May 16, 2022
The Descending Way
Tomorrow, we will bury my mother’s husband of 28 years: Donald Kiner Young. He was 88.
I was 19 when they married. My father had been dead a year, and my mother was beginning a new life. People have asked me over the years whether that timing was hard. The truth is that it never was.
Before Don asked my mother on their first date, he called me to ask for my permission. This was the kind, generous man he was, and I think he always recognized, from the very beginning, the challenge of blending families, even when the children of those families were “grown-up.”
I will remember Don for many things: first, for the tender way he loved my mom. For many years, it was their habit to linger over breakfast together, talking, reading Scripture, praying while holding hands. I remember those years as ones of much happiness for my mom, and what a gift that was not just for her but also for me. The morning Don died, I wondered whether I had ever properly thanked him for this gift, one that relieved me of shouldering the sole responsibility of caring for her those many years.
I’ll remember Don, too, for the generous ways that he loved my own children. Before his health declined, when my children were much younger, he was actively involved in their lives, reading to them, engaging their curiosity, letting them ride “horsey” on his back when it was time for them to be carried off to bed. Don was a deeply affectionate man, and there was never a time when he didn’t offer to all of us a hug and a kiss. “I love you.” “I’m proud of you.” These were words that he regularly said to all of us.
To think of all we might do with this one wild, precious and fleeting life of ours: I’m growing more convinced that the small, hidden offerings are really the most beautiful. To end your 88 years, as Don did, and to have others say He loved well: could there be a better eulogy?
I have just finished reading Henri Nouwen’s Letters to Marc About Jesus, and there is one chapter he writes, in the series of letters to his nephew, about Jesus, the descending God. Nouwen opens the letter by talking of the transition he was making in his own life at that moment: from the hallowed halls of Yale and Harvard to L’Arche, a small Christian community for people of varying levels of intellectual ability. “You might say that at Yale and Harvard,” Nouwen writes, “they’re principally interested in upward mobility, whereas here [at L’Arche] they believe in the importance of downward mobility. There’s the radical difference; and I notice in myself how difficult it is to change the direction of the ladder.”
At Yale and Harvard, there was an obvious system of values, all of them quantifiable: degrees, money, connections, professional success, and social status. At L’Arche, the residents could be cherished for none of these qualities. They were marginalized, largely ignored—and God had said to Nouwen, live among these people and learn to love.
Nouwen could only do this—take the “descending way”—because he was a follower of Jesus, the God-Man who descended into this pitiable world for the sake of love. Descent is at the heart of the gospel’s good news, and as Nouwen says, it is a story centered on mystery. The suffering that is healing. The humiliation that is resurrection. The hiddenness that is light. “It is the way of persecution, oppression, martyrdom, and death, but also the way to the full disclosure of God’s love.” Jesus is this way—the descending way—and to follow him is to forsake all upward ambitions to be noticed and applauded and congratulated.
This way is a neglected path, Nouwen writes. “Because it is so seldom walked on, it is often overgrown with weeds. Slowly but surely we have to clear the weeds, open the way, and set out on it unafraid.” We take this way through prayer, he says: because it’s communion with God that inclines our heart to descent.
“It doesn’t have to be spectacular or sensational. It may simply be a matter of what you say, what you read, to whom you speak, where you go on a free afternoon, or how you regard yourself and other people . . . You begin to discover that love begets love, and step by step you move further forward on the way to God. Gradually, you shed your misgivings about the way of love; you see that ‘in love there is no room for fear,’ and you feel yourself drawn to descend deeper and deeper on the way that Jesus walked before you.”
There is a kind and wonderful providence that I found myself reading about descent and hiddenness this last week—because I believe Don Young walked this way. I also believe that it’s the way set before me now, in the months ahead as we help my mother transition into this next season. Really, it’s the way set before all who call themselves Christ-followers.
We do not walk this way in our own strength, and we do not walk it alone. God stands shoulder-to-shoulder to us on the way of descent.
The paradox is: it’s the path to fullness of joy.
Yours,
Jen