Here’s this morning’s newsflash: one of the realities of life is that most of us will grow old.

Age and death are not synonyms. Death comes to everyone; but age is a gift. And sooner or later, we arrive at the point where we begin to imagine ourselves, whoever we are, that we ourselves are in the final stages of our lives. We begin to ask ourselves—quietly, seriously—what kind of person we want to be then, so that we can begin to be that person right now.

If we learn anything at all as time goes by and the changing seasons become fewer and fewer, it is that there are some things in life which, having happened, cannot be undone, cannot be fixed.  It is then more than possible that we will go to our graves with a good number of personal concerns, of life agendas, left unresolved. Some of the family fractures will not yet have healed. Some of the words spoken in heat and in haste will not have been redeemed. Some of the old relationships and friendships lost or broken will not have been renewed. Some of the dreams will never be realized. So has life been wasted? Has it all been for nothing?

Many of the things for which we still feel responsible, even feel guilty about, we couldn't do anything to undo now, even if we wish we could. We can't put back together, for instance, a failed marriage. We can't cancel the years of neglect, a lifetime of indifference, a history of disregard for the people who had a right to expect our concern.

There is nothing we can do now about a lifetime of lack of contact with our children maybe, the tension we felt with our mother maybe, or the distance we felt from our father perhaps, or the jealousies and outbursts and petty irritations that marked years long past and that call up still all our own defenses. That time, those situations, are simply gone. They are out of our hands. They are beyond our control.

Inside, though, the scars still smart. We have been hurt. We have done the hurting. We made the mistakes. We created the mess that came out of them. And there is not now and never was, as far as we can see, any way to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. So, now what?

If we cannot deal directly with all the unfinished struggles of our lives, how can we possibly face the end of life with any kind of serenity? The fact is that the unrest that accumulates over the years is the very grace reserved for the last years, the pinnacle of life. Only now, only then can the consciousness of these wrongs really make a difference in us. Only now can this pain be made productive.

Why? Because now we must deal with it all ourselves. There is no one here to forgive us anymore. There’s no one to tell us we were right, no one to surrender to our insistence, no one left for us to refuse to consort with. Instead, there’re all there, all alive yet, but within us. Now we must go down into the deepest part of ourselves and come to peace, not with our old antagonists but, more importantly than that, with ourselves, with the conscience we have been refusing to reconcile with for years.

This is the period of life when we must begin to look inside our own hearts and souls rather than outside ourselves for the answers to our problems, for the fixing of the problems. This is the time for facing ourselves, for bringing ourselves into the light.

Can we come eye to eye with our own souls and admit who we are? If we have been selfish, can we bring ourselves to the daily discipline of caring for others? If we have been dishonest about ourselves, can we take care now to tell the real truth about ourselves? If we have been God-less, are we able to trust now that the Creator of Life must therefore also be the home of our souls, and can we bow before the Life that has claim on our own?

Can we begin to see ourselves as only part of the universe, just a fragment of it, not its center? Can we give ourselves to accepting the heat and the rain, the pain and the limitations, the inconveniences and discomforts of life, without setting out to passively punish the rest of the human race for the daily exigencies that come with being human?

Can we smile now at what we have not smiled at for years? Can we give ourselves away to those who need us now? Can we speak our truth without needing to be right? Can we accept the vagaries of life now without needing the entire rest of the world to swaddle us beyond any human justification for expecting it? Can we talk to people decently and allow them to talk to us?

And yet, difficult as all those moments may be for us—physically, emotionally—it is also true that as the physical dimensions of life diminish, the spiritual dimension commonly increases. It is a special period of life. Maybe the most special of them all. Indeed, life is not about age. It is not about the number of years we manage to eke out of it. It is about aging well. It is about living into the gifts offered in every stage of life.

But perhaps the most important dimension of aging well is that we realize that there is a purpose to aging. There is a reason for old age, whatever our state of life, whatever our social resources.

The gift of years comes to many more than realize that these later years are gift, not burden. Not everyone who lives them either understands them or welcomes them. But our task is to realize that, in fact, the end-time of life is one of its best, certainly one of its most important.

This time, the end time, is the time for melting into God, for putting down the ragged remnants of the past, for learning to live in the present and to find it enough, for learning to live with life as it is and find it enough, for learning to accept ourselves and all we have learned as a result of it and finding it enough.

The words that come now will be the honest ones, the hopeful ones, the culmination of all the learning of all the other years. Then the veil between us and eternity will begin to tear and we will begin the slow walk through it, finally, finally ready and open now to being thrown upon the heart of God.

Conversation with Joan Chittister

Daniel Pawlus: Sr. Joan, it’s wonderful to see you as always. We look forward to this every year.

Joan Chittister: Me too!

Daniel Pawlus: You’ve really done it again with this beautiful book, “The Gift of Years,” and I know we’re going to talk a lot about it. Before we begin, I wonder if you’d share with us a little bit about how these books come to you. I know you spend some time in Ireland writing them. Briefly give us a little background of how this happens. This is number 35, I think. It’s remarkable!

