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Autumn has arrived full blown and the year begins its rapid descent into history. Perhaps a sage will someday write of these moments of uncertainty, of a world on the brink of drama
and life changing events, not unlike other times through which the old have lived. This October we might, if we wish, catch
the magic and mystique of our world grown older and wealthier in the treasure of falling leaves beneath our feet, mellow with
sumptuous hues like silk carpets from old Samarkand. Looking back at the summers of our life, successes have had their meaning;
failures, too, but those have deeper meaning. What gives them all meaning is
that they work together toward the fulfillment of God’s plan, writes Paul Tournier, in his book, The Seasons of Life. A consolation
prize for old age is to discover, perhaps anew, the real meaning of life. “To cling to the past, to seek most doggedly to prolong one’s time of action means precisely this:
living a useless old age”, writes
Tournier. “It is the pressing need to find meaning for one’s life, to subordinate the whole of life to that meaning. It is this need,
this inner aspiration, which is from God. All the ideologies, doctrines, and
formulas drawn up by men will pass; every ideal too, grows old in turn. Only
the true and living God remains. Thus the knowing encounter with the living God
is the greatest possible human event: the human experience par excellence....It
is this knowing which remains as the common denominator of all life’s stages.”
“No aspect of nature on this beach is more mysterious to me than
the flights of these shore-bird constellations. The constellation forms
in an instant of time, and in that same instant develops its own will. Birds
which have been feeding yards away from each other, each one individually busy for his body’s sake, suddenly fuse into
this new volition and, flying, rise as one, coast as one, tilt their dozen bodies as one, and as one wheel off on the course
which the new group will has determined….My special interest is the instant and synchronous obedience of each speeding
body to the new volition. By what means, by what methods of communication does
this will to suffuse the living constellation that its dozen or more tiny brains know and obey it in such an instance of time? Schools of fish, I am told, make similar mass changes of direction….We need
another wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal
nature and living by compli-cated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and
sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize
them for their incomplete-ness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err. For the animal shall not be measured by
man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete,
gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not our brethren, they are not our underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in
the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. “ The Outermost House by Henry Beston –[edit acg]
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