AHSS: The Gift of Years, Growing Old Gracefully – Mystery (Lesson 12)

“For age is opportunity no less / Than you itself, though in another dress,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow observed. “And as the evening twilight fades away / The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.” He speaks clearly of the mystery of the later years of life, the satisfaction of it all. And yet one of the obstacles to living an exciting life in our later years is that we become so sure we’re losing something and so unaware of what we’re gaining. To live into the mystery of this stage of life, it is important to allow ourselves to break out of the confines of the old one. We have learned so well how to live the rules of life. We are not so sure how to live its freedoms.

Being cemented in our personal little worlds creates the problem of not exploring strange streets or wasting precious moments in the exploration of new shops. We become repetitive. Routine seeps into every dimension of life. Some of it is comforting, of course. Routine is what lets us know what to do and just when and how to do it. However, it can turn us into lower-level robots who do not think enough to realize that we’re not thinking much about anything at all. It’s that from which old age liberates us. Routine can finally give way to mystery, to possibility, to the grazing time of life.

The problem is that it can take a long, long time before it feels like liberation. Only getting older frees us, despite ourselves, from ourselves. It gives us the opportunity to stray as we have never strayed in our lives. Why not, in fact, walk into the mystery of life until we are comfortable enough with mystery to trust it even at the end? Schedules and deadlines have a place in life, of course. The keep us accountable to society. The problem starts when they rule our lies, when they obstruct our lives, when they become our lives.

Mystery is what happens to us when we allow life to evolve rather than having to make it happen all the time. Just to see, notice, be there. There is something holy-making about simply presuming that what happens to us in any given is sent to awaken our souls to something new: another smell, a different taste, a moment when we allow ourselves to lock eyes with a stranger, to smile a bit, to nod our head in greeting.

Astonishment shakes us into conscious awareness of things long seen, but long unseen as well. Those things are the essence of mystery. There is purpose to mystery in a coolly calculated world. For the most part, we have learned to deny the right of the unexpected, the mysterious, to invade our neatly scheduled lives at all. In age, nothing is very sure anymore. Mystery comes alive. Something will surely happen. What will it be?

As the years go by, we learn to trust the goodness of time, the glorious cornucopia of life called God. At the end of life, the mystery waiting for us there, finally visible under the glare of time, may be more than the soul can hold.

Sister Joan Says: “A burden of these years is to fear the ever-approaching mystical before us, as if the God-ness we have known in life will desert us in death. A blessing of these years is coming to see that behind everything so stolid, so firm, so familiar in front of us runs a descant of mystery and meaning to be experienced in ways we never thought possible before. To become free of the prosaic and the scheduled and the pragmatic is to break the world open in ways we never dreamed of. In this new world, a mountain, a bench, a grassy path is far more than simply itself. It is a symbol of unprecedented possibilities, of the holiness of time.

• Sister Joan states that relationships “…are a sign of the presence of a loving God in life”. Write a letter, email, or poem to someone who has been or who is this for you and share why. (The poem does not have to be original.)
• For many, old age does not feel like liberation, according to Sister Joan. She claims, “We resist it mightily. We make our own prisons and live in them till we’re too numb to try to get away.” Do you agree? If yes, why? Name some “prisons” that victimize older people.