Joan Chittister: I never write about anything that doesn’t start in my heart. I really have to be committed to a subject. It has to be a subject that I care about in a most intense and personal way. So I don’t write books, I write thoughts. I write ideas. I write life as I see it at that moment. My column is called “From Where I Stand,” and I mean it. All I’m trying to do is to evoke thought about things that thoughtful people are concerned with.

Having said all that, Dan, I have to admit that this one is quite different. Believe it or not, I made up my mind to write this book when I was 45 and I can tell you why. Somebody said to me the other day, “Did you write this because you’re dealing with the problem of age yourself?” And I stopped for a minute and I thought, “What problem?” Dealing with a problem! I know that everybody else in this country makes it a problem. It’s not a problem for me. I knew why at 45. Because at that time I was a prioress of a Benedictine monastery and I watched our older sisters. I watched the generation before me move into another stage of life and I watched them become more beautiful as they grew. And I knew that they were being overlooked, their wisdom was being overlooked, and that someday, somehow, I would sit down when I thought I knew something about it myself and try to compare what I was seeing happening in the elderly women religious in this country to what I saw being sold in the society.

Lydia Talbot: You chose the title, “The Gift of Years.” I love the word “gift.” But Joan, what do you say to so many people who are suffering, older people who are sick, who are struggling and grieving with intense loss? Those who would say to God, “Take back your gift!”

Joan Chittister: In the first place, that’s the myth we live in. The studies tell us very clearly now demographically that the average older person spends no more than, or on the average, three months sick and bed ridden before death. Three months. Our image is that somehow or other the AARP sends you a postcard and you begin to die on the spot! It’s the beginning of a whole new stage of life but this gift has been denied. We don’t have enough people who know the gift and the ones that do, we think they’re strange!

Lydia Talbot: I love your quote from Dylan Thomas. Most of us as we go toward the end are raging against the light, but you, Joan Chittister, I’m confident—and Dan, don’t you agree?—that you’re going to go, throw yourself on the heart of God, luminous to the end.

Joan Chittister: Meridel Le Seur said, “I am luminous with age!”

Daniel Pawlus: That’s what I love about your writing and about your ministry. It always has this innate curiosity, asking those challenging questions. It’s always laden with compassion and there is always a call to action there. And one of the messages of this book is certainly that this is not a time of diminishment in your later years. You see it as a time of freedom, as a time of opportunity. Do you want to speak to that a little bit more because it’s a very inspirational read.

Joan Chittister: There is nothing more dangerous on the planet than an old lady!

Lydia Talbot: So what are you going to do with the last third of your life, Joan?

Joan Chittister: Well, I haven’t even begun to plan it. I’ll do more of the same and I’ll do it worse. I hope I’ll do it with even more honesty. I certainly will do it with more knowledge. I hope to do it with more understanding. Go into any book list and look up aging. The first fifty books will tell you how to pretend you aren’t: how not to look it, how not to think it, how not to be it, how not to walk it, how not to act it. And yet we come from whole civilizations of tribes and people who knew that wisdom resided in the elders in the tribe. They were the walking memory of the history. They were the understanding of understanding. We’ve lost that and it shows.

Lydia Talbot: You quote Nelson Mandela, who at age 89 created a group called “The Elders” with Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu, statesmen and women, to talk about global issues. Are they still meeting? That’s just wonderful.

Joan Chittister: They are still meeting and not only do they have a right, we should be calling on them. They are free of the political process now, wherever it is and whatever part of culture or society. They, God willing, have the humility to say we did this in my era and it was wrong. What we see going on here now lacks this dimension. Why are we not bringing that conversation into the conversation? When you look at younger people in a society, they’re so good. They’re so wholesome but they are looking for heroes and guides and models and we’re failing them.

Daniel Pawlus: You talk about the importance of generativity in the book. Do you want to address that a little bit because it seems like a very important insight that you offer?

Joan Chittister: Generativity is the ability to define and articulate what needs to be done now. You may not be able to do it, but if you are generating thought in the society and that thought is worth having, someone will do it. Or someone will stand up and say why it can’t be done or shouldn’t be done but you’re still generating life.

Lydia Talbot: Eric Erikson’s human development stages.

Joan Chittister: There you go!

Lydia Talbot: I love your quote from Pablo Picasso: “It takes a long time to grow young.”

Joan Chittister: I know! And it does, doesn’t it? That’s what I mean about dangerous old people who some how or other can put down all the masks and the false norms and the social conventions and concoctions and say, “Here I am!” as Martin Luther did. “Here I stand. I can do no other. This is who I am.”

Daniel Pawlus: We are so grateful for who you are.

Joan Chittister: Thank you.

Daniel Pawlus: The book is called “The Gift of Years: Growing Old Gracefully” and it truly is a gift.