 |  |  |  |  |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Home||Benedictine Sisters of Erie||Catalogue||Joan in the News||Contact Benetvision Fund for Prisoners||Retreats||About Benetvision||Ideas in Passing Benetvision • 355 East Ninth Street • Erie, PA 16503-1107 • Phone 814-459-5994 benetvision@benetvision.org • Fax 814-459-8066 Copyrighted © 2007 Benedictine Sisters of Erie, PA |
Is This Book for You?
It is a January morning in County Kerry. The Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of the craggy islands below me, is
roiled with whitecaps and angry palisades of water crashing against the tiny islets in their rocky midst. The
windstorms of the last two nights have drenched the hills on which this small Irish stone cottage clings, left
them dripping with water from bare branches hours later, sent the tiny rivulet of water outside my window
rushing wildly down the mountainside to the valley below. It is an average Kerry winter day.
But not average for some. In the last two days of rocking, howling wind, five Irish fishermen and their trawler
have been reported missing at sea. This morning, they were pronounced dead, the sea too wild yet to even
attempt to recover their bodies.
Who they were, how old they were, I do not know. But one thing I do know: life and time are ghosted
creatures for us all. They belong to us—and are not ours at the same time. Some of us, like these fishermen
caught in a season’s windstorm, leave it by surprise. Most of us, like you and me, inch our way through life,
sure on the one hand that it will never end, certain on the other that it will surely be ending for us soon.
It is at moments of such quiet consciousness that it is important to come face-to-face with what it means to
age, to be older, to be old, to become an elder in society. It is important that age be no impediment to the
magnet of life in us. But life is not about breathing only. Life is about becoming more than we are, about
being all that we can be. Whatever we are doing, however old we are, wherever we fall on the social-
economic scale.
This is a book for those who are on the brink of “old age,” for those who have just received their first mail
message from the Association of Retired People, and knowing themselves to be young and healthy, are very
surprised by it.
But this book is as much for those concerned about their parents and the kinds of issues older age may be
raising in them. It is also for those who want to reflect on the gradual effects of the aging process in their
own lives.
This is, finally, a book for those who do not “feel” old, whatever their chronological age, but who one day
realize with a kind of numbing astonishment that they have not managed to elude it. They are older than
they ever thought they could possibly become despite the fact that inside themselves they feel no different
now than they did a year ago. Except for the telling of years, of course. And, in the end, those make all the
difference.
…But inside, they know themselves to be coming out of one part of life and going into another, clinging to
one but unable to stop themselves from slipping into the other. And they don’t know what to think about it.
Is this the end of everything they know to be good and fulfilling in life? Or is the purpose of life only now
becoming visible?
Two Faces of Regret
"Do not brood over your past mistakes and failures,” the Indian Swami Sivananda wrote, “as this will only fill
your mind with grief, regret and depression.”
Regret, one of the ghosts of aging, comes upon us one day dressed up like wisdom, looking profound and
serious, sensible and responsible. It prods us to begin to look back. It presses us to question everything we’
ve ever done: I should have listened to my mother…; I should have stayed in school…; I should have waited to
get married…; I should have changed jobs….
Regret claims to be insight. But how can it be spiritual insight to deny the good of what has been for the
sake of what was not? No, regret is not insight. It is, in fact, the sand trap of the soul. It fails to understand
that there are many ways to fullness of life, all of them different, all of them unique.
Regret is a temptation. It entices us to lust for what never was in the past rather than to bring new energy
to our changing present. It is a misuse of the aging process. One of the functions–one of the gifts–of aging is
to become comfortable with the self we are, rather than to mourn what we are not. When we devalue it, we
bring everything we are and were into question, into doubt. We doubt the God who made us and walks with
us all the way to the end.
But the regret that comes with age can also be the very grace we need to connect again with the energy
that brought us to this moment in the first place. Regret comes with two faces: to regret our life choices is
one thing, but to regret our serious failures is entirely another.
When we regret the roads that have led us to where we are now, we risk the loss of the future. We drain it
of new possibility. We fail to see that these new roads we’re on can be just as life-giving, just as good for us,
just as full of God-ness as the road we’ve come down in the past.
However, when we regret doing what we should never have done–injuring someone’s reputation, abusing
someone we loved, abandoning the truth for the sake of advancement of approval, violating our own bodies
to the point of physical or emotional degradation– we know we have grown into someone of value. It is a
moment of great enlightenment when we realize that the years have grown us as well as sustained us. We are
more substance now than we were when we were young, whatever we did in the past, wherever we were
when we did it.
