Insane for the Light: A Spirituality for Our Wisdom Years by Ronald Rolheiser, OMI
SECTION FOUR OF PART TWO The Final Stages of Human Maturity from a Faith Perspective
This section explores how Christian faith reframes aging, illness, helplessness, and death as opportunities for a distinctive form of generativity. Rather than seeing value only in activity and productivity, the faith perspective highlights passivity—suffering, dependence, and dying—as a mode of giving that can be as, or more, generative than active service. Using Jesus’s life and passion as the central paradigm, the author shows how what is received through endurance and surrender can bear deep spiritual fruit for others.
Passivity as Generativity: The Passion of Jesus
The key theological move is to distinguish clearly between Jesus’s active ministry (what he did) and his passion (what he endured). The English sense of “passion” often emphasizes pain, but its root meaning—passivity—matters most here. The Gospels present Jesus’s life in two modes: active (teaching, healing, leading) and passive (arrest, suffering, crucifixion). Christians are saved not only by Jesus’s active life but, paradoxically, preeminently by his passive endurance—his willingness to absorb suffering and die. That passivity, like his activity, is generative.
Henri Nouwen’s hospital encounter with a formerly powerful CEO illustrates the difficulty many feel at becoming dependent: the man is distraught over his helplessness. Nouwen attempts to help him see that the helplessness of dying can itself be a gift, analogous to Jesus’s passion. The word ‘patient’ comes from the Latin ‘passio.’ Two further personal examples reinforce the claim. An Ursuline sister who spent decades actively nurturing young women became paralyzed in the last nine months of her life; in that passive state she paradoxically gave an even deeper gift to those around her. A mother who had failed for years to reconcile her estranged children found that her terminal helpless ness in hospice drew them together and produced reconciliation she could not effect by active effort. These stories show that passivity can disclose the capacity to bless and transform others in ways activity could not.
Cultural Blindspots and The Value of Passivity
Modern secular culture tends to equate human worth with productivity and utility, marginalizing those whose capacities decline. The text critiques that impoverish ment and suggests that attitudes like euthanasia risk losing sight of the spiritual and relational value conferred through passivity. Drawing on James Hillman, the author argues that when utility ends, what remains to be given is character and spirit. Conversely, lives and deaths dominated by bitterness can leave a legacy that drains and diminishes survivors
The Final Challenge: Giving One’s Death Away
The author frames the ultimate human challenge as learning to “give our deaths away” — to accept diminishment and passivity in such a way that one’s final surrender becomes a blessing rather than a burden. How one dies affects the moral and spiritual atmosphere one leaves. A dignified, reconciled, loving dying can amplify a lifetime’s good; a resentful, violent, or disorderly dying can negate it.
Leaving a Spirit Behind: Presence, Absence, Ascension, Pentecost
The final sections address the paradox of presence and absence: true presence often deepens when physical presence ends. Jesus teaches that his departure is necessary to send the Spirit; his leaving will, after initial grief, become a source of enduring life and joy for the disciples.
This pattern—painful separation giving birth to a deeper, indwelling presence— applies broadly: children achieve fuller maturity when they leave home; parents may only learn to appreciate a child’s true self after separation; the spirit of a loved one can return to nourish survivors in a deeper, less fragile way.
Examples include funerary reflections where survivors promise that the deceased will “come to us” in a new, individualized way—an experience of receiving a person’s spirit more fully after their death.
If people age and die without bitterness and with acceptance, the spirit they leave behind will be nurturing, lasting, and cleansing—the same “blood and water” imagery applied to everyday human departures.
Conclusion
From this Christian vantage, aging, sickness, helplessness, and death need not be mere losses. When embraced with faith and love, passivity can become a final act of generativity: a sacramental gift that nurtures, reconciles, frees, and blesses others. The spiritual task of maturity is to learn how to surrender, endure, and give the gift of one’s death so that the legacy left behind is life-giving rather than life-draining
A Prayer from Teilhard de Chardin, SJ:
When the signs of age begin to mark my body (and still more when they touch my mind); when the illness that is to diminish me or carry me off strikes from without or is born within me; when the painful moment comes in which I suddenly awaken to the fact that I am ill or growing old; and above all at that last moment when I feel I am losing hold of myself and am absolutely passive within the hands of the great unknown forces that have formed me; in all those dark moments, O God, grant that I may understand that it is You (provided only my faith is strong enough) who are painfully parting the fibers of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me away within Yourself…. Teach me to treat my death as an act of communion!