Handing Over the World
The older of my two daughters was married last night. She was beautiful, wearing a simple and elegant dress made by her mother. The groom was handsome. The church, an old one by the water, was, to my taste, a more than adequate foreshadowing of the ambience of heaven. The choir from the local cathedral provided the music, including a wonderful wedding anthem (“Set me as a seal upon thine heart” by William Walton). The reception was merry, with many friends and family, a bluegrass band, and plenty of shrimp and barbecue and beer and wine. The groom’s brother gave a moving toast which managed to involve both a line from Tupac Shakur (“I ain’t mad atcha”) and the phrase “holy sacrament of matrimony.” Most of all, we—my wife and I—think our daughter’s husband is a fine young man and that we have good reason to hope that they will have a solid marriage.
I’m left with an odd bittersweet feeling that I haven’t quite sorted out. But there was one very clear insight that has been growing on me over the past few weeks as this event approached: the world will go on. Without me, that is. This of course is the sort of thing we all know but don’t usually feel. I feel it now. I’m not yet elderly, but old age is nearer to me than youth. And I’ve begun to have hints of a diminishing responsibility for the world.
Which is not to say that I’ve been in command. I live a small life, working at a small job, with small influence. But it’s begun to dawn on me that from the time my first child was born I’ve felt an enormous sense of responsibility that went beyond my immediate concern for my family. I felt an obligation to care about the problems of the world at large, to do whatever I could to solve them. I never saw that there was much I could do, and probably haven’t done half what I should have, but that didn’t lessen the sense of obligation. You could call it a sort of extension of my vocation as a father: I felt a desire and a duty to shape the world in which my children would live.
But as they have become adults, finishing school, getting jobs, getting married, I find the weight lifting. The world is becoming theirs. My generation is aging. We’ve done some good and some bad, and the time is not that far off when our record will have been completed, for better or for worse. People my age will hold the reins of power for a while longer, but increasingly the everyday work of the world will be done by younger people, and in time they will assume authority. For some years now I’ve been disconcerted upon finding myself in the hands of a doctor or nurse or dentist who was born after I graduated from high school. But now the experience has become normal, and no longer shocks me as it did.
The process of handing over the world to the next generation has begun. It’s not a bad feeling, really, once you get used to it.
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