Only children understand the impulsive, impetuous, impelling urge to throw snowballs. Only wise adults realize that unless we throw them, it is unlikely we will ever manage to escape the traces that hold us down, hold us back, at any and every age. But that can only be learned from the young. And they can only learn from us when not to do it. Doug Larson wrote, “the aging process has you firmly in tis grasp if you never get the urge to throw snowballs.”

Getting in touch with the young again is what keeps us in touch with the world. An old tire store sits on the corner of a block of rental homes. Its walls are painted with colorful silhouettes of children, playing piano, dancing, and on a stage. It is a living playhouse called “The Neighborhood Art House,” written in large purple letters above the door. Children can play the drums or practice ballet or read their poems or write their puppet shows or do oil painting and it is all for free, thanks to the people of the city. Impressive.

But just as impressive is to pass that corner in the summertime and see those children sitting bot stark still on chairs on the patio, chin in hands, eyes wide open as well-dressed men and women, all professionals of the city, past and present – lawyers, nurses, corporate types, retirees – sit in the sun and read to them aloud. The patio is filled with almost a hundred children while the parking lot is filled with almost a hundred cars as adults scurry in and out, books under their arms. Each child has a private reader who comes every day to do what no one does for the children making animal sounds or changing voices from one character to another as they go.

They bridge the difference between childhood and parenthood for these children, between freedom and authority, the way grandparents were wont to do in decades past when children and grandparents lived in the same block, same city, the same state. They fill the children with a trust of adults. They open them to adult conversation, to adult influence. They give them refuge from all the rules. They become friends, this child and that adult.

Intergenerational friendships between and older generation and a younger one are as important to the elder as they are to the child. Children give us a lifeline to the present and the future that is denied to us if we sit alone in an independent-living unit. Children release the child in us before it completely withers up and blows away. They connect us to the children of later generations in our own families, the ones we only see once a year or struggle to talk to on the phone. We are meant to be society’s wisdom center its sign of a better life to come, its storehouse of the kind of lore no books talk about.

Once a society divides the human family as a matter of course, there is no family at all anymore. Child daycare, senior living facilities, a totally segregated and fractured society emerge. We lose the connection between the generations and the lessons learned and taught through those connections. We are out of touch with the fulness of the self. Relating to a child who is not theirs enables elders to reach out beyond themselves and the confines of their own private lives to become fully human again. Having elders who are not their parents take an interest in them, showing them things their parents do not have time to do, enables the child to be anchored by an adult who is also not a disciplinarian.

Sister Joan Says: A burden of these years is allowing ourselves to become isolated from the world around us. A blessing of these years is finding a child who will help us to step out of all the old roles and become a human being again.

• “Intergenerational friendships between an older generation and a younger one are as important to the elder as they are to the child [or young adult].” Send a card to a young person in your life with whom you have become a friend. Tell them why your friendship is so important to you.

“Old age,” in Louis Kronenberger’s view, “is an excellent time for outrage. My goal,” he went on, “is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.” The future is a very sweet part of getting older. It is something to be grasped with fervor. It gets more intense, more alive, more essential every day. It is snapping at the heels, becoming more and more demanding as we go. Most people live as if everything they are not doing now, they could simply do later. For them there is no urgency to life, just a long, quiet movement toward the acme of it. But not everyone. Those who have come roaring into their sixties, full of life, relatively secure, brimming with ideas and finally full of self-confidence, come face-to-face with the meaning of mortality as they never have before. There is, they discover with a jolt, an end to time. Their time.

The very thought of there being no work to get done, no deadlines to meet, no public demands to satisfy, no mountains left to climb, offends everything these people felt was necessary to be alive. Being edged off the upper shelf of life into a kind of shapeless, formless, substanceless nowhereland freezes their very souls. These are the ones who now keep reminding themselves and the rest of their world that “we’re all getting older.”

Another state of mind struggles to come alive now. The sense of urgency that comes with the awareness of time, the thought that there is so much else to life than what we have known till now. There is so much air out there that I have simply not allowed myself to breathe. There is the rest of life to be lived that I have been unaware of until now. Old age, like every other stage of life, is a learning time. It may be here, in fact, that we learn best what life is actually all about.

Old age is the time for letting out the spirit of outrage, the outrageous spirit that comes with having walked through the marketplace of life choosing between its fruits, tasting and discarding as we go. Finally, we know what is missing, know what is good, know what is needed. Now we can let our spirits fly. We can do what our souls demand that fully human beings do. This is the moment for which we were born.

There is nothing that can stop us now. Wherever we are needed, we can go. Whatever we would like to do, we can. Whatever needs must be said, we can say. Old age is the time to be dangerous. Dangerously fun loving, dangerously honest. Dangerously involved. Dangerously alive. This is the time to go, to parties and to political rallies, to music lessons, to the family that waits for us and to strangers who need us. This is not the time to remember that “we are all getting older” – as if getting older were the curse of the damned.

Tomorrow is sacred. It is the great reminder of the gift of life. It is our whole resource. It is everything we have left to give, and it is not without purpose. Most of all, tomorrow is for living, not for simply ambling around through life waiting to die. We will not be given tomorrow simply to allow ourselves to become one day older, one ounce less alive. It is the elderly who are the real signs of what life has been about and is yet meant to be. To abandon such a responsibility smacks of the immoral. “To save one life” as the rabbis say, “is to save the whole world.” To save one life, as we get older, is to live our own life well.

Sister Joan Says: A burden of these years is to assume that the future is already over. A blessing of these years is to give another whole meaning to what it is to be alive, to be ourselves, to be full of life. Our own life.

1. Sister Joan quotes Louis Kroneberger on old age. He said, “Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.” What do you think of this idea? Have you done anything outrageous recently? If not, why not? What is at least one outrageous thing you would like to do at this time in your life?
2. “Old age, like every other stage of life, is a learning time. it may be here in fact that we learn best what life is actually all about.” What are three of the most significant things you have learned as you have aged?

Journal or share your thoughts on these questions.

W. Somerset Maugham wrote, “What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one’s faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one’s memories.” What we often fail to realize is that memory is a mental function, yes, but it is also a choice. We do get to decide which of our memories of a particular time, or person or place, or moment may shape our life in the present moment. Memory is one of the most powerful functions of the human mind. It is also one of life’s most determining ones.

What goes on in memory has a great deal to do with what goes on in all our lives. Memory is a wild horse, unbridled, riderless, maverick. It takes us often where we would not go or takes us back over and over again to where we cannot stay, however much we wish we could.  So, it leaves us always in one state or the other, one place or the other, leaving us either pining or confused. It leaves us, in either case, in a world unfinished in us. The unfinishedness is the price we pay for growing always older.

The young hear memory in the voice of their elders and, delighted by these voices from the past of bored by them, too often miss the content behind the content. There is an energy in memory that is deceiving. The assumption is that since a thing is past, it has no present meaning for us. But nothing could be further from the truth. Whatever is still in memory is exactly what has the most meaning for us. It gives sure sign of what still has emotional significance for us. It tells us what we did that we now miss doing and reminds us of what we didn’t do that we now wish we had.

Memory is many things. It is a call to resolve in us what simply will not go away. It is an invitation to delight in what is gone but is, too, the gold standard of our lives. It is a desire for completion, for continuance of something we once had but lost too soon. It is always an opportunity for healing. Memory is the one function of the human mind that touches the core of us. It tells us what we miss and what we regret and what we have yet to come to peace with if our lives are ever to be really clear.