The fact is that the twinges of regret are a step-over point in life. They invite us to revisit the ideals and
motives that brought us to where we are now. They remind us of the people we loved, the sense of
direction that drove us on, the commitments we made and kept. It is the choices we made in the past that
have brought us to be the person we are today.
“I am luminous with age”
“I am luminous with age,” Meridel Le Sueur wrote. Her words give us pause, make us think, call us to the bar
of judgment.
The truth is that older people tend to come in two flavors—the sour ones and the serene ones. The sour
ones are angry at the world for dismissing them from the rank and file of those who run it and control it and
own it and are not old in it. They demand that the rest of the world seek them out, pity them, take their
orders, stay captive to their scowls.
The serene ones live with soft smiles on their aging faces, a welcome sign to the world of what it means to
grow old gracefully. To have the grace of old age. They require us to go on growing more and more into
ourselves as we age. It is of these that Meridel Le Sueur, an American author who lived to be 96, wrote, “I
am luminous with age.” Luminous. Not painted. Not masked. Luminous!
There is an important part of the aging process that lies in simply getting accustomed to being older. Part of
being a vigorous older person demands, first of all, that we learn to accept it for what it is, a new and
wonderful—but different—stage of life. We must admit, even in our own minds, to being older in a culture
that is so youth-oriented that age is something to be hidden rather than celebrated.
“Me?” we say. “Sixty? Impossible.” One can almost hear the tone of shame that goes with it. It burrows into
the center of us and an alarm sounds in the heart. How could life be almost over, we worry, when were just
beginning to understand it, to enjoy it, to love it. And with the fear of age, if we succumb to the notion that
being older is some kind of obstacle to life, comes the loss of one of life’s most profound periods.
The problem is that preparation for aging in our modern world seems to be concentrated almost entirely on
buying anti-wrinkle creams and joining a health club—when the truth is that what must be transformed now
is not so much the way we look to other people, as it is the way we look at life. Age is the moment we come
to terms with ourselves. We begin to find more strength in the spirit than in the flesh.
The way we view ourselves changes from period to period in life. It is not a steady-state experience, and its
most impacting definition comes in middle age. Then, we all get some kind of power, however limited it may
be, just by virtue of seniority, if nothing else. We find ourselves in charge somewhere: in charge of our
children, in a position of control on the job, in a position of preferment in the family, at a higher social level
in the group. We have arrived.
But all of a sudden it seems, as quietly as I arrived, I am now just as quietly dismissed. Power and control
cannot be my definition of self anymore. I must now find in myself whatever it is that gives me a personal
place in the world around me: I’m fun to be with; I care about other people; I have begun to live for deeper,
richer, more important things than I have ever done before. I am caretaker, public watchdog, social
advocate, companion now. Then, I begin to see myself differently. I begin to discover that, in many ways, I
am far more important now than I have been all my previous life.
Meeting Life Head On
“The secret of my vigor and activity,” Lowell Thomas confessed, “is that I have managed to have a lot of fun.”
If life is really for the living, then the trick to living well is to learn to live it fully, to soak it up, to revel in it.
What we too often fail to realize is that living fully depends a great deal more on our frame of mind, on our
fundamental spirituality, than it does on our physical condition. If we see God as good, we see life as good. If
we see God as a kind of sly and insidious Judge, tempting us with good things in order to see if we can be
seduced into some sort of moral depravity by them, then life is a trap to be feared.
Living well has something to do with the spirituality of wholeheartedness, of seeing life more as a grace than
as a penance, as time to be lived with eager expectation of its goodness, not in dread of its challenges. We
are not given life in order to suffer. We are given life in order to learn to love the Creator through the joys
and beauty of creation. We are given life in order to deal gracefully with the natural suffering of being
mortal creatures.
When we fail to meet life head on, we fail to live it fully.
Life is not simply what happens to us—though in moments of surprise life waits, too—but life is also what we
ourselves make happen.
We become what we do. We become new inside when we urge ourselves to do new things. We become
awake when we do not allow ourselves to simply sleep through life. We become more sure of ourselves when
we forget our age and trust ourselves enough to refuse to fear everything in life from a pair of stairs to a
mountain incline.
We aren’t “past” life unless we allow life to pass us by.
