The Tendonitis of Faith

Growing old, you have two choices. First, you can accept the decay and degradation of your body. Second, you can “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Is it faithless human hope that causes rage against death? If we are living to join God in our death, why should we, I, care so much about pushing death as far away as possible?

I had been a serious high school athlete, one of the rare teenagers in the 1970s who worked out, hard, in between sports seasons — because I sucked. My only shot at playing was to take what God gave me and max out its ability to perform. So strength training, running, and wearing five-pound ankle weights for all my waking hours for two years were just my life, as were summertime three-hour lifting and running sessions at the downtown Buffalo YMCA gym, the weight room right next to the perpetually “ON” furnace room. Think hot. If there were steroids around, I would have taken all of them.

If you are fully alone, and I was, you are the center of all your decisions. So I built a bunch of muscle mass, lost some obvious obesity, and was able to respectably play high school football. And that was it. After college, I was hired to be an assistant high school football coach. In a high school and for the 1979 Branford Fighting Football Hornets, I led “cals” (calisthenics) now called “warm-ups” and “stretching.”

But time after coaching distanced me from my body. Twenty years after high school, I tried to get in some kind of contact with my bloated body and succeeded. I am less fat than I was. But the old muscles that were used to burn calories in my quiet “raging” became tighter in my 60s and soon tightened up in full-on tendonitis. And any number of doctor friends said “Tendonitis: the gateway condition for arthritis.”

No damage, just pain. Old muscles do not recover from daily, aggressive work-outs — even in “Old Man Style,” and even elder care effort has consequences. Well, pulling back on effort and the resistance levels of the recumbent, elliptical, and BowFlex made the every-moment pain abate, but the stiffness simply accreted onto my frame. That stiffness was there because I simply ignored “cals.” I had not stretched in 40 years.

The danger of metaphor is that connection to a larger reality forgets the truth of what inspires insight. Being fully stiff and thus in pain if I moved beyond the limits of my stiffness, I saw the laughable humanity of self-obsession, shallow rationalization, but mostly it was my body screaming at my memory when neither stiffness nor pain became like breathing or sleeping — just a consequence of living.

Then I decided to stretch. The full Monty: hurdlers, squats, cross-leg toe-touching. It hurt. A lot. The pain was (is) excruciating as you slowly, forcefully, pull body parts against the bands of muscles that in one direction facilitate movement, but in the other direction prevent movement with pain in their shrunken, tightened binding.

I think stretching in old age is simply human incapacity raging at your mind. And I think I hear God laughing at my groans. The raging at the bodies given to us is not, for me, against the God who made me, but simply at the pain. Because it hurts. There is no justice or virtue signaling in making your body fulfill the gift we have been given.

With each long, progressive, lengthening pull of one part of my body to or away from another, I feel each fascicle of bound muscle fibers losing the binding constriction that does not cause pain until the muscle is used. So I could avoid pain by leaving well enough alone, and have these decades.

The idea that death should be greeted as a friend who carries us into eternal life is certainly one with a long pedigree in Christianity. The seventh-century theologian Maximus the Confessor believed such an embrace of death was the way to life, that we must “make life a rehearsal for death.” In that vein, Jesus said, “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” But at the same time, death is elsewhere deemed an enemy to be defeated (1 Cor 15:26). Death is not a gift from God, but an effect of sin.

As I become more bound in my own limitations, I find within these alternatives two options. I can embrace the encroachments of death, staying as I am and at peace with my body’s decay. Or I can use that body to make living in it less painful, to beat back death’s intrusions and live more fully in the part of the world I have been given. But amid the creaking bones and blurring vision, it is nearly impossible to see the deterioration of life into pain as anything but an affront to the God who is the giver of life.

So I stretch while I can and thank God for the life that is left in me. I can be happy with the grace of God which passes all understanding, or I can act on my ignorance, laziness, and satisfaction by stretching into what I have been given — until I can’t. Stretching hurts. And unavoidably connects us to what we have been given. And the Giver.