Memory holds us in contact with those who went before us. It is not meant to cement us in times past. It is the greatest teacher of them all. The task is to come to the point where we can trust our memories to guide us out or the past into a better future. Memory allows treasured lives to live inside of us. And most of all, perhaps, memory also confronts us with the emotions – the feelings, the fears, the struggles – that reside in us yet as unfinished questions and unresolved pain and unfinished joys. They become a blueprint for tomorrow that shows us out of our own experience how to live, how to love, how to forget, how to go on again. Memories are the happy remembrance of possibilities still to be sought, or the now meaningful recall of things yet to be completed.

Sister Joan Says: A burden of memory in these years is to allow it to meld us into the company of people, time, and places long on by. A blessing of these years is to realize that our memories of both the sad and the happy, the exciting and the secure, the successes and the failures of life are meant to guide us down these last roads with confidence – the confidence that having negotiated the demands of the past we may safely walk into the future.

• “Without memory we could go blithely on in life without ever really knowing what of that life was still unfinished, was still rumbling around inside of us, waiting for attention.” So says Sister Joan. Can you remember what is still unfinished, still rumbling around inside, still waiting for attention in your life? Write an anonymous column about one or more of these and share it with someone you trust.

“The answer to old age is to keep one’s mind busy and to go on with one’s life as if it were interminable. I always admired Chekhov for building a new house when he was dying of tuberculosis” wrote Leon Edel. To insist on living until we die may be one of life’s greatest virtues. It is easy at any age simply to stop, to be satisfied with what is, to refuse to be more. But when we go on working – at something, for some reason, for someone, for something greater than ourselves – when we go on giving ourselves away right to the very end, we have lived a full life. That is, in fact, the very definition of fullness of life.

What it does not mean is that we will become accustomed, happy even, with allowing ourselves to go to seed, to grow dry and brittle from the inside out, to stop thinking when it is precisely thought that the world needs most. Instead, it is the fine art of going on, of making life something I need to get up for every day. It is a sign to the world around us that we have each and all been put here to make this world different than it was before we came.

The purpose of retirement is to free us from working. It is to free us from being chained to work.  It has something to do only with the kind of work we do. Work is a necessary dimension of spiritual life. Without it, “tilling and keeping” the globe, tending to our own garden of paradise, is impossible. The work we do and the way we do it is what we leave behind for generations to come.

Retirement may be the first time in our lives that we really are free to choose work that brings out the best in us and so brings out the best in the world around us. We become co-creators of the world. The only question is, what work will we do? The answer is whatever work needs to be done where we are!

These years are for the development of the soul. These are the years we learn to paint, or go back to playing an instrument again, or become a Little Leage coach, or visit nursing homes so that the people there, so many of them alone in the world, have someone to talk to about important things.

Sister Joan Says: A burden of these years is that we begin to think of ourselves as superfluous simply because we are no longer tied down to a corporate schedule anymore. A blessing of these years is that they enable us to change our part of the world in ways that are as expressive of us as they are good for others.

• Sister Joan states that “Work is a necessary dimension of the spiritual life.” Has this been true for you? If yes, explain several ways your work informed your spiritual life. If no, give a reason or two why not. Journal or discuss your choice.
• “…retirement does not free us from the responsibility to go on tending the world,” according to Sister Joan. If you are retired, how have you continued to “tend the world?”

Carl Jung taught, “For a younger person, it is almost a sin and certainly a danger to be too much occupied with himself. But for the aging person it is the duty and a necessity to give serious attention to himself. After having lavished it light upon the world, the sun withdraws its rays in order to illumine itself.” Carl Jung brought to human awareness the notion that life develops in stages, some of them more centered on the outside world, others of them focused almost entirely on interiority, on reflection on the search for meaning. The end stage of life, it seems, has something to do with making sense out of everything that has gone before it. It also requires the courage to brave the answers to questions about what happened to us and why, how we handled what happened to us and, most of all, what it means to us now.

This can only be done in the center of the soul and with brutal honesty. Now is the time to stop excusing ourselves. This is the time to drain the cross of life and to celebrate its victories over the self – even the victories unknown to those who think they know us best. Certainly, the ones that made new and better people out of us. That kind of thinking and reflection is only really done well when it is done alone, in solitude. All the people we have ever known, still very much alive in us, come back again to help us see where we have been, to understand what we have become, to help us chart what it will take to make these final years our best ones.

Aloneness is the new monastery of the elderly. Sometimes a conscious choice. There are a growing number of single people of all ages living alone now. In old age, however, aloneness is, more than likely, not chosen at all. It is simply thrust upon us. It brings with it none of the romantic images of cabins or beaches. Now it is only an empty house or a small apartment in the new housing complex for the elderly that has become so common with the rise of the nuclear family.

The problem with solitude is that we often confuse it with aloneness or isolation. Isolation means that we are cut off from the rest of the world by circumstances over which we have no control; people don’t respond to us, for instance, no matter how hard we try to make contact with them. We live outside the mainstream. We are too sick, lame, shy, angry, far away from people to have any kind of social life. Isolation is either separation or alienation from the world around us.

Solitude is chosen. It is the act of being alone to be with ourselves. We seek solitude for the sake of the soul. Solitude opens us to the wonders of a world without noise, clutter, and purged of the social whirl. At least for a while. At least long enough to immerse ourselves in the balm of simply being. Then the silence outside ourselves enables us to go inside ourselves. It’s in the center of the soul where the unspoken in us runs deep. Here are the ideas we long ago refused to allow ourselves to think and yet could never not think. In solitude we have the opportunity to take them out, turn them over in our mind, look at them, own them or disown them once and for all.

Is the old anger worth it? Was the loss really a loss in the long run? If we didn’t do what we wanted to do, in what way did we grow instead? It’s in solitude where we come to peace with ourselves and the life that is behind us now. We are beyond it now, not able to be hurt by it now, no longer humiliated by it now. Whatever we have done, wherever we have been in life, we are what we are because of it. Stronger because of it, perhaps.

There is life to be lived in the last years that ought not to end infected by what went on before this. We have an obligation now to live well with the people around us who are making this new life possible. We owe them the best we have. And the best that is in us is what is undefiled by the past. Are we living now the happiest way we can in the circumstances we’re in? Solitude is what enables us to illuminate for ourselves whatever it is in us that is making that impossible.

Sister Joan Says: A burden of these years is that we fail to understand that solitude is the gift that comes naturally to those who take the time and the space to explore their core. A blessing of these years is that solitude is their natural state, the gift of reflection that makes the present a contented place to be.

• “Solitude is chosen. It is the act of being alone in order to be with ourselves. We seek solitude for the sake of the soul,” Sister Joan writes. Is choosing solitude one of your regular or daily spiritual practices? If yes, discuss or journal about what value it has for you. If not, what are the obstacles that prevent you from choosing solitude.

Maggie Kuhn said, “Old age is not a disease. It is strength and survivorship.” When we ignore the fact that all of us are on an inexorable journey to our own old age, we miss the gift of years. We miss the profound insight that we are never too young to begin to see ourselves as old, to imagine ourselves as now, at this moment, shaping what we will be in years to come – as well as the way we will become it.

Maggie Kuhn left seminary work at the age of sixty-five and founded what became one of the most influential groups of retired people the world had ever known, the Gray Panthers. The group was dedicated to nursing-home reform, to the elimination of agism, and to the eradication of the social concept of “disengagement,” the notion that older people should be beyond, outside, disengaged from the public arena. A whole new population was speaking out against ageism. Legislation, economic support, and public awareness emerged. The elderly were alive and well and on the move. We are their inheritors.