It is time now to begin again, to become new, to find ways to enjoy life, to seize every opportunity to be an
exciting, interesting, significant person. We owe the world the best of ourselves because all the rest of the
world is struggling with something, too.
It is a January morning in County Kerry. The Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of the craggy islands below me, is
roiled with whitecaps and angry palisades of water crashing against the tiny islets in their rocky midst. The
windstorms of the last two nights have drenched the hills on which this small Irish stone cottage clings, left
them dripping with water from bare branches hours later, sent the tiny rivulet of water outside my window
rushing wildly down the mountainside to the valley below. It is an average Kerry winter day.
But not average for some. In the last two days of rocking, howling wind, five Irish fishermen and their trawler
have been reported missing at sea. This morning, they were pronounced dead, the sea too wild yet to even
attempt to recover their bodies.
Who they were, how old they were, I do not know. But one thing I do know: life and time are ghosted
creatures for us all. They belong to us—and are not ours at the same time. Some of us, like these fishermen
caught in a season’s windstorm, leave it by surprise. Most of us, like you and me, inch our way through life,
sure on the one hand that it will never end, certain on the other that it will surely be ending for us soon.
It is at moments of such quiet consciousness that it is important to come face-to-face with what it means to
age, to be older, to be old, to become an elder in society. It is important that age be no impediment to the
magnet of life in us. But life is not about breathing only. Life is about becoming more than we are, about
being all that we can be. Whatever we are doing, however old we are, wherever we fall on the social-
economic scale.
This is a book for those who are on the brink of “old age,” for those who have just received their first mail
message from the Association of Retired People, and knowing themselves to be young and healthy, are very
surprised by it.
But this book is as much for those concerned about their parents and the kinds of issues older age may be
raising in them. It is also for those who want to reflect on the gradual effects of the aging process in their
own lives.
This is, finally, a book for those who do not “feel” old, whatever their chronological age, but who one day
realize with a kind of numbing astonishment that they have not managed to elude it. They are older than
they ever thought they could possibly become despite the fact that inside themselves they feel no different
now than they did a year ago. Except for the telling of years, of course. And, in the end, those make all the
difference.
…But inside, they know themselves to be coming out of one part of life and going into another, clinging to
one but unable to stop themselves from slipping into the other. And they don’t know what to think about it.
Is this the end of everything they know to be good and fulfilling in life? Or is the purpose of life only now
becoming visible?
Two Faces of Regret
"Do not brood over your past mistakes and failures,” the Indian Swami Sivananda wrote, “as this will only fill
your mind with grief, regret and depression.”
Regret, one of the ghosts of aging, comes upon us one day dressed up like wisdom, looking profound and
serious, sensible and responsible. It prods us to begin to look back. It presses us to question everything we’
ve ever done: I should have listened to my mother…; I should have stayed in school…; I should have waited to
get married…; I should have changed jobs….
Regret claims to be insight. But how can it be spiritual insight to deny the good of what has been for the
sake of what was not? No, regret is not insight. It is, in fact, the sand trap of the soul. It fails to understand
that there are many ways to fullness of life, all of them different, all of them unique.
Regret is a temptation. It entices us to lust for what never was in the past rather than to bring new energy
to our changing present. It is a misuse of the aging process. One of the functions–one of the gifts–of aging is
to become comfortable with the self we are, rather than to mourn what we are not. When we devalue it, we
bring everything we are and were into question, into doubt. We doubt the God who made us and walks with
us all the way to the end.
But the regret that comes with age can also be the very grace we need to connect again with the energy
that brought us to this moment in the first place. Regret comes with two faces: to regret our life choices is
one thing, but to regret our serious failures is entirely another.
When we regret the roads that have led us to where we are now, we risk the loss of the future. We drain it
of new possibility. We fail to see that these new roads we’re on can be just as life-giving, just as good for us,
just as full of God-ness as the road we’ve come down in the past.
However, when we regret doing what we should never have done–injuring someone’s reputation, abusing
someone we loved, abandoning the truth for the sake of advancement of approval, violating our own bodies
to the point of physical or emotional degradation– we know we have grown into someone of value. It is a
moment of great enlightenment when we realize that the years have grown us as well as sustained us. We are
more substance now than we were when we were young, whatever we did in the past, wherever we were
when we did it.
