SAUCIER — Gifts I did not ask for

Another year has elapsed, full of joys I underappreciated and gifts I did not deserve.

Its passing raises many questions.

I’m well into the second half of life. The last quarter has begun.

My spirit asks, “Where has time gone?” while my body wonders “What has time done to me?”

Last night, I found myself in “Little Gidding,” a part of T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” In the poem, Eliot describes “the gifts reserved for age.”

The first is “the cold friction of expiring sense.” As our senses diminish over the years, so does our enchantment with the world which they have faithfully nourished.

Failing hearing has not only left me on the periphery of many conversations but deprived me of some of the sweetest sounds of nature. A lingering neuropathy makes it harder to marvel at the soothing smoothness of sanded wood or the playful fuzz of a peach.

The second of Eliot’s dubious gifts is realizing “the impotence of rage at human folly.” Time teaches us that human stupidity and callousness date back to the garden and will be with us until the final harvest.

Sadly, I find that the world is less amusing. I once thought humor an effective weapon against the foibles of the era, but aging revealed the sobering truth that what I thought was unjust, but passing, was rooted in invasive and abiding evil.

The third is “the rending pain of re-enactment of all that you have done, and been.” With memories there is also a shame of futility, vanity and self-interest disguised as virtue.

Age evaluates our life, and if honest, we don’t measure up to the stories we told ourselves along the way. We are challenged to remember, confess and forgive.

Written in the darkness of WW II, Eliot sounds remorseful and defeated about aging, but his poem is one of hope.

To Eliot, these gifts are “refining fire” which purifies us, destroys our life’s illusions, and frees us from our past.

Faithful to this process, we realize that the divine love that has accompanied us this far, saving us from ourselves, will see us through our end to a new beginning.

Eliot concludes “the fire and the rose are one.”

It’s an echo of Isaiah: “Even to your old age I am he, even when your hair is gray I will carry you; I have done this, and I will lift you up, I will carry you to safety,” (Isaiah 46:4).

Not a bad reminder on a birthday.