Is it realistic to think that the elderly elderly – eighty-year-olds- can possibly have any real effect on public issues? Whatever the limitations of each of them might be separately, according to Maggie Kuhn, “Old people constitute America’s biggest untapped and undervalued human energy source.” More than that, they teach the rest of the population, all of its various age groups, something about the power of limitations. They make us rethink the entire function and meaning of ‘limitation.”

Limitations – those physical boundaries that the old reach before the rest of the world – are only that, elders show us. They are boundaries not barriers. They limit us, they take time and energy, but they do not stop us unless we decide to be stopped. In fact, limitations in one area simply make us develop in another. Imitations, at any age and every age, call out something in us that we never considered before.

They also alert us to the needs of others. Once our own eyes are not as good as they once were, we want visual aids for everyone. Being limited gives us an opportunity to learn both humility and patience. We aren’t as arrogant anymore as we used to be. Just as we learn to do routine physical things differently, we can keep attempting to find another way to get a Congressperson on the phone, to launch a petition to get a letter to the editor published in the paper.

Finally, limitations invite others to get involved as well. We create a community out of the needs of others and the gifts we can bring to them while they, in turn, enrich us. We become connected to the rest of the human race, all of whom are just as limited as we are, whether they know it yet or not. Limitations are the mutual stock of the human race. By helping ourselves we also help others. By helping others, we extend our own reach.

We are only as limited as we want to be. When we define ourselves only by our limitations, we fail to see to what greater things those limitations are calling us for. Age and limitations are no excuse for being a nonperson in a world that needs icons of truth and courage, vision, and possibility as never before. What the world wants in the elderly is: wisdom, truth, and the sign of a better future for us all.

Sister Joan says: A burden of these years is the possibility that we might succumb to our limitations as if they were the real definition of age, rather than an aspect of everyone’s life. A blessing of these years is that we know at last what really matters, and the world is waiting to hear it, if only we will make the effort and don’t give in to our limitations.

1. According to Sister Joan, “Limitations… are boundaries not barriers.” Is this true for someone older you know? Explain through journaling or discussion.
2. “Being limited gives us an opportunity to learn both humility and patience,” states Sister Joan. Recall a limitation you have experienced or are now dealing with. Discuss or write about how it taught both humility and patience.

“In a dream you are never eighty,” Anne Sexton wrote. Our dreams reveal to us the basic truth of life: years are biological; the spirit is eternal. The number of our years does not define us. Deep down where our souls live, we stay forever young. It is this surging, driving force that brings us to the bar of life every day of our lives, whatever our age, however much we have been through, prepared to live life to the hilt again. It is our own fault if we refuse to think again all the great ideas of life – and our own position on each of them.

The personality and the soul within an aging body stays always alert, ever dynamic. Even when we find ourselves less physically active than we may once have been, the mind wrestles with the ideas of the soul, the heart reviews over and over again every emotional moment of life, every major turn along the way. We are forever in motion, as long as we live, one way or another. To stay alive, fully alive, then, we must open ourselves to life’s eternal dream.

We must dream to be better people tomorrow than we were today. We must be willing to rethink all the ideas that have kept us bound until this moment. Are they still believable? Do we ourselves still believe them? And if we do not, what does that mean in regard to what we say to those younger people who have been influenced by these ideas because of us?

One of the problems of the modern world is that we are more fascinated with technology than we are with the spiritual. We are good at reporting every technical or scientific advance the world has ever spawned but other elements of life, more profound and impacting on human society, are inclined to be missed entirely. One of them has special meaning to the aging. One of them shows us that the dreams that determine the ultimate quality of our lives never die, are never too late to be grasped. It is the ability of humans to change their minds, to begin again, to start over, to be someone else.

Robert McNamara, past Secretary of Defense, one of the chief architects of our part in the Vietnam war, and consultant for the documentary The Fog of War, told the public that he had thought it over and could no longer support the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Nor could he condone his own part in it. He had reflected again on what he had done in the past, why he had done it what he thought about it then and now and came to a startling conclusion: “Although we sought to do the right thing – and believed we were doing the right thing – in my judgement, hindsight proves us wrong.” This change of perspective took place twenty-five years after the end of the war.

The very act of reviewing one’s own values, then and now, stands as a marker for us all. It reminds us that it is possible to learn as we go through life. It is even more important to be open to doing it and willing to report it. Life grows us. Life opens us as we age to think differently, even about ourselves. Whatever our physical age, we must go on dreaming of the desirable so that we can do our bit to make it happen. We must allow ourselves to dream about what life could really be like if enough of us demanded that it were. But to do that means to open for examination all the assumptions that have driven the world to this point. All of them. In our dreams lies the unfinished work for the world.

Sister Joan says: A burden of these years is that we come to think that our dreaming days are over. Then we become mired in the past. We refuse to grow. We make past mistakes the definition of our entire life. A blessing of these years is the power to dream and the freedom it takes to bring to the awareness of our world – however small, however boundaried it may be – the voice of reflection, of reason of feeling, of penetrating awareness that comes with having been wrong and setting our to right it.

• Sister Joan suggests that “In our dreams, in the way we ourselves see ourselves, we are forever becoming.” Share in your journal or through discussion, one or more ways you can say that you are still “forever becoming.”

“Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read,” said Francis Bacon. There is something about getting older that tempts us to settle down a bit. We begin to run the ruts in the road, not because we cannot find our way to other paths, other places, other people but because we really don’t want to make the effort it takes to do it. New people, ideas, patterns not only take effort, but also demand new attention. The thought of familiar, on the other hand, comforts us. It assures us that life, as we have known it, is still there, stable, secure. Settling into a routine of friends, foods, places and plans is easier and fulfilling. These things are our identity as well as our pleasure. They say who we are and who we have always been, where we belong and why.

There is a cost to settling into the routine of being what we have always been. The cost of familiarity is the angst of loss, the anxiety that comes with feeling more and more alone. As one thing after another goes, an awareness that we are becoming a world unto ourselves grows. A natural melancholy sets in as the years pass by. Little by little, the world that shaped us fades away. But then one day, in a rush, all the beauties of those years come roaring through us in an emotional whirlwind. The problem is that nobody cares about them now but us. Those years have taken with them a part of ourselves. Is it to be mourned – or celebrated – for its disappearance?

The remembrance of the days we learned to kneel for our nightly prayers and stand up straight to sing our hymns has nothing of absolute value to maintain the present. But what is worth wondering about is whether we still have any of that piety in us. The pain that comes with the remembrance of piety lost is a good kind of pain. It means that there is something in us that still holds on to the innocence of childhood. Only after the rules have been broken – after we stop worrying about whether the passions of youth endanger salvation- are the lessons really learned. If we forget the presence of God in our lives we find ourselves terribly alone. No doubt about it, there are moments from the past which, when they flash back, carry the sting of new awareness.

Ageing well is the real goal of life. To allow ourselves to age without vitality, energy, purpose, and growth is simply to get old rather than to age well as we go. Aging is the process by which we face the tasks of every level of life. Life is meant to form us in independence, usher us into an adulthood that begins in apprenticeship and ends in mastery. Those tasks accomplished bring us to the acme of integrity, of wisdom, of eldership in the community of the world.

Remember the great heroes, noble ideas, and the fine deeds that we ourselves inherited from the past. They focused our hearts on higher goals when we were young. They filled us with the notions of the grandeur of the soul. What happened to those? What happened to us? Were we up to the level of any of them at all? There is unfinished business aplenty to do, too many things left unsaid, too much teaching yet to be done if we are ever to do our part in making our world as good as those heroes of earlier generations made theirs.

Sister Joan Says: A burden of these years is the desire to give in to the natural sadness that comes with the shifting journey through life, to cling to it in ways that make living in the present a dour and depressing prospect. A blessing of these years is the realization that there is still so much for us to do that we have no time, no right to be sad.

