No. 013: I Don't Know about Thee—But I'm Feeling Thirty-Three.
On aging playfully.
On my final night as a twenty-one year old, I waited for the clock to show midnight, then opened Spotify and played “22,” Taylor Swift’s pop-hit ode to my newly-awarded age. According to Taylor, I, as a freshly-minted twenty-two-year-old, should have then been thinking the following: “It feels like a perfect night to dress up like hipsters, and make fun of our exes, uh-huh, uh-huh. It feels like a perfect night for breakfast at midnight, to fall in love with strangers, uh-huh, uh-huh.”
But, alas, I was a grad student, and I had term papers due both on my birthday and the day after. Therefore, my plans for both preceding evenings looked more like this: “It feels like the perfect night to pull an all-nighter, to chain-drink coffee, uh-huh, uh-huh. It feels like a perfect night to translate Hebrew, to write a bibliography, uh-huh, uh-huh.”
Just shy of eleven years have now passed, and later this week I will celebrate birthday number thirty-three. I plan to go out for dinner with my husband of nine years, with my three children, and with my parents. I’m going to order a Pickle Lover’s Pizza. Then we’ll come home and indulge in the same chocolate éclaire pudding I always requested for my birthday as a child. I expect I’ll go to bed around 10:30, wearing my magenta pajamas and a peaceful smile on my face.
I can say it with neither hesitation nor qualification: I would choose thirty-three over twenty-two any day.
My twenties, I’ll grant, were exciting. At every point along the way I had something I could work toward and to which I could look forward. I earned two degrees, met the love of my life, began my career as a freelance editor, got engaged and then married, and welcomed three sons into the world. I even bought a minivan.
But my outlook, on myself and on my life, has changed. Whereas at the outset of my twenties I might have agreed with Taylor Swift that I was “happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time,” I now gratefully inhabit a season in which I am content, committed, concentrated, and connected. I’m still invested my daily work, but now that work operates from a posture of peace with who I am and what I have, rather than from a posture of hungry striving toward a nebulous target. My eyes are no longer fixed anxiously on some mirage at the horizon, but now rest on the magic of my immediate surroundings.
I’m thankful to have waved goodbye the pressure to “make the most of” my youth by styling myself as the Girl Next Door, or as the Cool Girl, or as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, or as any other hollow Girl of Hollywood’s anemic imagination. I’m glad to begin embracing the patina of age—a strong and grounded beauty that tells a singular story through crows’ feet and scars and stretch marks.
I am particularly amused to be turning thirty-three, given that people acknowledge this as the age of Jesus both at the height and at the end of his earthly ministry. A couple months ago I shared how having a newborn at Christmastime once transformed my appreciation of the Incarnation. The anticipation of my thirty-third birthday is producing a similar effect.
When I was a child, my mental image of Jesus was just like the image of him I saw on the flannelgraph: two-dimensional. I could understand him as God in flesh, and I could understand him as a Man—specifically, as the “Grown-Up Man” par excellence.
“Grown-Ups,” as I understood them then, were simple characters: They were competent, responsible, and serious, and every wondering and whimsical child would someday become one. It was easy for me to envision Jesus teaching with authority, because per my understanding all Grown-Ups had authority. I believed that Grown-Ups inherently had all their ducks in a row, so the perfect wisdom of Jesus I accepted as self-evident.
My thirties, however, have confirmed that my childhood imagination of generic adulthood was woefully inaccurate. True, I am (hopefully) at least a bit more competent and responsible than I once was. But I am still wondering and whimsical. I still have many questions—perhaps more than ever—about what constitutes a life well lived. I’m still terrible at parallel parking and terrified of cockroaches. I struggle with time management, and I get cavities. And I can’t wear a white shirt for more than a couple hours without spilling coffee or spaghetti sauce on it.
In light of my comically obvious insufficiency to have a grip on it all, I’m now freshly astounded by the wisdom and authority of the thirty-three-year-old Jesus. It’s hard for me to imagine someone my age saying and doing all of the things he’s recorded as having said and done. His words and deeds must have been both awesome and scandalous to witness.
But my appreciation of the Jesus of the Bible is growing in another way. Whereas my old vision of him was two-dimensional, my new vision of him is, well, thirty-three-dimensional: it is living and warm and irreducible to any SparkNotes synopsis. I can now envision him as a young man with a vibrant inner world of thoughts and emotions, joys and dreams. I can imagine him waking up in a human body and rolling up his sleeves to feel the warmth of sunshine on his weathered skin. I can imagine him settling down for sleep by searching the sky with amusement for the Pleiades and Cassiopeia and the thousand other constellations he had once there installed.
In other words, I can now imagine him not only as a character, but also as a person—a whole and dynamic one, just like me. I can imagine him savoring a pimento cheese sandwich with a side of pickled okra and a slice of pecan pie. I can imagine him listening to Wilco and excelling at bar trivia. I can imagine him laughing at the same things I laugh at (lol, or maybe not—but a girl can hope).
If there was anything about adulthood that as a child I severely miscalculated, certainly it was the seriousness of it all. My thirties have delighted me with the revelation that maturity is not mutually exclusive with playfulness. Responsibility does not necessarily compromise humor, nor competence merriment.
