So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away,
our inner nature is being renewed day by day.
For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal
weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but
at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be
seen is eternal. (II Corinthians 4:16-18)
Years ago the Presbyterian church
engaged an insurance company to manage its ministers’ superannuation fund – and
we started to get an annual notice asking each of us to affirm again that we
were still alive… it was called a Certificate of Existence, and it had to be
attested by someone presumably able to distinguish being alive from being dead[1]. One year I replied in the words of St Paul,
in the King James Version: …though our outward man perish, yet the inward
man is renewed day by day. They were
not amused, but I was.
Now, I have to say to St Paul
that there are some conditions of ageing that he is better not to describe as “this
slight momentary affliction”. Perhaps in
Paul’s day you had simply to grin and bear it, whatever it was – minimise it if
you could. That may have provided more
incentive than we have now, to attend instead to what pious Presbyterians call
the things of God… what Paul calls the inner man/woman. We have it easier now in some ways, not all
-- you can be blissfully asleep while they remove your leg; and if you don’t
like what the normal usage of the years is doing to your skin, the situation may
perhaps be relieved, these days… I believe it is possible, if you wish and can
afford it, for your remains to be carbonised and processed into a diamond…
about which it is better that we are silent.
As Paul reminds us here, what can be seen is temporary, whether
it is tidied up or not. And I do
understand that Paul could regard his trials in life, which were considerable,
as slight compared with the coming world in which there will be no more pain.[2]
Paul says our outer nature is
wasting away… as it will and should.
If our inner nature, as he calls it, is being renewed day by day,
that is really good news. Our inner
nature… the faculty by which we give and receive love, our sense of God and
wonder and purpose, our will to forgive and to be forgiven, our loss of fear… our
sense of being at home in this place and at this time, held in love, known,
named, loved unconditionally… or to know it deeply if we’re not. Our inner nature is reached in silence and
stillness, in waiting… and waiting some more… learning how to wait… and there
it is renewed, day by day[3]…
frequently beyond our knowing and often despite how we are feeling.
In John’s Gospel the analogy of
this is Living Water[4],
picturing an inner spring, fresh and bubbling, cooling and sustaining. Whatever
the picture, the process of loss and frailty in us is balanced by the inner
process of renewal. And yes, we have to
say that with some it is tragically, unaccountably overwhelmed by forms of dementia,
by neurones packing up… and that remains a challenge both to science and to
spiritual wisdom. So we thank God for
our wits, we practise silence and stillness, waiting and attention, and we are
renewed, day by day.
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