“In youth we learn, in age we understand” is a quote from Mary von Ebner-Eschenbach that she wrote when she was seventy-five years old. This shows an understanding of the function of aging and the role of the elderly. Understanding is the bedrock of a society. It enables us to see why we do what we do, and to realize why we cannot do what we want to do in all instances. It is in the development of understanding for the next generation, in the cocreation of the world, that the older generation has so serious a role to play.

The service of the elders is not a service of labor, it is a service of enlightenment, of wisdom, of discernment of spirits. Only the carriers of generations past can give us those things because wisdom is what lasts after an experience ends. This period in life, when we finally get to the point that we really understand some things about living well, is when we feel most out of it. It is, far too often, exactly the time when people who know more than they have ever known begin to feel useless. Everything that ever gave us status or influence at all has simply dried up, disappeared, or moved on.

Clearly our role has changed. But to what? For what purpose? What are we to anyone now that we are nothing at all of the things we once thought were so important? In fact, the moment of apparent disengagement is exactly the moment when we become most important to the world around us.

We are beyond being replaceable. We cannot be replaced. The unique understandings and beliefs we have come to are beyond substitution. They are the things of the soul. The elder’s role is to be what we have discovered about life. Our responsibility is wisdom. Having lived through and experienced all the societal expectations and responsibilities, only our elders have the insight to know what is needed or what should be avoided. Only our elders can show us all another way to live.

Researchers tell us that Americans have much less reflection time than almost any other culture in the modern world. The elderly, by living at a more leisurely pace, by taking the time to read again, to pursue new questions, by involving themselves in the discussions of the day, can bring to us a wisdom that comes from experience. Older people have what this world needs most: the kind of experience that can save the next generation from the errors of the one before them. The older generation know that the only thing that is good for any of us in the long run is what is good for all of us right now. Why must the elders in a society immerse themselves in the issues of the time? If for no other reason that they are really the only ones who are free to tell the truth.

Sister Joan says: A burden of these years is to accept the notion that nothing can be done to save a people when a younger generation is in charge. A blessing of these years is to have the opportunity to take on the role of thinker, of philosopher, of disputant, of interrogator, of spiritual guide in a world racing to nowhere, with no true human goal and no lived wisdom in sight.

1. Who has been a wisdom figure in your life? What did he or she help you realize?
2. Pray these lines from Psalm 51 and sit with them for a few minutes: “Out of your glory send Wisdom to be with me and to work with me. Wisdom knows and understands all things and will guide and protect me in all I do.” Share a time in your life when you felt Wisdom was with you.

Pablo Picasso wrote, “It takes a long time to become young.” The beauty of the later years, in other words, is that if we have learned through life to trust our own insights at least as much as we trust the insights we have been taught, we find ourselves at the end of a very long life with a very young soul.

Time has done for us what needs to be done. We have deepened as people. We have broadened as personalities. We have softened as thinkers. We have abandoned arrogance and authoritarianism for reflection on new ideas and respect for others. We now see newly, clearly, what in some ways we have never seen before. If we watch older people closely, the free ones, the ones who let life come to them rather than trying to wrench it to themselves, we can see it happen right in front of us.

Nothing weighs more heavily on age than time. Nothing has more meaning. Time is now everything – the only thing- that is left in life. Time is, suddenly, not for wasting. Now time becomes, with a kind of ruthless honesty, what it has always been: life’s most precious commodity. The only difference is that, finally, we know it.

But time is not one-dimensional. Time I a great deal mor than simply “passing.” It has a function in life like little else. When we are young it goes slowly because we are always rushing. Living in the moment is not the mark of youth. Instead, the young are always on the way to somewhere else. They are immersed in wanting.

The old, on the other hand, have long ago exhausted both the wanting and the going and the striving. They are immersed in being. Being alive, being healthy, being present to the moment, being who they are, being happy, being young again in delight and in vision.

Time ripens things and brings everything to fulfillment. We have survived so much already, what can possibly destroy our equanimity now? Here we are still. Here we are yet. Here we are and that is enough for us to have it all. Time is a wonderous thing, if only we fill it well. If we do not allow the passing of time to dimmish our spirit but, instead, see it as a call to live life to the dregs- being our best and developing and life-loving selves to the end. Then time is our friend and not our enemy.

Now too, we have the quiet time, the solitary time, to think it all through – everywhere we’ve been, everyone we’ve known, everything we’ve done in life with all the glories and all the sad mistakes, all the successes and all the personal failures – and to be glad for all of it. There is not one part of this that did not teach us about life and make us stronger. They are everything we bring to this time now – when the only question yet to answer in life is what we have become.

Sister Joan says: A burden of these years is to allow time to hang heavy on my hands, to simply sit and wait for life to be over- as the Irish say, “knocking another day out of it till the great day comes.” A blessing of these years is to realize what an important and lively time this final period is. I can, if I will, bring it all together, into the final and the very best of me.

1. Sister Joan says that the passing of time has “tested our assumptions, tried our talents, developed our relationships softened our arrogance, opened our hearts to other possibilities, force us to think newly.” Spend time with one of these concepts and describe how it has unfolded in your life.
2. This week, instead of just crossing out the days on a calendar as they pass, take time to jot a few notes about what happened to you each day. At the end of the week, find a way to celebrate the blessings of passing time.

“Though it sounds absurd,” Ellen Glasgow said, “it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I had felt at twenty.” There is no doubt about it: whatever we have become at sixty, we are. The game clock has ended. Now we can just enjoy the interminable feeling of having finally survived the climb, of being free of the unceasing competition, of the unending demands for self-sacrifice. Now life is just life and no more.

Nevertheless, the conditioning goes deep. Surely there must be something we should be striving for, even now, even here. If not, what is there? And if not, why do we feel this way in the first place? The fact is that we get instructed in the meaning of success even while we’re very young, which makes it so much more difficult to enjoy life as we get older. We talk about teaching our children to be successful, but we really mean that we teach them to be competitive. All our lives we compete, in fact and call it “success.” In the end, we’re exhausted. Did we succeed? At what? And who knows? It all depends on what we’ve always thought success must be about.

Did we succeed at making the family a “family”? Did we succeed at being a good neighbor? Did we succeed at developing a genuine spiritual life, the kind in which the presence of God dominates our whole existence, above and beyond worship attendance on holy days and liturgical events? Did we succeed in living gently on Earth, on creating a balance in our lives of time with nature, time with people, time with God, time for reflection, time for a new kind of personal development? If not, it’s time to plan our days rather than simply have them slip by unnoticed.

Did we succeed in learning how to be happy ourselves, doing something that we do only because we love doing it? Did we succeed at developing the kind of interior life it takes to weather the external demands of life? Did we succeed at becoming a person – a real person? A person who is real!

In the end, it becomes so clear: success is a much simpler thing than they ever told us. It has to do with having the basics, with learning to be happy, with getting in touch with our spiritual selves, with living a balanced life, doing no harm, doing nothing but good. The only test of the good life here is happiness.

Sister Joan Says: The burden of false success is that it creates an artificial standard that follows us through our entire lives, leaves us in fear, leaves us in a state of perpetual discontent, too tight to enjoy retirement, too invested in the elements of life that do not last. The blessing of real success lies in the fact that sometime in life we come to the point where we never overemphasize any one side of it again. Instead, we come to live easily and fully in all aspects of it.

1. In this chapter Sister Joan begins several paragraphs with “Did we succeed…?” which of these can you say “Yes” or “No” to?
2. Name a person you personally feel has been very successful. What has she or he done/been that has led you to feel this way? Consider telling her or him some way.