I suppose I equated maturity with seriousness because I knew the mature Christian was supposed to be “sober-minded”—and I understood “sober-minded” as synonymous with “serious.” But if my college tenure on a dry campus taught me anything, it was that sobriety doesn’t by definition have to be serious. My college friends and I have many times expressed our thanks that we experienced those formative years above the influence of alcohol, for rather than dissolving our memories into the monotonous blur of party culture, we pursued novel and creative expressions of fun that have left us with many hilarious stories.
To be sober-minded is simply to live awake and alert to reality. Reality, of course, sometimes is quite serious. Embracing reality requires that we respond to the serious call to worship and obey the very Christ who created the cosmos. It requires that we open our eyes to the real amplitude of suffering in the world, and that we serve the downtrodden even (or especially) when it’s uncomfortable.
But embracing reality also requires that we tear down the delusions we’ve built to convince ourselves of our own wisdom and sophistication. It requires us to admit that we are often quite ridiculous little people. If we are truly honest with ourselves about ourselves, we will acquiesce that we ought not take ourselves so seriously.
We know this instinctively. We know that the pinnacle of maturity isn’t shouting at the neighborhood kids, “Get off my yard!,” but stooping down on bended knee and letting out the silly voices and faces to play peek-a-boo with a toddler.
But somewhere along the way, we hear the world telling us that if we do the right work, read the right books, attend the right college (or church), and buy the right carton of eggs, we might achieve a maturity that is consistently right and thoroughly impressive. There’s no time for frivolity; we must buckle down and be serious. We recognize this vision of maturity as “pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom” (Gen. 3:6), and when we chase it, we applaud ourselves as virtuous. We are blind to our pride, but the pride slowly suffocates our joy.
My seriousness peaked during my late teens and early twenties. I was a self-diagnosed hopeless romantic, and the content of my wistful daydreams was sophisticated and elegant, à la Terrence Malick and Tchaikovsky. I was proud to be known as an “old soul,” and I considered myself wise for my years.
Having children humbled me—not just in part, but in whole. They frustrated (and still frustrate) my every attempt to curate an aesthetic lifestyle, to run a tight ship, and to show up in life as a semblance of grace embodied. They brought (and still bring) my incompetence and irritability daily to the surface. I didn’t give up the fight easily or cheerfully, but ultimately I had no choice but to acknowledge myself as incapable of shaping myself or my life into the vision of elegance of which I had once daydreamed. If I was going to make it as a mom, I had to learn to laugh at myself.
Life this side of abandoning the project of perfect elegance is a haven of joy and freedom. I wish I had found it earlier. I can order a quesadilla at a restaurant without embarrassment for my culinary immaturity, and I feel no shame in enjoying it. I love myself more than I used to, and I also love God more than I used to.
While there is much to gain from meditating on images of Christ as stern Pantocrator, in recent years I’m coming to grasp the perfect holiness of God as inseparable from the perfect joy of God. The chief end of man is to worship God and enjoy him forever, but these are not duties in service of a dispassionate stalwart; they are exercises of participation in a vivacious and mutual delight. The Father laughs merrily at his good creation, the Spirit inspires convivial love, and Christ plays in ten thousand places. When we grow in Christlikeness, we grow in dignity—but true dignity “can laugh at the days to come” (Prov. 31:25).
Tolkein understood this. Characters like Gandalf and Tom Bombadil demonstrate a maturity and power that is enhanced, not obscured, by good humor. Their examples make it easier to imagine the Ancient of Days as, dare I say, a happy God.
I was already processing these thoughts a few days ago when Chris and I watched the penultimate episode of Rings of Power, season 2. Celebrimbor’s parting address to Galadriel, as they mourn [spoiler alert!] what seems to be Sauron’s inevitable, forthcoming coup d’etat over Middle-earth, struck me as a fitting addition to this conversation. (The script of Rings of Power, of course, is a modern creation, not original to Tolkein; but I’m optimistic he would have given this the green light). Says Celebrimbor:
Neither of us were strong enough. There might not be anyone in Middle-earth who is. But perhaps the elves need only remember that it is not strength that overcomes darkness, but light. Armies rise, hearts may fail, yet light still endures, and is mightier than strength. For in its presence all darkness must flee.
Christians, including myself, most often speak of light in terms of its function, which is to reveal truth. But I wonder what we could learn by meditating on the character of light. Light is not stern; it is not even serious. Light is a folksy little Hobbit. It is buoyant. It is lively. It frolics and dances through even the thickest darkness. The light of Christ—the light into which he calls us—is full of truth and grace.
Grace... I used to believe that the highest priority for getting older was to “age gracefully.” But it has come to my attention that to be graceful is to be, well, full of grace—and grace is a gift that can only be received by a humble heart. The more we labor to synthesize a grace of our own, the more we will devolve into plastic counterfeits of the miraculous, living beings God created us to be.
As far as it concerns my own priorities in aging, I’ve decided on a new goal—and that is to age playfully. I aim be sober-minded: Rather than numbing my heart with delusions of eternal youth, I will stare the truth of my ever-closer, impending death in the face, and I will laugh at its powerlessness against the light of Christ. I will walk forward in peace, and I will have fun along the way.
Thirty-three-year-old Jesus was faced with a hard task—a serious task. But “for the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12:2). Now, more than ever, I live in cheerful hope of the day when I will meet this Son of Man in full color. Maybe we’ll play Scrabble, and maybe I’ll let him win.