The prayer of a senior citizen.

Backward, turn backward,

O Time, in your flight,

Make me a child again

Not just for a night.

That’s the name of that tune, Lord, the way I’d like it sung now that I’m past 80. But I would make it a prayer, not a poem or song. However, you might think I’m joking, or that I don’t know the difference between an idle wish and a prayer. So, much as I might like you to run time backward—at least long enough for me to sneak in and erase some of the more glaring errors showing on my tape—I shall stop myself from asking for such science fiction possibilities.

Because the point of praying, if I’m going to pray at all, must be not to weaken the mind’s common-sense grasp on things, but to strengthen that grip.

Accept this as my first prayer for us, your senior citizens: Help us not to dig any more deeply the ditches of our delusions, for delusions are like trenches that imprison us, cutting us off from reality.

Yes, Lord, let us recognize that some of us are a bit stubborn and deluded. I remember when my father-in-law came to celebrate his eighty-second birthday. He complained that I served the rest of the family creamy whole milk but poured him only skimmed. I had merely given him a different glass—a clear one instead of the amber-colored ones we used. But no amount of explanation ever convinced him.

That was 40 years ago, Lord, and now it’s my turn to be 82. Paranoid or just farsighted, it’s my time hardly to see the butterfly alighting under my nose for the one I’m dreaming about. May we recognize things as they are, Lord, but have our dream time, too.

Help us not to need our vanity. My daughter recently pointed out that I should be prepared to live longer, perhaps even indefinitely, if science succeeds in breaking the genetic code.

“But what would I look like at 120?” I replied. How much vanity is part of all of us!

I remember back in school reading the adventures of Don Quixote of La Mancha. Proud but perilously poor, knights in his day would sally forth with a few crumbs stuck in their whiskers, hoping to convince the world they had eaten well.

Help us not to need these crumbs to feed our vanity, Lord. Let us be ready to show ourselves to others “as is,” secure in the conviction they will accept us just as we are—just as you do. Didn’t we used to sing “Just As I Am” when we were still able to sit in the pews and hear each other sing?

Teach us, Lord, to let go of our egos. Soon enough we’ll be off the ego trip and have to do without it anyway, without security blankets as well as teeth.

My husband, a retired university professor, gave in to persuasion and at 84 made the long trip to see our younger daughter in her new home. The next morning, having looked everything over and approved of it, he hooked his extra bow tie around the paper bag containing his pajamas and toothbrush (he preferred the bag to the fine set of initialed luggage he received at his retirement dinner) and said, “I’m ready to go now.”

Help us, Lord, to rid ourselves of our excess baggage. Help us need a little less every day. Help us to detach ourselves from our possessions and follow the signposts pointing to simplicity (not oversimplification).

Help us deal with feedback from you and others and ourselves in a positive manner, too. If biofeedback experts are right that we can consciously control such functions as body temperature and heartbeat, let us benefit from it. Perhaps that’s a way we can rectify our past mistakes. Instead of trying to correct the moving finger that has already writ, we elderly can attempt to solve our next problems before they emerge by nourishing our good reactions and starving out the bad.

If we can tune in that positively to ourselves and to existence, Lord, maybe we can forge a link in the chain of time and serve a real purpose in your overall plan. The young will see continuity in us. They will be eager to know the past, not turn their backs on it. Being no longer alienated by what is mirrored in us, they will fear the futureless, incline themselves less to hide under an artificially prolonged, if glorified and gilded, shell of youth. We will remember less resentfully and less apprehensively that youth is the future and we cannot afford to be cut off from it, any more than youth can stand being segregated from us. That will be the happy day when, if not the lion and the lamb, youth and age will lie down together, having put aside their individual egos. Then none of us will want them back, because we will have found too much use, too much purpose, for ourselves.

If that millennium comes about, I shall say to the angel of my guard, “Thanks for keeping me company, thanks for letting me not be such bad company myself. Thanks for these lived-out years, years when I have identified with all the joy and all the pain and all the knowledge. Thanks if I’m a well-used-up and not rusted-out instrument of life.”

And by then, when there are already bridges into new territory, I can say, perhaps, not too unlike the child I was wishing in the beginning to be again, “Lead me, O Lord, to step where I cannot see, for the blazing white light of a new dawn will be in my eyes as I set out on the greatest journey of my life.”

Mrs. Lewis lives in El Paso, Texas.

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