We in our modern society tend to build upon a myth of an ideal society, consisting of selected and approved individuals – of “normal” human beings, with average intelligence, average bodily health and with a sufficient degree of psychic maturity. These selected and privileged individuals have – it is true – the obligation on their shoulders, in the name of humanity, to take care of the others who do not belong to this class of the “true ” society. This kind of care does not, however, acknowledge the sick as belonging to the body, unless they recover. One might say the sick people do not belong… The prevalance of this idea among us is obvious if we think of how we speak of the sick [person‘s] return to society, as if [one] had not been in [the] society while sick – especially if [one] had been in the hospital. Racial discrimination is not in any way an isolated phenomena among us! It is as though the human defects and illness do not belong to our proper life and that individuals who had by accident succumbed to the fate of being ill (or dying!) were not actual, proper members of society-unless they recovered-unless they could be made healthy again.“ (Dr Martti Siirala)

The failing aged will never be made healthy again, they will never again become proper members of a society of the well, so we must invite them into a community where membership is not dependent on health and productivity. To tell someone yes, your life is over and you feel useless, but you are not an outcast and I will not shun you, requires that we look into the mirror and accept our own aging selves, accept the part of us that is infirm, incontinent, and unproductive. This acceptance, to be a source of hope, must go beyond recognition; it must be a deep form of acceptance, “an entrance into the fact that takes hold of the fact, but not with the grip of evil.”

William Lynch recalls a Christian legend about the wicked angels who fell from heaven because they were given an anticipatory vision of Christ‘s humanity and refused to adore it. They cared only for the light.

– from The Dark Night of Hope, Annette Brownlee