts of distinguished fellows in The Fitzwilliam Museum.
What if being fully alive was also small and simple and quiet and remaining true to the things that perhaps only God would ever see.
What if, in my case, turning 50 was not a matter of wondering whether I had made of myself what every other fifty-year old “should have” made of themselves by now, but rather a matter of looking at the larger patterns of the past many years, going back to 47, or 42, or even 35, and discerning a meaningful trajectory to my life.
Am I loving my wife well? Would she say, behind closed doors, that I was loving her well?
Do my children feel well-loved in the deepest places of their hearts? Do they feel truly seen by me?
Am I loving my parents and siblings and uncle-with-dementia and nieces & nephews well, as hard as it may, on certain days, to love one’s family members well, truly love them despite all of our irksome personality traits and mystifying habits?
Would my friends say that I was a good friend—if they were required to be 100% honest?
Am I honing the craft of a scholar?
Am I becoming a better teacher, each year a bit better?
Am I leaning in more deeply to my calling as a priest and pastor?
Am I becoming, in the end, more deeply at home in my own skin in such a way that I am also becoming a more hospitable presence to others?
Am I truly content in plenty or in want, or do I struggle against an insatiable appetite for one more thing? Do I suffer a crisis of worth when I see others around me advancing in life while I fall “further behind,” leading me to resent others and simultaneously to crave their pity?
A redwood tree I marveled at in my visit to the Redwood National and State Park, in California
Many more questions could be asked, of course, but there is no way that turning 50 on April 17, 2022, could bear the weight of a proper answer to any one of these questions. To expect that 50—or 40, or 30, or any other round number—should automatically reveal one’s worth, based on the median level of achievement in one’s age group, is absurd. It is a cruel expectation that we place upon ourselves, and upon our neighbors, which we ought to resist at every turn.
The answers to my questions above, and others like them, can only come, I believe, in chunks of years: four years perhaps to learn how to teach a single class well; seven, or seventeen, years to learn how to write a truly good book; ten years to relearn how to love my wife properly; an innumerable number of years to learn how to be a good shepherd to sheep who have not changed a wit since the age of our primordial parents, but whose aches and needs and questions demand fresh energies and creative thinking.
And each of these things will be acquired at a different pace and to different ends for different people. And what each of us needs is companions along the way who are brave and gracious enough to show us where we are taking ourselves too seriously and the right things not seriously enough.
We need friends who might help us to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit in greater measure.
Am I becoming a more joyful person, or are small bitternesses quietly making their home in the crevasses of my heart, hardening it in some fashion?
Is a deep sense of peace increasing in me and am I becoming, bit by bit, a non-anxious person? Or do I keep struggling with the same anxieties in the same acute way?
Do patience and self-control mark how I face the inconvenient and sometimes traumatic interruptions of life?
Do the people nearest me experience me as genuinely kind, fully present without pretense or excuse? Or do they wonder whether the “real” me is hiding somewhere behind the image that I project to others for fear that, being truly known, I will be found wanting and then rejected?
Am I increasingly faithful in the little things?
Am I as gentle and gracious as God is with my experiences of failure, as also with my limitations, or am I graceless and punitive with my failures (as I am perhaps, tragically, with others’ failures)? Am I able to more easily able to admit my character failings to others because I more keenly feel that I am in the care of my Good Shepherd or do I resist such admissions because I fear that my failings with be handled without care and be used against me?
Have I become better at savoring the signs of goodness around me or do I find that nothing and no one can really satisfy me, so I keep looking for the holy grail of the One Impossible Thing that will single-handedly satisfy the aches of my heart, only to discover that I have craved a god-less One Impossible Thing, because I fear, deep down, that God cannot and, more cruelly, does not wish to satisfy the longings of my heart?
And, finally, am I growing in my ability to love the people and the things that mark my life as Jesus might love them, were he me, because I feel so firmly my own beloved status before God?
Or do I love the people I wish they were, rather than the persons that they presently are, and do I love the things that lie on the other side of the present things, because, at bottom, I live in an economy of scarcity where no present thing and no immediate one is ever felt to be good enough?
Phaedra Taylor, “Landscapes of the Mind: 7,” watercolor and graphite, 2”X3”
In the end, nothing good will come, I don’t think, of making an artificial list of accomplishments that one should have achieved by the time one has reached a number that ends in a zero.
And while there is every good reason to celebrate one’s life, with a grand party, or a small gathering of friends, or even a quiet moment by oneself, there is likewise every good reason to imagine a world where such “big numbers” don’t mean anything, not really.
(Imagine a world, for a second, where no one kept track of birth days and instead you discerned the shape and purpose of your life only through large swaths of years, a handful of rites of passage, and seasons of growth that your community bore witness to in faith, hope and love. Imagine how you might feel about yourself in such a world. It’s worth imagining, I think, at least for the sake of re-construing the meaning of your life.)
The only thing that matters is whether one is slowly but surely becoming more alive: more alive with the life of Jesus, more alive in the company of others, more alive in one’s calling, more alive to all the joys and sorrows of this world, along with all its beauty and horror. And such vibrancy of life may have very little to do with one’s level of productivity. It may occur on a very public stage or in a quiet place, largely unseen to others. It may earn the praise of many or the glad thanks of few.
Always it will come with an increased ability to be deeply content regardless of one’s circumstances.
It will be evidenced in an expansive generosity of spirit towards others.
It will lead to a deeper pleasure in work well done for its own sake, rather than for anything that may accrue beyond it.
And it will bring about a heightened sense of God’s loving presence, even in his felt absence, along with an increasing realization that this earthly pilgrimage does not constitute the only stage upon which one gets a chance to become one’s truest and fullest self but rather that the new creation that yet awaits will bring to completion the good work that God began in each of us, here in this aeon. This life that seems so precious and so fleeting to us is only the beginning.
And none of it can, or should, be done alone, but only in the company of kindred others, who, as the psalmist sees it, might bear witness to the conflicts of life, the finitude of life, the suffering of life and the worst of life, which is what one yearns and prays for always.
So a happy birthday to me on this half-century mark. A happy middle of my earthly years to me as I continue to become the one-of-a-kind me that God has lovingly made. And a happy me that is becoming more truly me by God’s grace, or in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”:
“Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.”
