There’s no abiding city
Thursday, June 3, 2021 at 03:32PM 
Remember to keep your death before your eyes daily. – Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 4
I suffer from sarcopenia. Don’t be alarmed. If you’re old enough, you suffer from it, too. Sarcopenia is the loss of muscle mass, a natural part of the aging process. As I turn 64 and am at the YMCA lifting weights, I look at the young folk around me and think “just you wait and see.” I can’t lift what I used to lift. I used to be able to bench press my own weight five times. Now (on a good day) I can get the weight off the bar and down to my chest. As it turns out, that’s the easy part. Then I have to look around and beg somebody to pull the weight up and off me. Otherwise, I’m ruined. May as well pay rent there.
Truth is, I’m already dead, at least that’s what Benedict reminds me to remember. No amount of a YMCA exercise regimen, macrobiotic diet, or even prayer can change my already deadness. It’s just a matter of time. Meanwhile my sarcopenia continues unabated and I am reminded daily that I’m in a race I can never win. The race is rigged against me. Sarcopenia, among other truths, will have the last laugh. Vassar Miller’s sonnet, The Wisdom of Insecurity says it so well:
There’s no abiding city, no, not one.
The towers of stone and steel are fairy stories.
God will not play our games nor join our fun,
Does not give tit for tat, parade His glories.
And chance is chance, not providence dressed neat,
Credentials hidden in its wooden leg.
When the earth opens underneath our feet,
It is a waste of brain and breath to beg.
No angel intervenes but shouts that matter
Has been forever mostly full of holes.
So Simon Peter always walked on water,
Not merely when the lake waves licked his soles.
And when at last he saw he would not drown,
The shining knowledge turned him upside-down.
Living with my death always before me. To some, that may sound depressing. I get that. Hey, I’d like to be able to do what I once did with my body. To me, however, it isn’t depressing at all. It’s liberating. I don’t have to pretend the inevitable won’t happen. I don’t have to lie to myself or to others. I can admit that life is rigged and not in my favor. But I also can proclaim that “Simon Peter always walked on water.” I can also know that I won’t “drown” in my sarcopenia, in my torn peroneal tendon (another story all together), or in my inability to remember things. I can trust with all that’s in me that one day Jesus will turn me “upside-down” just like he did with Simon Peter.
In the meantime, I hope we realize our sarcopenia isn’t limited to our physical muscle mass. We all suffer from a spiritual sarcopenia as well, especially on the other side of this Pandemic; the loss of our “muscle mass” of compassion and mercy for one another. And that’s something that need not be lost with aging. Grace toward one another is always possible, even for dead people like me.
+Scott
Brother Scott Benhase, OA
Vicar, St. Cyprian's, Oxford, NC
Reader Comments (2)
One of the privileges of serving as a parish priest is the occasional opportunity to be with people as they die. Some seem easy; some seem hard and drawn out. When I was younger, I thought I could tell when the moment was nigh. When I got older, I knew I couldn't. But the opportunities to be there have made me a little less afraid to die. I think. We'll see when the time comes.
Lately when I find myself distracted and unsettled during Centering Prayer, I've found a technique that often quiets my jumpy mind. I imagine myself in hospice. Can't talk, can't move. Might still be hearing a little bit. Fluids in, fluids out. There is no more check list; no more "to dos." My work is finished. Except to wait in trust. That practice often quiets my busyness. I also think of it as practice, should I ever get the opportunity to await my own death that way. Seems like another form of exercise.
Lowell
My abiding city was the one block of Agusta Street between the school play yard and the corner store. Baseball at one end and handball against the factory wall at the other end. There were five of us Billy, Bruce, Billy, Eddie, and me. A whole world with dipped ice cream, gas streetlights, milk and bread delivered, fireflies in the summer, poker in Bruce’s basement, and Cub Scouts in mine. The War was over, still reenacted by us kids and never mentioned by our parents. A safe world where you lived forever.
One night there was an older girl at our door. A stranger. Crying, afraid, blood dripping down her face. Attacked under the schoolyard’s oak trees. Maybe it was then when I started to keep death before my eyes. I think it came bit by bit over the years—the funerals for my great grandparents, the recruit dying at Quantico, a kid coming at me with a knife, and a man with a gun wanting to come in to pray. It all added up. There was that moment years later-- I remember going in for surgery and knowing with Peter that I might die that day but I “would not drown.”