In some ways, we are all just getting to be more of who and what we have always been. We can decide right now what we intend to be: approachable and lovable, or tyrannous and fractious. The Austrian novelist Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach wrote, “Old age transfigures or fossilizes.” We don’t, by nature, sour as we get older. The fact is that we have always been sour, but now we take the liberty of doing it with impunity. We don’t get softer as we get older. We simply get to be more unabashedly loving every day of our lovable old lives. We only get to be more of what we have always wanted to be. We are free to choose the way we live and relate to the world. Our attitudes shared and the meanings we get out of it are choices. And all of them can change.

The tendency to talk down to older people comes from stereotypes of incompetence that have been so much the caricatures we’ve drawn of older people once they have left the work force. Instead of honoring the wisdom and experience of the generations before us – as did the Greeks and the Romans and the American Indians, for instance – industrial/technological society infantilizes anyone whose life is no longer caught up in the skills and languages of that world. Once people can no longer talk about advertising plans or departmental goals or the job, the experience they garnered over the years is no longer a premium in the very society that produced it all. All ties are cut. All connections have expired. All experience has gone to dust.

Instead, Joan writes that we, “are ‘free’ to be useless, the window-dressing on the society, the people left behind after the system doesn’t need them anymore. Freedom can be redefined for those aging out of the workforce or their productive middle years… Freedom in later years is the exemption from having to live a standard-brand life. I no longer need to ‘fit in’ to all the conventional wisdom, to the company policies and politics and political positions. I can take any position I want. I can be a socialist in a republican club. I can be a feminist at a meeting of the pastoral planning commission. I can be an environmentalist at the oil company’s stockholders meeting. I can take all the pieces of my life, weigh them carefully, and then speak the words my world needs to hear- before it’s too late.”

When we realize that freedom really is the right to be ourselves rather than someone else – perhaps for the first time in life – the liberation of the soul begins. We can become something new, as well as simply more of the old. Whatever path we have followed to this point is not the only path we have ever considered, been fascinated by, wanted to explore. We have the right to explore new ideas, to think new thoughts. The ones we did not learn at home, the ones we have never dared to admit to in public. We can begin to think about God for ourselves, for instance. Our answers will surely be closer to our hearts.

Finally, we are now free to become involved in life in ways we never did before. Now is the time to think it all through again. Everything. God, life, work, relationships, behaviors, goals. We are free to measure all of them against our experience, to reshape them out of new knowledge, to try things wherever our new spiritual energy leads us, to add new ideas to the old ideas that have controlled our lives for so long.

Sister Joan says: A burden of these years is to allow all the stereotypes of old age to hold us back, hold us down, to stop the flow of life. A blessing of these years is that they give us the chance to break the bounds of a past life, and to create for ourselves a life more suited to what we now want to be.

1. “But freedom in old age is the ability to be the best of the self I have developed during all those years,” says Sister Joan. Write a letter to yourself or discuss with a friend what celebrating the best of the self you have become would look like.

The fact is that religion is not one thing, but a multi-layered phenomenon, if successful, that can bring people to the height of whatever spiritual mountain they climb. The Tibetan master Sakya Pandita said, “Even in decline the virtuous increase the beauty of their behavior. A burning stick, though turned to the ground, has its flame drawn upwards.” In the elders of every society, those flames burn clearest of all. Religion is not a topic, not a course, not simply a body of beliefs. It is a process of becoming.

Religion has various functions at various stages of life. It is a guidepost from early life through to the end. It is a direction, a map. It is not a guarantee of anything. In early life, the function of religion is the formation of conscience. Religion sets the standards that mark the path. Every religion, according to the Universal Code of Ethics adopted at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, accepts four nonnegotiables: not to steal, not to lie, not to murder, and not to exploit another sexually. There is a law above the law, we learn. And that law is the end toward which we tend.

In middle age, religion becomes a social guide. It creates the standards that measure the quality of the soul as well as the behaviors of a person. It becomes an attitude toward life. Some things are holy, some things are not. It is the ideals to which we cling. We begin to understand that religion is more a deep-down struggle to believe and to do than simply a way of acting, sterile on paper, full of thorns in the flesh.

As we grow older and begin the last stages of life, behaviors and failures are not the stuff of religion much anymore. Now, the ecstasy of life and the surrender to the Mystery become the last of the revelations of religion. Now, everything we learned long ago, never left completely, begins to make sense. Begins to become who we are. Begins our new beginnings as a person. The older members of society teach us how to live, they also teach us how to die, how to make sense of the unity between life and death, how to love life without fearing death – because we know ourselves to have been always on the way, even when we did not know where we were going.

The impacting thing about religion is that it is everywhere – even in places the world never thought it would be. In the communist era of the Soviet Union, whose doctrine was that belief was not to be in religion; belief was to be in the state, the cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square was filled with the elderly chanting, singing and praying. This always surprised visitors.

In the later years, religion ceases to be simply a series of rites and rituals, of rules and answers for which we get some kind of eternal points. Religion becomes what it was always meant to be: a search and a relationship with the Spirit Who draws us on. Always on. Even to the point where “on” is unclear. Religion is not a millstone around the neck anymore. It is the warm, soft, strong, hard awareness that yes, it has all been for something worthwhile.

Sister Joan Says: A burden of these years is the fear that I have not practiced religion well enough to be worthy of the life it teaches. A blessing of these years is the awareness that yes, it must be true: there is a God who created me and who is calling me upward, beyond myself – home.

1. Many people today claim to be spiritual rather than religious. Suggest several reasons why.
2. Do you agree with Sister Joan writes, “Finally, as we grow older, when we begin that last stage of life, it is clear that behaviors and failures are not the stuff of religion much anymore.” Discuss why or why not.

Agatha Christie, still writing bestsellers in her eighties, shattered the very idea of a sclerotic old age. If anything, she is an icon of the link between education and experience, of the notion that learning is not only a lifelong task but also a lifelong summons to renewal of the soul. She is quoted, “I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations and suddenly find that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study or read about. It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thought was rising in you.”

There is danger in thinking that we have completed our preparations for life with the completion of high school or a college degree. Degrees wear out quickly or prepare us for only one small area of life, at best. We are still young when the certificates turn yellow on the wall and the knowledge that they proclaim is obsolete.

The danger in later years is the myth that older people cannot learn as they have in younger years. Fear of mental collapse becomes the anxiety of the age. “I think I must be losing it…” is said with a laugh at first and then becomes a mantra, if not a silent gnawing fear. The effects are somewhere between panic and despair. Has it finally happened? Is this what the mean by dementia? The bad news is, maybe. The good news is, probably not. Very unlikely. Not normally.

One of the most positive results of the rising incidence of Alzheimer’s disease in a large and aging population is the amount of research now being done on the human brain. The assumption was simply that the brain ages as the body does and as the body declines, so does the brain. The image of the shrinking, atrophic brain loomed large in our minds. Age meant mental deterioration, as surely as the night follows the day. But is that assumption true? No.

Old brains are indeed physically smaller, but no less intellectually competent than young ones. And, in some ways, in terms of reflection and creativity, they are even better, if for no other reason than that they have a lot of experience to add to intellectual acuity.

As Agatha Christie put it, we “bloom” as we grow. New abilities emerge. New insights arise. New vision is possible. The danger lies in not feeding this growth. With nothing to think about, with no challenges to engage us, with no problems to solve, the question looming is: What is left of me? Why bother? Why not quit?

