Romans 11: (1-2) 13-15, 29-32 (links validated 7/8/26a)

Jennifer Weiner’s January 17, 2015, New York Times article “Mean Girls in the Retirement Home” suggests not even advancing age automatically frees us from our prison that is disobedience. She writes, “When I was young and innocent — say, last summer — the idea of 90-year-olds in pecking orders, picking on those at the bottom, was a joke. Everyone knew that the real danger to the elderly came from unscrupulous relatives, con artists or abusive caregivers…. “The notion that a threat to seniors is their peers is usually played for laughs … Like the poor are always with us, that mean girls stay mean — they just start wearing support hose and dentures… “A recent Cornell University study by Karl Pillemer [shows] that aggression among residents in nursing homes is widespread and ‘extremely high rates of conflict and violence’ are common. According to the study’s news release, one in five residents was involved in at least one ‘negative and aggressive encounter’ with another resident during a four-week period. “Sixteen percent were cursed or yelled at; 6 percent were hit, kicked or bitten; 1 percent were victims of ‘sexual incidents, such as exposing one’s genitals, touching other residents, or attempting to gain sexual favors;’ and 10.5 percent dealt with other residents’ entering their rooms uninvited, or rummaging through their belongings… “What transforms with age are the criteria for judgment: not looks, not wealth, not the once-coveted ability to drive at night. When you get to be Nanna’s age, you’re reduced to a number — the younger the better. Even in a residence for the elderly, the 80-somethings will still be cold to the 95-year-olds. “Now 99, my Nanna is completely cognizant of what’s going on. Her memory, both short- and long-term, is excellent. But once her new neighbors heard her age, they knew they didn’t want her at their table.”

Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour tells the story of Jim, his widow Annie and Sister St. Savor. When Jim takes his own life, the Roman Catholic Church denies him both a funeral mass and burial in its cemetery. His widow Annie “well understood that there would be no rules at all if there were no punishment for failure to follow them. Like any good mother, the Church had to cuff its children when they misbehaved. Make the punishment fit the crime. “He’d murdered himself and murdered something in her as well. Who could argue for leniency? Who could expect absolution? Sister St. Savor did, of course. But the woman … had a mad heart. Mad for mercy, perhaps” (italics mine).

For some reason Romans 11 and its words about God as at once kind and severe put me in mind of the wizard Gandalf from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Gandalf was often a bit of mystery to the Hobbits who revered him. He could be at turns deeply kind and mirthful and yet sometimes apparently rather severe and curt. Yet in the end the Hobbits learned a deeper truth about Gandalf: he was fundamentally kind and good and if at times there was a severity about him, it did not last long and even this was somehow rooted in Gandalf’s bottom line desire to see everyone flourishing. He was severe about what blocked delight and goodness but it was his basic kindness and love that drove everything he did.

Scroll down the page to August 14th for this resource.