Catherine, a neighbor encountered at a local restaurant, was obviously not feeling at the top of her game. At age 85, she appeared before us for the first time holding a cane, an instrument needed to help keep her balance. As she moved unsteadily toward the table where her husband, their niece, and she would sit, she muttered back at us: “Old age is the pits.”
Her sentiments, though far from original, shook something in me. Of late I have been experiencing some unexpected physical distress myself. Who could have expected a long dormant wisdom tooth to become infected at this stage of life? And why did that oral stirring lead to other irritating complications?
I t is not so much any single problem that gets to you but, as Catherine’s complaint implies, a succession of things. My age peers and those older than I often feel themselves caught in a irreversible sequence of ailments impossible to escape. If only I had not taken that fall, they think, or suffered that allergic reaction, things would be much better for me now.
Old age is indeed the pits for a whole lot of people. However, this simple statement does not get at the full range of later life. Being who we are is much more complicated than that. Along with the suffering of bodily existence there often comes the growth of a different perspective.
Surely Catherine herself takes a more nuanced approach to life than any one statement can convey. Even as she walked away, I could detect something jaunty behind her complaint. While expressing distaste for the small humiliations of advancing age, her smile suggested that she finds something appropriately ridiculous about the whole thing. At the risk of reading too much into a single gesture, I judged her to be looking at life in a larger perspective.
Catherine, I suspect, knows how later life, with all of its physical trials, is a time for appreciating the rich complexity of existence. Wife of a minister, mother to ten sons and daughters, she has done a lot of living. Her years have taken her through uncountable experiences that have left their mark. Probably she spends much time in her eighties laying hold of this richness that lies in the events of her earlier life and their meaning.
Like so many others, Catherine most likely sees later life as a favorable time for taking care of her soul. She would probably embrace the advice of the writer Elizabeth Lesser: “We should cherish those moments when we have an awareness of our life being something more than it appears to be.”
This spiritual reality is what I feel strongly every time I get together with friends for meditation. They are older men and women with long experience of the spiritual life and people familiar with the various religious traditions of the world. They have learned how to draw on this wealth to enrich their daily lives.
Members of our prayer group are not strangers to suffering either. One of our number is currently living through a severe test of memory deficits. His courageous response to this problem inspires me and others in the group. The loving support given him by his wife moves us all: just last week he said of her, “She is my memory.”
For these companions of mine, the life of the spirit remains the central reality of later life. That is why we meditate together sitting in silence before a lighted candle and waiting upon the stirrings of the spirit within us. Nothing dramatic happens but we come away from the experience feeling peace, or strength, or interior light.
But spiritual exercises do not always produce such reassuring feelings. Suffering happens there too. Some people, as they attempt to reach for meaning, taste bitterness. The dark night of the soul is not reserved only for the great mystics of the religious traditions. Everyone serious about spiritual life encounters times of inner dryness and temptations to lose heart.
In the face of an uncertain future, we keep returning to hope. People committed to the spiritual life have no special understanding of why we suffer. The “pits” are something we all have to encounter sooner or later. But perhaps it makes some difference how we see our life.
If we envision it as a spiritual journey, our life takes on a meaning that can help place the pits in a perspective. Admittedly, those sufferings remain both unwelcome and not fully understood but at least they can yield some meaning.
As Henri Nouwen, one of my favorite gurus, once wrote: “Aging is the turning of the wheel, the gradual fulfillment of the life cycle in which receiving matures in giving and living makes dying worthwhile. Aging does not need to be hidden or denied, but can be understood, affirmed, and experienced as a process of growth by which the mystery of life is gradually revealed to us.”
Richard Griffin