There are two approaches to aging: passive aging and active aging. Lifelong learning, a Harvard study notes, makes the difference between healthy and unhealthy aging. It determines the degree to which life will be satisfying to us, as well as the degree to which we will be interesting, valuable, and life-giving to others. Surely the capacity for ongoing learning and the sense of new meaning it brings to life is not an idle gift. The very fact that it develops as we grow means that it is meant for something important. When life, in all its physical dimensions, becomes less accessible, less doable, less desirous why wouldn’t this capacity for learning be exactly what is needed in a generation whose responsibility is to bring the wisdom of the years to the questions of time? What shall we learn now?

Sister Joan says: “A burden of these years is the fear that they bring nothing but incompetence to our once-competent selves. A blessing of these years is that we find ourselves at a time of life when we can finally concentrate on all the things we have ever wanted to learn and know and, as a result, become and even more important, more focused, more spiritual person thatn we have ever really been before.”

• Are you engaged in passive aging or active aging? Or perhaps you have moved from one to the other. Discuss or journal your journey.
• Sister Joan writes, “The questions then is not, is the older generation capable of learning anymore? Instead, the obvious question is only, what shall we learn now?” List in your journal or discuss with a friend three to five things you would like to learn at this point in you life and explain why.

Spiritual eyesight increases when physical eyesight decreases according to Plato. It is this spiritual eyesight, the ability to see into the inner meaning of things, the spiritual value of things, the essential core of things, that must carry us from this point on. It is the spiritual essence of a person that emerges from the natural divestment that comes with old age. In our early years we accumulate and in our later years we divest. Both are a struggle, and both are liberating.

Through the climb of our lives our parents and friends worry about us. Are we going too fast, too slow, intently? Whatever the pace, the concentration is on the climb. We know we’re doing it right because there are mile markers along the way that measure our success. The job, the car, the trip, the bank account are all markers of our coming of age and the passage of milestones. Once reached, those who have worried through all of this say settle down.

Settling down, we discover, has its own criteria, struggles, and trophies. Now comes the career, the apartment, titles and mortgages. The children, graduations, social life and weddings. And then, at long last, the retirement party. Then we have arrived at another great crossover moment in time. All we know now is that whatever we have managed to accumulate at the end of the climb is just about all we’ll ever get. Did we succeed or not?

Suddenly, none of the old milestone markers really count for much. But what does? Every major spiritual tradition knows as one of its core experiences a period of major divestment, of total renunciation of that which shaped a person before he or she began the great spiritual quest. In this period, the seeker considers the meaning of life and death, of the spiritual and the material, of Earth and its beyond, of the soul in contact with the create soul within.

This is the period when we evaluate everything we have come to know about life and look for a dimension above the things of this world, for the sake of what is yet to come. The search means we strip ourselves of whatever it is we have accrued until this time in order to give ourselves wholly to the birthing of the person within. Into this part of life, we travel light.

When the house is too crowded and the car is too big and the perfect lawn too much of a bother, we have begun a whole new adventure in life. It is the shaping of the soul that occupies us now. Now we set out to find out for ourselves who we really are, what we know, what we care about and how to be simply enough for ourselves in the world.

The problems come for those who are unable to let go. Somewhere along the line they accepted the heretical notion that what we have is what we are. They have not looked inside themselves for so long that they cannot now appreciate that they finally have the time and the freedom to furnish the soul with poetry and beauty, with friendships and adventures with children to play with rather than raise, and with peers to talk to about important matters rather than superficial things.

We have a chance to become what all the living has enabled us to be. Now we can make sense of it. But only if we can let go of the past. Only if we can let go of all the old ideas of success, all the marks of humanity and finally, now, allow ourselves to become simply human instead.

Sister Joan says: “A burden of these years is the temptation to cling to the times and things behind us rather than move to the liberating moments ahead. A blessing of these years is the invitation to go lightfooted into the here and now – because we spend far too much of life preparing for the future rather than enjoying the present.”

• At this later time in life, according to Sister Joan, “The question now is, how and by what measures do we decide if our life has been a success?” Imagine you are in a conversation with Sister Joan. How would you answer her question? Role play for discussion or journal your thoughts on this.
• When Sister Joan states, “It’s what’s inside of us, not what’s outside of us that counts,” she is talking about our interior life. What choices have you made over the years to cultivate your interior life? Journal or discuss your thoughts.

The Hasidim say, “For the unlearned, old age is winter; for the learned, it is the season of harvest.” It is the distribution of that harvest to the rest of the human community for which we look to the elders among us. Old age is a treasure-house of history – personal, family, national, and world history. What do we do with everything an older generation knows in a culture that does not seek answers from that generation? Every elder in every community is a living story for the people to whom he or she will someday leave the Earth to guide as good, as better, than they did in their own time.

In the older member of every society lies the taproot of that society. It goes down deeper into the past than any others. The elders know where every idea has come from. And why. They know what it means – what it really means – to be family, to be citizen, to be free, to be enslaved. They know the difference between evolution and revolution. And, most of all, they know that there is room for both in the development of the world in which we live.

More importantly, is their ability, their call to pass those stories on to the later generations. Without the passing on of the stories, the young ones are a group without character, without tradition, without the living memory of how and why they came together in the first place.

Family tales are the parables of one generation handed down to the next. They tell us who we are and where we come from. Funeral rituals, the interment of ancestors, became the art form that preserved the values and ideals of the past in special ways. Funerals were a tribal event where the telling of the stories of those who passed away made family the bridge to both past and future. Not long ago, the deceased were laid out in the family homes. But, while it was prayer time for the soul of the dead in the parlor, in the rest of the house it was story-telling time for the living.

Children learned the history of their parents’ own childhood and came to realize what stood to be lost forever in one last breath if the next generation did not take responsibility for maintaining it. The lessons were immortal ones. The tale-telling of the older people became the catechism of the family. These were the life lessons meant to make us all stronger, wiser, and truer. These are the stories that become the living history that binds us together.

Only the old can tell the tales with both conviction and meaning. Only the old bear within their own bodies the truth of each story itself. Only they authenticate our right to live the story, too, in our own times, for the sake of our own children and history and people and nation.

Being tale-bearer is of the essence of growing old. The tale-bearers are proof of the authenticity of the past. They determine what truth will be for all of us. Their stories will carry us all into the days to come. The stories of the majesties of war and not its ghoulishness or the pain of childbirth but not the ecstasy they plant lies in the minds of young ones through omission. When any of us fail to listen to the stories being handed down to us, we lose the opportunity to hear the life lessons and must then learn the hard way ourselves.

Sister Joan says: “The burden of tale-telling is to think that by avoiding our responsibility to be part of living history we will stay forever young. By not telling those who follow us the stories of what it took to get here, we fail the harvest of our own life and the plowing days of theirs. The blessing that comes with tale-telling is the awareness that we have now done our duty to life. We have distilled our experiences to the point that they can become useful to someone younger.”

• Sister Joan writes about older people: “But more important even than their knowledge is their ability their call to pass those stories on to the later generations. Without the passing of the stories, the young ones are a group without character, without tradition without the living memory of how and why they came together in the first place.” What is one family story you heard growing up that instilled in you a sense of character, tradition, or history of your people? Share or log your stories.
• What stories or traditions are you passing on to the next generation? Explain why you chose these. Journal or discuss your answers.

“Old Age is an island surrounded by death,” wrote the Ecuadorian essayist Juan Montalvo. At its core, life is not about things, it is about relationships. It is the hands we go on holding in our hearts at the end that define the kind of life we have led. Our relationships determine the quality of life as we have known it. They show us the face of God on Earth. They are what batter our hearts into the feelings of life.

