To Grow in Love: A Spirituality of Ageing New Revised Edition

By Brian Grogan

A new revised edition of this popular bestseller. Growing in love is not something we can do on our own; it doesn't just happen to us as ageing does. In our later years, when our hearts and minds are mellowing, perhaps we can imitate God - the same way we imitated our parents when we were young - to grow more fully in his love. Life can be hard, and old age can be very hard indeed. In times of hardship we often ask, "where is God?" God comes to us disguised as a parent, a sibling, friend, teacher, spouse, co-worker, stranger, helper, nurse. In the love and goodness of others, we meet the selfless love and goodness of God. Equally when we show love to others, we show them God's love. This book addresses primarily those who know ageing from the inside, but if you haven't yet entered that strange world, knowledge of its landscape may help you relate more richly to those who have, and help in your own journey towards that "Third Age".

• Language: English
• Publisher: Messenger Publications
• Release date: Jan 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781788122481

Book preview

Part One

A SPIRITUALITY OF AGEING

1

INTRODUCTION

All the genuine, deep delight of life

is in showing people the mud-pies you have made;

and life is at its best when we confidingly recommend our mud-pies

to each other’s sympathetic consideration.

— J.M. Thorburn

Mud-pies

The image of mud-pies is attractive to me. Firstly, it links in with our origins: we are told that the Lord God formed us from the dust of the ground, so we are in fact God’s mud-pies (Gen 2:7)! The image also brings me back to childhood and the delight I found in messing about in mud, despite all commands to the contrary. More deeply, it catches how some older people with whom I have spoken describe their lives. Having lived uneventful lives by popular reckoning, they humbly ponder the question, ‘What have I to show for all the years?’ To this the best answer is, ‘What you have become is the person God loves. God loves you simply as you are; this is your real self, with your strengths and limits, your history of ups and downs, God loves your humility, and as you well know, the word humility comes from the Latin word for mud! You have had to abandon the sense of being in charge of your life. Steady diminishment is ongoing, but this is allowing God to take you over more and more, even though you see little of this. As we age we are indeed ‘brought to the ground’ until finally we are encased in Mother Earth at burial.

Further, the mud-pie image says something about what I write. St Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest minds the world has known, remarked at the end of his short life – he died at the age of forty-nine – that all he’d written about God was ‘straw’ in comparison with the reality. I sometimes feel the same in writing about ageing: others could write more helpfully than I from their longer experience of growing old. Who am I to suggest to others how to conduct themselves in the autumn of life? That said, I can reflect and share on what ageing means to me, and reflection is good. The unexamined life is not worth living, as Socrates says, but when we reflect on it we can say that, while life is indeed a risk, it is a beautiful risk. So I confide my mud-pies to your sympathetic consideration, and invite you to construct your own. You have your own chapter to add to this book!

What Is God Up To?

I have tried to write primarily from God’s point of view, which explains the generous sprinkling of scripture references. Books on ageing are usually written from a human perspective: its economic, psychological, social and medical angles. There are fewer books around the divine perspective on human ageing. This however is the lens we will use here. So this book is not about issues between you and your bank manager or your doctor or your home help! My underlying question is, ‘What is God trying to make of us in our later years?’ An answer to this will help us to make some sense of the diminishment and pain that we endure, so that we can come to terms with loss and decline and find the treasure hidden in them. Old age is terrifying to most of us: we need help to navigate it well. One friend says to me whenever we meet, ‘Ageing has nothing to recommend it!’ Can the bitter water of these years ever be turned into wine, as happened at Cana? Occasionally we meet wisdom figures who help us to see the best way forward, people who have come to terms with the reality of their own ageing. They are just themselves; they are not ‘difficult’ – or at least not for long. Love flows through them to those around, even if they’ve had a stroke and can hardly talk. If you can find such people, try to be like them. If you can become as they are, you will be a blessing for the world. If these pages can give you a new perspective on growing old, my mud-pie will have nurtured a flower!

