Baffled by Octogenarians

I joked with a friend that my favorite contemplative readings have trended lately toward reflective white octogenarians. 

I’m 32, white, serve in a majority Black city, and my faith has been saved and then sharpened daily by young Black and brown friends and authors. 

But these recent literary companions: Marilynne Robinson, Parker Palmer, Richard Rohr, Wendell Berry— they’ve equipped, challenged, and guided me. They share pieces of my culture, and their language feels like home, which draws me toward them on my sabbaths. 

One particular thread intrigues me about these octogenarian companions: they have a cultivated commitment to being baffled. 

Which is to say: a comfort for living with paradox and mystery and mercy. They can peacefully say, “I don’t know.” 

I noticed that those approaching “octogenarian status” at our denomination’s Synod—which ruled to disaffiliate the church I currently serve and many others—were cautious and gracious dissenting voices. 

When Jesus stooped down to write in the dust before a mob ready to lynch the woman caught in adultery, the octogenarians were the first to put down their stones: “They slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest,” choosing to disregard their law of Moses, leaving only Jesus with the woman. 

Perhaps as they considered their own lives, they became baffled by why they cared so much about hers. 

I owe my personal bafflement to a dear octogenarian-turned-90 friend and mentor, Don Postema. As I lamented to him that I rarely felt I could sufficiently piece together a passage for a sermon or package a concept for a teaching, he advised me to follow Wendell Berry and embrace bafflement as a gift: 

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Of course, some near-octogenarians we know seem to have quick answers to everything, which means the gift of bafflement must be a cultivated practice.

I imagine the companions who have received this gift have done so through eighty years of awakenings, having come of age through Dr. King’s assassination, fights for women’s rights, the pursuit of dignities denied to LGBTQ+ friends. They dove headlong into advocacy, probably at times wanting to “burn it all down.” They weathered depression and wars, exhaustion, assassinations and schisms, and then these faithful and wise companions—some of them at least—came out the other side with an unusual gift that I receive: 

An appreciation for being baffled.

Marilynne Robinson writes, “The Bible does not exist to explain away mysteries and complexities but to reveal and explore them with respect and restraint that resists conclusion.” 

Parker Palmer writes, “Thinking paradoxically is key to creativity, which depends on the ability to hold divergent ideas in a way that opens the mind and heart to something new. Living paradoxically is key to personal wholeness, which depends on the ability to embrace one’s self-contradictions.” 

And Richard Roher adds this: “If you can’t deal with paradox and mercy, then you’re going to be an angry person.”

Yes, we are an angry people, and some of that anger may need to burn. 

If I stop being baffled — by people whose actions seem deeply contradictory, by scripture layered with mystery, by my own life where I say one thing yet do another — it will be impossible to live graciously and show mercy, to myself, and others.  

Jesus, I think, wanted us to be more-than-occasionally baffled. Why else would the Scriptures record him saying, ‘if you are not for me, you’re against me,’ and also, ‘If you aren’t against me, you’re for me?’ God’s people, after all, were named “Wrestles-with-God.” 

The path of the Kingdom is not one of simply “being right,” but following the way, the life, and the truth: not a set of declarative statements, but a journey.

My spouse and I have faced hard decisions this year: a graduation and a job search, a tumultuous denomination, and the ever-pressing question of how best to act in a world that seems to be crumbling. 

Bafflement might be the right response. Not forever, but perhaps, for now: 

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work.