What kind of old person will I be?

What happens if I lose my mind? What is the purpose of senility?

They say “wisdom is the gray hair unto men” (Wisd. 4:9), and so when I was young I always associated wisdom with the experience of the aged. Hence I understood a young person to be wise whenever he or she could manage to behave as an old soul would, benefiting from experience despite not having it yet. Everyone while they have youth should spend time with their elders and consider where their life is heading and how they should be spending it. You can spend time with your grandparents. You can make regular visits to a nursing home. You can, I don’t know, follow American electoral politics in 2024.

Visiting a nursing home, though, is a really good thing — volunteering there regularly, getting to know a slew of different characters. Observe the souls there and you’ll see a variety of options of what kind of old person you can become. Some old people have their wits about them, and everyone who knows them will boast that they’re “sharp as a tack.” Others will appear to have lost it some time ago. Then, regardless of the state of their reasoning faculties, present or not, some will be habitually cheerful and pleasant to be around, though you’ll observe the pain they’re hiding and wonder how they do it. Others will be habitually cantankerous and quarrelsome, and you’ll learn (if you apply yourself) that they deserve your attention too and can even give you something valuable in return. Then there are other types. One old lady I once knew, a frail little Polish woman named Stella, who had lived as a librarian and never married, would never leave her bed and barely said a word to me, so locked away was her soul in sullenness and depression. Every week I would just sit with her for a time, desperately trying to communicate to her through my presence that someone cared for her and enjoyed being with her. She never responded. My last day there I gifted her a blanket and left praying that she would remember me, and that it would make a difference.

Me, I have my worries. I worry about losing my mental faculties one day. I observe all the things my powerful mind has done for me, and I wonder where in the world I would be without it. How many times have I found my way out of the shackles of lust or anger, depression or anxiety, by means of theological reasoning? Memories of these struggles fill me with gratitude and dread. What if I wasn’t able to use my intelligence as a crutch and was dependent on my lower passions behaving well? I call intelligence a crutch, but that is in fact reason’s intended purpose: disciplining the lower passions, nurturing them in their proper use. But our time for repentance is limited, and our time for using reason to guide our repentance can be even more limited. By way of senility, dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, our reason can abandon us before our time has expired. The charioteer can give up the ghost and drop his reins before the race is over. Then’s the real test. This is what we have to be ready for. This is what I have to be ready for. Can the horses of my desire and my anger be trusted to get me across the finish line without my reason to guide them? My desire and my anger — the most wayward, most disastrous aspects of my soul — can they find their proper gait in time? Can my anger learn to hate no one and nothing but sin alone? Can my desire turn away from self-pleasure and learn to burn solely with love for God and neighbor? Can these grass-feeding beasts habituate themselves in virtue before my reason expires and is no longer of help? In return for my reason’s life of care and attention, can my desire and my anger pull themselves together to fulfill their teacher’s wishes even after it’s gone?

I meditate on these things not to discredit the role that divine grace must play in order for me to do anything right at any time, on any level. But God, the source of our grace, is also the source of our nature, and He wants us to be able to walk according to our nature, besides also being receptive to His grace. He says through the Prophet David, “Be ye not as the horse or as the mule which have no understanding; whose jaws thou must hold with bit or bridle, lest they come nigh unto thee” (Ps. 31:9). He wants us to be freeborn sons, heirs in His image, not slaves shackled by His might. To this end He strategically abandons us, that our grace-filled union with Him be not without the participation of our God-given free will. These are the stages of the spiritual life taught to us by St. Silouan of Mt. Athos: that God sheds His grace freely on us in the beginning, before eventually withdrawing from us that we may be proved and learn to strive for Him as we should, before at last embracing us mystically as, somehow, equals, though this makes zero sense and is due entirely to the beneficence of our Lord and God’s abounding love.