I hope that over your lifetime, you have had some experience of God as being good. You need that in order to cope with the final stage of your journey. If we look back, we can see that our development over the years required us at times to let go of a previous, comfortable stage of life. But the next stage brought something better and was worth the uphill struggle. While we may have resisted the change, something – or someone! – was pushing us on until eventually we had to let go of the previous stage. This pushing was for our good; think of the pushing involved in giving birth. It enabled us to exchange something good for something better. I believe that this process continues even in our final years. We are pushed painfully out of one comfort zone after another, only to arrive finally in a new and better place prepared for us by God. The final push which we call ‘dying’ will bring us something incomparably better than we now have.

Trust

Only with empty hands can we grasp what is before us. St Paul asserts that ‘the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed in us’ (Rom 8:18). How did he know this, and what is this ‘glory’ he speaks of? He couldn’t prove in a way that would satisfy a sceptic that the best is yet to come, nor can we. But belief in the future goodness of God is based in our experience of God’s steady goodness to us over our lifetimes. As the Eucharistic Liturgy says, ‘From God comes all that is good’. Old age with all its letting go seems to lead only downward, but from the inside, where God is working, it leads upward into divine life.

So you do well to keep praying for the virtue of trust. It is basic to human living. We trust ourselves to surgeons and doctors, hoping that they will make us better and enable us to resume our lives. We do this even though human error can creep into the most careful treatment. Since an all-wise and good God underpins our spirituality of ageing, we can entrust ourselves to God as we endure the ageing process; we can decide to believe that God will reveal to us new vistas of the culmination of human life, what ‘no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived – what God has prepared for those who love him’ (1 Cor 2:9). For me, two passages from scripture act as lifebuoys when the going gets rough. The first is from Jeremiah: ‘For surely, I know the plans I have in mind for you, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future full of hope’ (Jer 29:11). The second is from the Psalms: ‘Do not cast me off in the time of old age; do not forsake me when my strength is spent… Even to old age and grey hairs, O God, do not forsake me’ (Ps 71:9,18). These and similar texts offset the fear that grips my heart when I read Jesus’ words to Peter, ‘When you were younger you used to fasten your own belt and go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go’ (Jn 21:18).

2

THE AWESOME TASK OF AGEING

‘What’s Happening to Me?’

For each of us, there is probably a defining moment when we cross the threshold from feeling that we’re in ‘the prime of life’ to the awareness that we’re ‘not as young as we used to be’. The whiff of mortality assailed my own nostrils without warning in 2007. I was approaching seventy, had just retired from full-time administration and was on a sabbatical, which meant time for myself to rest and plan for the years ahead. But on Good Friday that year my Jesuit home was burnt down. Much of the life I’d known went up in smoke, and a bleak and uncharted future loomed ahead. All that was familiar disappeared – books, writings, notes, bric-a-brac, clothes, photos – and part of me was gone with them. In this time of shock, I was rudely catapulted into a new phase of life, with new challenges and surprises. I was being introduced, against my will, to my senior years, the ‘third age’ as it is kindly called. Ten years on I am writing from that perspective, and primarily I’m addressing those of you who know ageing from the inside. If you haven’t yet entered this strange world, some knowledge of its landscape can help you to prepare for it, and to relate more richly to those who have already begun to explore its uncharted territory.

Jane Fonda

Recently I stumbled across Jane Fonda’s Prime Time: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life (Random House: London, 2011). Our receptionist was reading it and we got chatting about a reference to Teilhard de Chardin SJ, one of my favourite authors. ‘Why not read the whole thing?’ she said. ‘I know it will be a bit different from your usual diet, but it has a lot going for it!’ This was true. It is a well-researched and lively book on the possibilities of the later years of life. Fonda’s enthusiastic acceptance of the ageing process has much to commend it. She suggests that we can think of our senior years as a staircase, either going up or down; we can choose to sink into age or grow into it. We can make the most of our remaining years, and grow into a sense of wholeness rather than decline. She suggests that we review the past, learn its lessons, and move forward to become the energetic, fulfilled persons we were always meant to be.

