To help give meaning to my later life I have created a mantra. This three-word phrase expresses spiritually a response to the events that mark my days.

My brief formula for dealing with those happenings is “The mystery deepens.”

I apply these words to gains and losses, insights and impasses, surprises and well-worn actions. Throughout, the phrase says something about the kind of person I am.

What I mean by the word mystery is reality too deep for human understanding. I apply it to whatever does not allow me (or anyone else) to grasp its fullness.

Lest this seems too abstract, let me list some instances where my mantra comes into play.

One example: when family members and friends produce children. This event, almost always joyful, makes me wonder about the way human life spreads over this earth (7 billion now!) and how generations succeed one another. More particularly, it makes me think of my own ancestors and how they continued the line that produced me.

What was the meaning of my own birth and how do this fact and its difficult circumstances (about which I think often) shape all that I do?

Even more mysterious for me is the coming of death. This I ponder virtually every day. Why have so many of my family members and friends, many of them younger than I, already met death while I continue to live?

They have set out on the ultimate adventure. They already know the mystery, these people with whom my own fate is linked.

Why haven’t they shared their sublime knowledge with us? How can every last one of them have kept silence?

And death, when it comes for me — what will that reality mean? No matter how much I love them, I can accept the death of others the way I cannot quite accept my own. I have become so used to living a long life that I have trouble imagining what it may be to have it come to an end.

And, as the years mount up, what of the changes that late life has brought and continues to produce? Observing these changes in other people is not at all the same as experiencing them.

Even though we are helped by insights provided by scholars in the field of aging, still the reality of change often brings struggle and sober reflection.

My mantra enables me to draw spiritual meaning from this kind of challenge to peace of mind. It reminds me how to respond when serious difficulties strike my heart and soul.

My mantra also applies to music. Recently, I have attended concerts that have brought me great pleasure. Hearing performers — sopranos and pianists, an organist, a trumpeter — has filled me with inner joy.

Is anything closer to the soul than music? So insubstantial, yet so dynamic. Each note, so fleeting, so subtle, a reality that provokes awe and wonder.

Later life often brings lapses of confidence in the religious traditions that used to feel more secure. With me, this change relates more to the leadership in the church than to its spirituality. For a long time, I have remained skeptical of those who know too much about God.

Above all, God must remain mystery; my mantra reminds me of this.

Meditation, contemplation, and of course prayer are ways of putting the mantra to work. They mean reaching out to the holy and deepening one’s appreciation of mystery.

In later years these forms of spirituality may impose their own difficulties, but in doing so they may be paying tribute to mystery.