“Blessed little drop of dew that is known only by Jesus! … To be His, one must remain little, little like a drop of dew!...” (Saint Thérèse of Lisieux).
The other day someone told me that they felt as though they were having a mid-life crisis. They were suddenly worried about the future direction of their life and felt terribly old.
I remember hearing about mid-life crises when I was a little girl. And when I had heard about them they were always focused on the individual making sweeping changes to their life and leaving their spouse, buying sports cars and behaving – generally – in a ridiculous manner.
And I have been reflecting on that because it is the sort of strange behaviour that is parodied in the movies as it seems sort of ridiculous to see older people making crazy decisions in their lives. And those decisions are ridiculous…
And I have been thinking about why people make those sorts of decisions at that stage of their lives. And it seems to me that the reason for that is that people feel that they are running out of time and their reaction to the feeling of discomfort that generates is to try to make this lifetime as perfect as possible in the time they have left. In other words, people try to chase perfection during their remaining (short) years of earthly life when they feel that their life is nearing its end.
And when you think about it like that it makes perfect sense that people would behave in a ridiculous manner when acting under that impulse – because it is a ridiculous notion. After all, the closer we get to the end of our lives, the less comfort we shall find in them. As we age, we become more ill, more frail, less comfortable, and less able to be successful in what we do as time moves on past us and we are less “sharp” so to speak. The Irish Realist Poet, William Butler Yeats, described that longing for intellectual clarity in his later years in his poetry as his desire for an “old man’s eagle mind”. And the imagery seems accurate to me…
And it seems to me today that this attitude is all backwards… You see, Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus of the Holy Face decided to behave in the opposite manner with opposite desires when she said, “Blessed little drop of dew that is known only by Jesus! … To be His, one must remain little, little like a drop of dew!... Oh! how few are the souls who aspire to remain little in this way! ...”
And I was hoping that perhaps I could skip the mid life crisis and be a little drop of dew. For it seems that the souls who were fixed on heaven – souls like Saint Thérèse are the souls who did not worry about how long they had left on this Earth, because they were only ever here to be little drops of dew anyway…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.