When the relationships we forge as we go begin to disappear, our own life changes. We know then what it is to be abandoned, to be a little less impervious to feeling that we thought we were. Now it is not things we need, it is understanding we crave. It is understanding that draws us out of ourselves into the earthenware vessel of new life.

As we watch loved ones leave us, we come to another crossover moment in time. We wonder, what do we do now? Go on alone? Stop and withdraw into ourselves? Risk the chance of becoming a friend again? It is a life-changing question. It is a soul-changing answer. And, for fear we might miss the lesson of it, the pain of it is everywhere. The loss is clear: once our mates go, so, in a way, do we. When this occurs, we can be tempted to hide in a collection of graying photographs, to insulate ourselves from the risk of being vulnerable again, to allow emotional death to take us before physical death arrives.

People once laughed at old people who fell in love. Marriage was out of the question. The primary purpose of marriage had for so long been defined as child-rearing that the role of adult relationships, especially in later life, had been dismissed. As a result, unlike those in any other phase of life, older people are forced to deal with the challenge of two very different types of relationships. First, the haunting presence of relationships lost to death or distance and second, the effort it takes to make new friends, new companions in their own world, which is becoming ever more removed from the faster-moving world around them. The temptation to disengage is severe, yet our need for understanding and comfort and a sense of presence is greater than ever.

How is this shell of a life ever to be filled again? And if it is not filled, is there any real life yet to be had? Relationships are the sign of the presence of a loving God in life. There is no such thing at any stage of human development as life without relationships. The only uncertainty is whether we will decide to live inside ourselves, or trust that life can be made glorious again by new meetings, new moments, new spirits.

For this to happen, we need to reach out first. We need to make ourselves interesting again. We need to learn how to invite people into our lives. Then we need to make the effort to go out to places where people our own age gather, as well as to events where the generations mix and the fun comes from meeting new people and talking about different things.

Sister Joan says: “A burden of these years is that being alone, bad as it feels, is easier than doing what it takes to be with someone else. It would be so much easier now simply to close the sunshades of our soul and give up. So much easier simply to wait for death to claim what has already died in us – a love for life and a trust in its essential goodness. So, we cut ourselves out of our own lives and watch them wither away. A blessing of these years is that they offer us the chance to be excited by new personalities, new warmth, new activities, new people all over again. Does it demand that we fall in love? No. But it does demand that we love someone else enough to be just as interested in them as we are in ourselves. It demands that we se out to make tomorrow happy.”

1. 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.) Share your thoughts on this or journal your choice.
2. Tell the story of an older person in your life who, having lost a spouse, loved one or dear friend, has been a role model for you in terms of how she or he comped with such a loss. Journal this story for reflection and discuss it with someone.

“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.

Fruit of the Spirit – Week 11

Galatians 5:22-23 – Kindness Part B

The publisher of the book God Within issued an invitation to young adults to submit writings about their spiritual or religious lives. The book reflects the opinions of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans, agnostics, and atheists. The author of the essay “Simply Complicated” writes that at one time she was a fervent Christian, but at the time of this writing, she felt abandoned by and disillusioned with God, preferring to follow no God than to follow a God she couldn’t commit to wholeheartedly. The following is a quote from this essay:

“When I say I worship God, am I really saying that I worship a being that pretends to love the world while only caring for himself? I ask myself, ‘If this God is the selfish maniac he appears to be, how can I spend my entire life worshiping him? What a waste of a life that I could dedicate to something better.”

How do people miss seeing God’s kind nature?
What can Christians do to help the world see the kindness of God?

From the Random Acts of Kindness website, we find this description of what happens when kindness takes hold of someone.

“As people tap into their own generous human spirit and share kindness with one another, they discover for themselves the power of kindness to effect positive change. When kindness is expressed, healthy relationships are created, community connections are nourished, and people are inspired to pass kindness on.”

What motivates people in general to be kind? – What difference does kindness make in the world?

What should motivate Christians to be kind? – How does the Holy Spirit grow kindness in us?

What is our role in that process?
 

Kindness Quotes – The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation from randomactsofkindness.org

• “Kindness is being someone who makes everyone feel like a somebody.”
• “Kindness can make a bad day good, and a good day better.”
• “Kindness is like a seed that when cultivated can grow and grow and grow.”
• “Kindness is the ability to know what the right thing to do is and having the courage to do it!!”

Write out or chat with a friend about how these quotes resonate in your daily life. Do they go along with what the bible verses revealed last week?

(Jeremiah 9:24 & 31:3, Hosea 11:4, Romans 2:4, Proverbs 11:17, 12:25, 14:31, Luke 6:27-35, 1 Corinthians 13:4, Ephesians 4:32, 1 Thessalonians 5:15, 2 Timothy 2:22-24, 2 Peter 1:5-9)

“Lord, give me patience and I want it now!” Kids, school, clubs, plans, finances, jobs; all of these stretch us too far and fray our threads of patience. Of all the qualities of the fruit of the Spirit, patience may be the most difficult to acquire. Instant gratification is the way of the day and who has time to wait, persevere, endure? We are more likely to demand, “Lord, give me patience!” than to practice patience by simply waiting on God to work through our circumstances.

The thesaurus lists the following words under the entry for patience. Tolerance, acceptance, leniency, sweet reasonableness, forbearance, sufferance, endurance, long-suffering, stoicism, fortitude, perseverance, uncomplainingness, nonresistance. (Roget’s International Thesaurus, Fourth Edition)

• How do these words affect your understanding of what the word patience means?
• What is your definition of patience?
• What situations in life call for patience?
• What makes being patient challenging?

Read the following examples of impatience:
Exodus 24:12-28, 32:1-4
Habakkuk 1:1-4
Luke 10:38-42

• What makes people impatient?
• Is impatience always wrong?
• What does our impatience say about our character? About our attitude toward others?
• When has your own impatience caused you trouble?

It’s one of the world’s rarest flowers – so rare that it was seen in bloom only about twenty times in the United States in the last century. Its scarcity isn’t the only thing that has made as many as 76,000 people line up for a look at it.

The titan arum is also the world’s largest bloom. Just the bloom can measure eight feet tall and four feet across. The plant, which is native to Indonesia, must be tended patiently and exactingly for weeks or months before the grower is rewarded with a bloom. The plant blooms only a few times in its forty-year life span and the bloom only lasts about seventy-two hours before it collapses on itself due to its tremendous weight.

But what makes this rare flower worth the wait isn’t its size either, but rather its scent. Scent may be too polite a word. The flower is also known as the corpse flower. Its scent has been described as a nauseating rotten-flesh, or ripe manure smell. In fact, in one nursery in Michigan, the plant had to be moved outside when it was in full bloom, and even so, people reported that the smell “would take your breath away” if you were twenty yards downwind of it.

• What makes the story of the corpses flower a story about patience?
• Is this flower worth the wait? Why or why not?
• What parallels can you make from this story to times in your life when you’ve had to be patient?

Jot down your thoughts about patience as you read these passages:
Proverbs 14:29, 15:18, 19:11, 25:15
Romans 12:12
1 Corinthians 13:4
Ephesians 4:2
2 Timothy 4:2

• Why is patience a particularly important virtue for Christians?
• How should we exhibit patience in our lives?
• What good does being patient bring about?
• How would your life be different if you exhibited more patience?
• How would having more patience affect your walk with God? Your relationship with others?
• How does the Holy Spirit grow patience in our lives?
• What is our role in that process?

