Creativity Knows No Age
It happened on a Friday night. A brisk, bouncy, twenty- something handed me three tickets and said ever so brightly: “Here you go! Two students and one senior. Enjoy!” I stared at her in split second disbelief, furtively holding out my hand to receive my…fate. Did I hear correctly? Surely, I did not hear correctly. As if on cue, the answer to my silent query took the form of my son’s voice in my left ear brimming with entirely too much, hmm, let’s call it glee: “Whoa, Mom, you’ve been senior’d!” For added emphasis, the son on the other side of me guffawed in boyish delight at my expense and gave me a distinctive son shove. I am told this sort of banter at the ‘plight’ of others is the male version of affection – even toward mothers. I take that on faith and do not hold it against them, though I don’t mind saying that my Pavlovian response was to pummel them soundly with a swing of my very large mom purse. However, the bright, bouncy twenty-something began stammering out apologies, and I felt intensely sorry for her at that moment. She had just assumed. I could not fault her. It is the gray hair I inherited from my mother. It came early before the idea of age had ever crossed my mind. I smiled her out of her misery with a quick pat on the hand. And I don’t mind saying that I did have the last laugh. My ticket was cheaper than my sons’ tickets. Revenge, alas, is sweet.
The word had been said, however, and out loud. Senior. It felt like a large, garish label had been slapped onto my chest that relegated me to a group, a class, a demographic, a market, the way I was viewed by the outside world, complete with a preprogrammed expectation of how I would now act. All that in one, little, spoken word: Senior.
It is so odd, getting older. You never feel old on the inside. On the inside you are young, vibrant, and singing all the lyrics to ‘Freebird’ with wild abandon. You know passion and remember romance and still whisper things in your husband’s ear that would shock the children. You read poetry and think thoughts and make judgments. You still ask questions. The questions don’t disappear when you get older, but perhaps the young might assume you are not curious anymore. You might be fascinatingly well read. You might have flown a fighter jet, put out fire after fire, delivered hundreds of babies in your lifetime. You might still be writing stories, creating paintings, building things. You might have the periodic table etched permanently in your brain. You even have a tattoo, for heaven’s sake.
Yet, you have gray hair and wrinkles on your hands, and you wonder as you pull that first, complimentary AARP magazine from the mailbox inexplicably addressed with you name: Is that all the young will see in the end? The outside. The gray hair. The wrinkles. Will your real, autonomous self quietly sink beneath them as in quicksand? That is the question I ask with more frequency lately.
I count it as a blessing, then, that this question was answered in quite a comforting way recently by a small, side character tucked into Eric Metaxas’s fascinating biography of a long-time hero of mine: Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Her name was Ruth von Kleist-Retzow. Ruth happened to be Bonhoeffer’s dear and cherished friend. The most charming detail of this friendship, however, is this: Ruth was sixty-eight and Dietrich in his early thirties. Theirs was to be a friendship orchestrated by the kind and surprising providence of a Divine Father for Whom age was a thing of naught.
Dietrich had traveled to northeast Germany to Pomerania, an area near the Baltic Sea which straddles Germany and Poland. He was there to start a seminary to prepare future pastors in his Confessing Church – pastors who would learn to fight the atheistic hatred of the Third Reich with the knowledge and love of God. They needed an out of the way place in order to fly under the radar of Adolph Hitler's prying eyes and ears. So, Dietrich traveled as far from his home in Berlin as he could and into these unfamiliar wilds. He and his students were hearty and strong. They had to be. They set up the school in a ramshackled old estate with no running water or heat. They used wood chopped from the trees about the grounds and were completely dependent on the goodness of God and on their own sense of adventure.
Well, as any struggling Pastor would do, Dietrich sent out begging letters to the families in the area. These people were untitled aristocratic families who were members of the Prussian military officer's class. They had "traditional values and fealty to high standards of culture." It was from this group of people that most of the conspirators against Hitler would rise. Dietrich quickly felt at home with them for they were so much like his own family in Berlin: cultured, well read, and in love with their rich German culture. Ruth von Kleist-Retzow was among their number. She was to become his greatest ally and benefactor.