Jane Fonda encourages the reader to ‘dance their final years’. Her framework is the immediate present: she deals with health, energy, friendship, sex and fulfilment, rather than sickness, pain, poverty, disability, death or life after death. She has a sense of the finiteness of things and the preciousness of time. Her message is to ‘seize the day’, because everything will eventually end. Never to have fully lived is a fate worse than death itself. Her book and mine are written from complementary perspectives: she focuses on what we can do for ourselves right now, while I focus more on what God is doing and will do in us. But I will say something on her theme in chapter five.

The Inward Journey

If our early years are taken up with following an outward path into the world around us, the path in later years is an inward one. While the outer journey had vast possibilities, some of which became part of our reality, our later journey opens up an immense inner world. This means that the journey home deserves the same attention as did the journey out. Back then we engaged heart and soul with the challenges of making a good life, now we face towards a deeper and better life, which stretches to the end and beyond. The journey home demands different skills from those that enabled our journey out. Then our time and energy went into education so that we would get a job and settle down. Now we move into an intensely personal and private world, an education of the spirit, because the core of this ‘good life’ is our relationship with God who is Spirit. In T.S. Eliot’s phrase, we are now being drawn to ‘the still point of the turning world’. We can by all means wish those well who explore the moon and the nearer stars, but as we age, the most important territory to be explored is God’s, and that is what this book is about.

As the years run out, it is a comfort to know that we are not simply in irreversible decline! St Paul says that though our outer nature may well be falling into decay, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. He invites us to look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen, for what can be seen is temporal, but what cannot be seen is eternal (see 2 Cor 4:16-18). How, we might ask, can you look at what cannot be seen? The best we can do here is to pick up the hints we are offered by God, always allowing that there is far more to come than we can ask or imagine.

Energy

Of course, one of the problems about this journey inward, this turning homeward, is that we no longer have the energy we had before. As one of my older brethren says to me over and over again, ‘My getup-and-go has got up and gone!’ There is humour and humility in this. It can help to be aware that the energy for the final stages of the journey of life comes less from within and more from God. The cosmos, according to the scientists, began with an explosion of energy nearly fourteen billion years ago: that energy is not yet spent; it simply gets recycled. We are slowing down and often feel tired, but the cosmos is not. We live in an energy-field that is not of our own making: it carries us along, and it is purposeful. We are in fact being drawn toward the totality of flowing energy from which we and all else emerged. We are being brought into the heart of things, into the life of God, who is not static but rather is pure energy and the source of all energy. Divine energy is always streaming toward us, impacting us in everything and in every moment; our spirit is made for God who endlessly works in us and draws us home. We are pilgrims rather than settlers in this world, however much we try to settle down and find security here. We are caught in a spiral of becoming, of growth into greater consciousness and into greater love. Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it so simply:

Thee, God, I come from, to thee go,

All day long I like fountain flow

From thy hand out, swayed about

Mote-like in thy mighty glow.

Divine energy surrounds us as we age; it carries us forward and brings us ever more deeply into relationship with God. God is spirit, and spirit is eternally young. The kingdom of God is within us, and can increasingly take us over, even as we age. We are in good hands; the awesome task is to allow God to take us over more and more. But we struggle to try to ‘do it all ourselves’, so an ongoing conversion must take place in us. I was ordained almost fifty years ago, shortly after the Second Vatican Council. Hopes were high within my group that we could pour out our pent-up energy on a waiting world by implementing the teachings of the Council. Now, a half-century on, much of our energy has gone, and we realise that we have more than enough to do in letting God lead us in whatever way God wills. The lurking temptation is to despair, to grow cynical. The daily challenge is to do what small things we can still manage, and to believe that God’s power is made perfect in our weakness (2 Cor 12: 8-10). As Newman says in Lead, Kindly Light,

So long thy power hath blest me, sure it still

will lead me on,

O’er moor and fen,