“Lord, give me patience and I want it now!” Kids, school, clubs, plans, finances, jobs; all of these stretch us too far and fray our threads of patience. Of all the qualities of the fruit of the Spirit, patience may be the most difficult to acquire. Instant gratification is the way of the day and who has time to wait, persevere, endure? We are more likely to demand, “Lord, give me patience!” than to practice patience by simply waiting on God to work through our circumstances.

The thesaurus lists the following words under the entry for patience. Tolerance, acceptance, leniency, sweet reasonableness, forbearance, sufferance, endurance, long-suffering, stoicism, fortitude, perseverance, uncomplainingness, nonresistance. (Roget’s International Thesaurus, Fourth Edition)

• How do these words affect your understanding of what the word patience means?
• What is your definition of patience?
• What situations in life call for patience?
• What makes being patient challenging?
  

Exodus 24:12-28, 32:1-4
Habakkuk 1:1-4
Luke 10:38-42

• What makes people impatient?
• Is impatience always wrong?
• What does our impatience say about our character? About our attitude toward others?
• When has your own impatience caused you trouble?

A quotation from Harry Emerson Fosdick, in his book Living Under Tension, is worth considering regarding peace. It was written in 1941 for context.

“Here in this immediate, factual world we see such catastrophe and brutality as will make our generation rememberable for its horror many a century from now. And yet we inhabit a spiritual world as well, with intellectual insights, with ideals of beauty and loveliness, with faiths and friendships, and with aspirations that lay hold on God and goodness. If we could only live all in one world or all in the other, we might have peace, but what tension is involved in having to live in both!”
 
Consider the horrors and the stresses of the age Fosdick was living in. How do those stresses compare with today’s stresses?

Do you experience the tension Fosdick describes when he writes of living both in the world and in the kingdom of God? How does that tension affect our sense of peace? How can we have peace in these times?
 
Isaiah 9:2-7, 11:6-9, 32:17-20; Micah 4:2-4; Revelation 21:1-4

• What promises do these passages hold for our world? How would it affect a person’s sense of peace if they truly believed this promise?

Luke 2:14; Ephesians 2:14-18

• How has God provided peace for us? Describe the peace that comes from God. People worldwide long for peace between nations and a sense of personal, internal peace. Why do you think people long so for peace? Why do you think peace is so elusive in our world? In what ways is one’s personal peace dependent on or independent of external surroundings?

1 Peter 3:8-12

• How can we seek peace and pursue it? What is the connection between peace and unity? What is the difference between true peace and “peace at any cost”?

James 3:13-18

• Describe what a wise and peaceful person’s life is like. Contrast that with what a “worldly-wise” person is like. How does the Holy Spirit grow the fruit of peace in our lives? What is our role in that process? You may want to look at Philippians 4:6-7.

In this world that is wrapped up in anxiety, we worry. Terrorism, violence in our schools, global warming, stock markets all drive our emotions toward worry. Any hope of having true and lasting peace in the midst of this is, for many, a pipe dream. Still, Scripture comes to us and tells us that the fruit of the Spirit is peace. What can that mean for us in a world like ours?

The Hebrew word for “peace” is shalom. It means more than just the absence of conflict. It is a positive state of inner harmony and well-being. This kind of peace consists of three attitudes.

First is self-acceptance. We need to be glad to be the person God made us to be. Guilt and feelings of inadequacy wage war on our psyche.

Second is positive hope for the world. It helps to keep us from the constant turmoil of wondering what horrible news will arrive next.

Third is confidence in one’s future. We know who holds the future! Confidence about one’s future means we don’t have to fret over whether we will ever “make something of ourselves.” We know the real issue is what God will make of us, and God never fails. Knowing that is real peace!

Take a moment to be silent and quiet your mind. For two minutes focus on and repeat a Scripture over and over. Psalm 46:10a or Isaiah 26: 3 would be a viable choice.
 
Were you able to experience peace during this exercise? What natural setting comes to mind for you when you hear the word peace? Is there a moment in your life that you remember feeling most at peace? What destroys your peace? What encourages it?

Jesus said in John 10:10, “I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly”. To have life abundantly is more than to have a life that never ends; rather, it is to have life as God originally intended it to be, full of meaning and joy. But the truth is that many of us don’t experience life in that way. For far too many of us, life too easily becomes humdrum.

Perhaps this is why writer C.S. Lewis titled the biography of his early life Surprised by Joy. He went from nominal Christianity to embracing atheism before finally being converted to a more vital Christian faith. Joy came through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Joy is something different than being happy or excited all of the time. Instead, joy is being able to maintain a strongly positive feeling about life and to praise God for life even in the midst of sorrows and setbacks. This is the quality Paul had and urged on others when he wrote from a Roman jail, “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again, Rejoice!” (Philippians 4:4).

The Holy Spirit helps us to have and maintain this attitude of joy.

How would you define Joy? How is it different from similar concepts such as happiness, excitement, or ecstasy?
 
Read Psalm 103:1-5, Psalm 105:1-3, and Psalm 106:1-3.

What is something that happened this last week that you would like to celebrate and that you can now see as a work of God bringing Joy to you.

Galatians 5:22, Matthew 5:43-48, Luke 10:25-37, John 13:34-35 & 15:9-13, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, 1 John 4:7-12 & 16b-20. These are the verses that we looked at last week. Refresh your thoughts about these passages with new eyes and some distance from the initial reactions you may have had.

What happens when we, as Christians, live lives of love? What makes living a life of love difficult? When a Christian has a difficult time loving a person or a group of people, what can he or she do?

Meanings of Love There are four Greek words that mean “love.’

Eros: This means romantic or sexual love. It is love based on natural biological attraction.

Philea: This means what we commonly call “brotherly love.” It is love based on common interests and the affinity one might have for someone who has a similar view of life.

Stergo: This means the love between parents and children. It can sometimes refer to the love between a pet and its owner or the love a people feel for a leader.

Agape: This means love without expectation of receiving a benefit in return. It is the kind of love that God has for us. This is the word that Paul uses in Galatians 5:22 when he says the fruit of the Spirit is “love.”

When you think of the word love, what do you usually think of? What does it mean to you that the kind of love Paul says is the fruit of the Spirit is agape? What do you need to do to start showing this fruit more in your life? How does the Holy Spirit grow the fruit of love in our lives? What is our role in becoming people who are known for loving others?

“This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we’re most sure that love can’t conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there it swells and comforts.” Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith.

How have friends shown you this kind of love? What happens to relationships when people show God’s love to each other?

Read Romans 5:6-8 How did Jesus exemplify this idea of love going “down into the rat hole with us?

Reread John 13:35 If you made John 13:35 your personal mission statement, how would that affect your daily life? To answer this question, consider your career, your finances, your hobbies, your church life, your relationship with your family and neighbors, and all other components of your life.

We are told in 1 John 4:19, “We love because he first loved us.” Why do you think it is significant that love is the first quality of the fruit of the Spirit Paul mentions?

The Beatles tell us that all we need is love. This may not be literally true, but there can be little doubt that love is what many, if not most, yearn for. When we have the Holy Spirit in our lives, the Spirit helps us love others. The Spirit does this by planting and growing the love of Jesus Christ within us.

It is not always easy to love others. We can be tempted to strike out or walk away from difficult people. When we cannot love through our own power, we can do so by the Spirit. The Spirit will help us to love in difficult situations.

We must learn to rely on the Spirit to help us love the people around us. We must learn to give love so that we may receive love.

Read John 13:34-35 Why is it important to be loving? Is it possible to be a Christian without being loving?

Matthew 4:43-48, Luke 10:25-37, John 15:9-13, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, 1 John 4-7, 16-20

What is the most important insight each of these passages gives us about love? What challenges do these passages present us?

We will continue with the quality of love next week.