As a girl Ruth had lived in luxury. She was the daughter of a Count and Countess. Her father was the governor of Silesia. She met her future husband at fifteen and fell madly in love. He whisked her away from this glittering world to his large agricultural estate in Pomerania. There they had four children but when Ruth was expecting her fifth child, her husband died and left her a widow at the age of twenty-nine. Bereft and in her prime, she did not complain nor did she leave. This was her husband’s land and she had come to love it. There she lived with her children in several different homes for the next thirty-nine years. Did she perhaps long for a friend of her own stature? Did she give up longing after so many years and the gray hair began to show? It does not say. Yet, God was about to give her the gift of her lifetime, though it came in a surprisingly young package.
Metaxas points out that Ruth, “was a strong willed and accomplished woman who had no patience for wishy-washy clerics. The brilliant, cultured, and heroically combative Pastor Bonhoeffer seemed an answer to her prayers." As soon as they met, they knew they were friends. Dietrich with his ever sensitive and exquisite ability to see into the hearts of others, saw only a heart like his. He talked with Ruth like an intellectual equal and at sixty-eight, encouraged by his belief in her abilities, she decided to study Greek. Because of this, the New Testament would be revealed to her in a new and insightful way. They had long and wonderful conversations out on her patio about Scripture and Theology. She lovingly drew this young pastor into the very heart of her cherished family probably aware that he missed his own family in Berlin.
Dietrich loved this sixty-eight-year-old woman with the complete naturalness of friendship and never thought to do otherwise. He did not just see her gray hair nor did he talk to her in any kind of condescending way. He saw her steal-eyed intellect and the strong will forged by a long loneliness and he was impressed and delighted. Here was his utter equal as friendship demanded. Within her was a youth like the Eagle’s. He had no doubts. The natural ease with which they loved each other could not have been lost on Dietrich’s students. Did they perhaps in turn give a second thought for the other older people in their midst and discover friendship there was possible and rewarding? I dare to hope this was so.
Ruth was to love Dietrich unwaveringly throughout the short span of his heroic life. In true friendship, she was to give him one of her most cherished gifts: her granddaughter Maria. Maria was very much like her – strong willed and loving and a bit combative. She was nineteen, Dietrich thirty-seven when they discovered their love one for the other. Eyebrows and objections were raised among the relatives, but Ruth understood, as none other could, that age mattered not to these beautiful souls. She reveled in their courtship as one who still understood the young heart’s heady joy at being in love. For Ruth, despite her gray hair and wrinkled hands would never grow old.
Maria reading a letter from her fiance
Dietrich and Maria were engaged, championed by the guiding hand of Ruth. Did she know that Maria was to be Dietrich’s reason for hope in his final imprisonment by the Nazis? I am most certain. This loving friend knew what a soul like his was about and how it loved and how it would be saved. Maria would be cherished to the end of his all too short life. Her love in turn would give him the courage to face martyrdom. Maria would always know what it was to be the beloved of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s heart. It was to be Ruth’s final gift of friendship.
This young pastor, who teasingly called Ruth Grandmother, fed her soul and gave her hope that culture, beauty, and real FAITH were stronger than death. He honored her worth with conversation and songs and poetry. She responded in kind across generational lines that evaporated into thin air by the warmth of their deep and abiding love and respect.
I love these two friends. They have inspired me to boldly seek the possibilities of friendship across the generations. To my utter joy, and perhaps through Dietrich’s prayers, I have found a few of my own who have never once thought to call me ‘senior.’ They have become treasures to me. Thank you, Dietrich Bonhoeffer for not seeing the gray hairs and the wrinkles, but the ever young and interesting child of God that resides within us all.