St. Isaac the Syrian explains this heavenly pedagogy with the most touching analogy. He compares God’s abandonment of us to a mother teaching her child to walk. From when we are babies our mother holds us close, and in this embrace we find all we desire. But her desire is that we mature and learn to be like her. She wants us to walk by our own two feet. At first she will hold our hands as we do this, showing us the way and preventing us from harm. But if she only ever holds us, we will be forever reliant on her assistance and forever susceptible to harm. Eventually she must let go and step away. This is what it is when we feel God has abandoned us. He never steps far away. The mother’s aim is for her child to walk to her, and in doing so, to learn how to walk like her. Likewise the Lord wants us to come to Him, and in doing so, to learn to be like Him, to love like Him.

It may happen that we stumble. The first time we fall, God like a loving mother rushes to our aid and helps us up. He still must teach us to walk, though, so He steps away again. The process repeats as necessary, but if we exploit His aid and refuse to fulfill its purpose, He will start withholding that as well. As long as we keep fooling around and harming ourselves, refusing to learn, He will maintain a distance from us, yet ever calling us. Spoiling us in this matter would not be to our benefit. His patience is His love. His abandonment is His grace.

Our reason, our logos, paying attention to this pattern, should learn from it — and straighten up its act while it can. As God has parented us, so must we parent our children, that we be like Him. This parenting can be understood both literally and anagogically. Anagogically, the logos must look upon the desiring and incensive aspects of the soul as children to be raised up in its image, that they be worthy heirs of the household, that the activity of the soul be one. The values of logos must be instilled in its children, that they behave as they should even in reason’s absence. Parents raise their children in hopes that they will be able to care for them in old age, in their feebleness and senility, performing the tasks of survival that they no longer can. Reason must raise the lower passions to do the same. That’s the ideal.

But what so often happens instead? Look around that nursing home again and see. Look in your soul, observe your sin, and extrapolate what happens next. What kind of old person do you want to be?

I see in my soul the vice of pride, its constant companion. Reason too is an aspect of the soul that is passible, corruptible, if more subtly so. Where do you think its children get it? As the desiring aspect is prone to out-of-control appetites, and the incensive aspect is prone to playing the tyrant, so the reasoning aspect is prone to pride, attributing everything to itself. A logos practiced in self-love trains its horses in the same, and when reason departs in old age, the lower passions act as they were taught, with nothing to correct them except the feebleness of old age and the suffering they pull down on themselves. Friends and family can be of help, for sure, if in our lives we managed not to alienate them, and if they can get through to us in our stubbornness.

But this pride we are subject to, it’s useful to think of it as ignorance. The passibility that affects the reason is in a sense defective knowledge. The proud miss the mark in their failure to attain knowledge of God’s providence, grace, and judgment. I talk about using theological reasoning to wrestle loose of the shackles of lust and anger, depression and anxiety. Do I fail to see the true source of those victories when they happen? Do I think for a moment that I could shepherd my soul with my logos, if God were not shepherding my logos with His love? It’s the theological logismoi which have lifted me up, after all, the patterns of thinking and seeing and breathing that come down to me from the Holy Fathers and Mothers of the Church, the Body of Christ invested with the grace of the Spirit. In my old age, when my career of intellectual activity slows to a stop, shall pride in my thought say to my soul that I did a good job, that I answered all the questions, that I knew all the facts? May God preserve me from such ignorance and folly!

My nature made according to the image of God comes from grace. My ability to act according to my nature comes from grace. My being in the likeness of God comes from grace. My being, my well-being, my ever-being — all is grace. Only by the grateful acknowledgment of this grace do I embody God’s love and reenact it in the world and in my self. Only then is my ignorance absolved, and only then can my reason set my soul right in imitation of God. Only then can my soul’s idolatrous appetite for created things be dissolved and reformed as love for the uncreated God. Only then can I let go of all anger towards the world and the need to control it, that I cease judging anyone, even my enemies; that I forgive my enemies and think of them kindly, loving them as I love myself. This must be the new person I strive to become in old age, that even if senility descends upon me and I am deprived of my reason, my lower passions can step up and fulfill their calling, and grace can rule my soul. May God grant me a blessed and peaceful life, and repentance before my end.