AHSS The Gift of Years: Spirituality (Lesson 32)

If, as the years go by, we grow more and more aware of both the meaning and the meaninglessness of things, we must certainly also grow more sensitive, not less aware of the ebb and flow of life. In her journal, The Measure of My Days, which she kept in her eighties, Florida Scott-Maxwell wrote, “Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age.” We do not simply ignore life as we get older, but we do engage with it at a different level, out of different motives, with a more focused heart.

This time of life is not meant to solidify us in our inadequacies. It is meant to free us to mature even more. It is more than possible that we will go to our graves with a great deal of personal concerns, of life, agendas, left unresolved. To hope that in the end all ruptures will have been repaired, however, is at best unreal. People are long gone and even longer out of touch. We can’t put back together failed marriages, cancel years of neglect, a lifetime of indifference or a history of disregard for the people who had a right to expect our concern. That time, those situations are simply gone.

Inside, the scars still smart though. We have been hurt. We have done the hurting. Mistakes were made. If we cannot deal directly with all the unfinished struggles of our lives, how can we possibly face the end of life with any kind of serenity? The fact is that the unrest that accumulates over the years is the very grace reserved for the end time, the last years, the pinnacle of life.

Now we must deal with our consciousness of these wrongs and let them make a productive difference in us. Why? There is no one here to forgive us anymore, no one to tell us we were right, no one to surrender to our insistence no one left for us to refuse to consort with. In our deepest parts we must come to peace with ourselves, the conscience we have been refusing to reconcile with for years. This is the period of life when we must begin to look inside our own hearts and souls rather than outside ourselves for the answers to our problems, for the fixing of the problems. This is the time for facing ourselves, for bringing ourselves into the light.

This is the period of spiritual reflection, of spiritual renewal in life. Now is the time to ask ourselves what kind of person we have been becoming all these years. And do we like that person? Did we become more honest, more decent, more caring, more merciful as we went along because of all these things? And if not, what must we be doing about it now? Can we come eye to eye with our own souls and admit who we are? Can we begin to see ourselves as only part of the universe, just a fragment of it, not its center?

Old people, we’re told, become more difficult as they get older. No. Not at all. They simply become less interested in maintaining their masks, more likely to accept the effort of being human, human beings. They must face what the smallness is and rejoice in the time they have left to turn sweet instead of more sour than ever.

Sister Joan says: A burden of these years is the danger of giving in to our most selfish selves. A blessing of these years is the opportunity to face what it is in us that has been enslaving us, and to let our spirit fly free of whatever has been tying it to the Earth all these years.

1. Answer for yourself Sister Joan’s questions: What kind of person have I become? Am I more honest, more decent, more serene, more caring, more merciful – and if not, what must I do about it?
2. Sister Joan says that one of the blessings of aging is that it provides time for spiritual reflection, spiritual renewal. Is this true in your life? What is nourishing your spirituality as you age?