About Christmas, my friend Frank has only one problem. As he views it, this event tells us more about the beginnings of life than about the later stages.

Contemplating Christmas, my friend interprets it as saying something important about smallness and poverty, about what is truly important and what is not. “I love this feast,” he says, “but it doesn’t tell me much about being old.”

These themes emerge in Frank’s annual letter that he writes from Kalamazoo, where he lives with his wife Toni. With his recent birthday putting him at the three-quarters of a century mark, he ponders more and more what his advancing age means.

With typical provocativeness, Frank seems to hold it against Jesus that he died so young. “I am wondering what Jesus would have been like,” he writes, “if he had gotten to be seventy-five like me.” Of what he has learned in recent decades he says: “I didn’t know that when I was thirty and I don’t think Jesus did either.”

This issue reminds me of a passage in Fifth Business, a 1970 novel written by the late Canadian author Robertson Davies. His narrator meets a Jesuit scholar, Padre Ignacio Blazon, who has strong and hardly orthodox opinions about Jesus. Thay go like this:

“The older I grow, the less Christ’s teaching says to me. I am sometimes very conscious that I am following the path of a leader who died when He was less than half as old as I am now. I see and feel things that He never saw or felt. I know things He seems never to have known. Everybody wants a Christ for himself and those who think like him. Very well, am I at fault for wanting a Christ who will show me how to be an old man?”

My friend Frank would surely not go this far, nor in real life would any Jesuit I know. But Frank has raised a question worth thinking about: how does a person growing old learn from a spiritual tradition that puts emphasis on the young?

Or, as he puts it in his own distinctive language, “There are times when I think one of the limitations of the gospels is that there is lots of good news for people up to about thirty, but not much for the geezers.”

What Frank loves about growing older are the new insights and discoveries that open up to him. Broadening his experience to include his age peers, he says: “Our lives never cease having new challenges in them we never dreamed of and, if we live to be old, we can learn things we never could have when we were young.”

Specifically, he has been studying Chinese religion and Buddhism in recent years. After mentioning other findings, he writes: “It has blown me away to discover that the position of the feminine in Chinese religion is clearly more fundamental to human living than the stuff of us males.”

He also finds himself now wondering “if there are not more Messiahs than my own beloved Saviour, more than one person who saw the shallowness of great deeds and the depth of being true to yourself.”

He also has come to see how what he once considered exclusive spiritual gifts are actually shared by people outside his own tradition. Among the mysteries of Christmas for him now is “the later insight on the part of us who, when we were young, thought we were the sole possessors of holiness, salvation, and the Kingdom of God.”

Being able to raise questions and receive insights like this are among the gifts that bring this vibrant correspondent from Kalamazoo “real joy in being old.”

Also contributing much to this joy is his wife Toni who, in the same mail, announces her retirement after 25 years as a psychotherapist. She will soon leave her work “for purely personal, life-transforming reasons.” It sounds as if hers will be a retirement graced by further growth, like that of her husband’s.

Among his other blessings, Frank cites the proximity of his two sons. They are both in their early married years, “each with an altogether remarkable woman,” according to this devoted father-in-law.

For fear I make it seem that everything is always upbeat with my friend, he would be the first to correct this. He speaks of himself as filled with “wisdom and forgetfulness, thinking clearly one day only to have the next day finding me with a head full of sawdust.”  

Nonetheless, “sitting here in this old bag of bones,” Frank wishes all his friends a joyful Christmas. And so do I wish you, my readers who celebrate this day, a blessed Christmas, filled with the grace of the event. For those who celebrate other special days, let me wish you also the best of health, and prosperity both physical and spiritual.

Richard Griffin