I love old things. I love a star like Arcturus that’s been shining for billions of years or starlight that’s taken 2 million light years to reach my eyes, like that of the Andromeda Galaxy imaged on our home page. I love rock that reflects metamorphosis occurring deep underground 250 million years ago. I sing renditions of 3000-year-old psalms, and ever, the study of scripture from numerous traditions renders me almost speechless at the timeless intelligence and wisdom of ancients.

Having first been trained as an academic and prison chaplain, I was then drawn to parish work in part because I enjoyed working with elders. Such interesting people, I thought, some with a nothing-new-under-the-sun composure but many other elders who had grown in their capacity to be curious, enlarged, even awed by new experience. Now as a hospice chaplain, I am steadily amazed at the pith and measured appreciation given to life by people in their 80s and 90s.

It’s one reason I lead naturalism programs: to come into contact and to foster appreciation with old trees and rocks and stars. And it’s one reason why our retreats promote real and early engagement with our elders as elders, that is, out of respect for them as keepers of the flame represented in knowing laughter and memories, in grandchildren and the old tchotchkes which sit on soot-stained mantels. When our era tempts us with fast talk and ever faster electrons, it’s the long wavelengths of time that console me.