The fact is that the twinges of regret are a step-over point in life. They invite us to revisit the ideals and
motives that brought us to where we are now. They remind us of the people we loved, the sense of
direction that drove us on, the commitments we made and kept. It is the choices we made in the past that
have brought us to be the person we are today.
“I am luminous with age”
“I am luminous with age,” Meridel Le Sueur wrote. Her words give us pause, make us think, call us to the bar
of judgment.
The truth is that older people tend to come in two flavors—the sour ones and the serene ones. The sour
ones are angry at the world for dismissing them from the rank and file of those who run it and control it and
own it and are not old in it. They demand that the rest of the world seek them out, pity them, take their
orders, stay captive to their scowls.
The serene ones live with soft smiles on their aging faces, a welcome sign to the world of what it means to
grow old gracefully. To have the grace of old age. They require us to go on growing more and more into
ourselves as we age. It is of these that Meridel Le Sueur, an American author who lived to be 96, wrote, “I
am luminous with age.” Luminous. Not painted. Not masked. Luminous!
There is an important part of the aging process that lies in simply getting accustomed to being older. Part of
being a vigorous older person demands, first of all, that we learn to accept it for what it is, a new and
wonderful—but different—stage of life. We must admit, even in our own minds, to being older in a culture
that is so youth-oriented that age is something to be hidden rather than celebrated.
“Me?” we say. “Sixty? Impossible.” One can almost hear the tone of shame that goes with it. It burrows into
the center of us and an alarm sounds in the heart. How could life be almost over, we worry, when were just
beginning to understand it, to enjoy it, to love it. And with the fear of age, if we succumb to the notion that
being older is some kind of obstacle to life, comes the loss of one of life’s most profound periods.
The problem is that preparation for aging in our modern world seems to be concentrated almost entirely on
buying anti-wrinkle creams and joining a health club—when the truth is that what must be transformed now
is not so much the way we look to other people, as it is the way we look at life. Age is the moment we come
to terms with ourselves. We begin to find more strength in the spirit than in the flesh.
The way we view ourselves changes from period to period in life. It is not a steady-state experience, and its
most impacting definition comes in middle age. Then, we all get some kind of power, however limited it may
be, just by virtue of seniority, if nothing else. We find ourselves in charge somewhere: in charge of our
children, in a position of control on the job, in a position of preferment in the family, at a higher social level
in the group. We have arrived.
But all of a sudden it seems, as quietly as I arrived, I am now just as quietly dismissed. Power and control
cannot be my definition of self anymore. I must now find in myself whatever it is that gives me a personal
place in the world around me: I’m fun to be with; I care about other people; I have begun to live for deeper,
richer, more important things than I have ever done before. I am caretaker, public watchdog, social
advocate, companion now. Then, I begin to see myself differently. I begin to discover that, in many ways, I
am far more important now than I have been all my previous life.
Meeting Life Head On
“The secret of my vigor and activity,” Lowell Thomas confessed, “is that I have managed to have a lot of fun.”
If life is really for the living, then the trick to living well is to learn to live it fully, to soak it up, to revel in it.
What we too often fail to realize is that living fully depends a great deal more on our frame of mind, on our
fundamental spirituality, than it does on our physical condition. If we see God as good, we see life as good. If
we see God as a kind of sly and insidious Judge, tempting us with good things in order to see if we can be
seduced into some sort of moral depravity by them, then life is a trap to be feared.
Living well has something to do with the spirituality of wholeheartedness, of seeing life more as a grace than
as a penance, as time to be lived with eager expectation of its goodness, not in dread of its challenges. We
are not given life in order to suffer. We are given life in order to learn to love the Creator through the joys
and beauty of creation. We are given life in order to deal gracefully with the natural suffering of being
mortal creatures.
When we fail to meet life head on, we fail to live it fully.
Life is not simply what happens to us—though in moments of surprise life waits, too—but life is also what we
ourselves make happen.
We become what we do. We become new inside when we urge ourselves to do new things. We become
awake when we do not allow ourselves to simply sleep through life. We become more sure of ourselves when
we forget our age and trust ourselves enough to refuse to fear everything in life from a pair of stairs to a
mountain incline.
We aren’t “past” life unless we allow life to pass us by.
It is time now to begin again, to become new, to find ways to enjoy life, to seize every opportunity to be an
exciting, interesting, significant person. We owe the world the best of ourselves because all the rest of the
world is struggling with something, too.
Selections from
The Gift of Aging
by Joan Chittister
The Gift of Aging
by Joan Chittister
