“We are made to persist, to complete the whole tour. That’s how we find out who we are.” These words come from Tobias Wolff’s book, In Pharaoh’s Army, and find an echo in my experience.

My route to self-knowledge goes through surprise, mystery, radical change, providence, and hope. The years teach me how everything is swathed in mystery, with layers underneath layers of things to be known, with no end ever in sight, and the search for truth the most appropriate activity.

In old age I feel confirmed in my life-long curiosity and desire to know.

When we are young, we imagine and plan our future lives. With age, we seek to understand the form our lives have taken, and the forces that have shaped them. I sense that spirituality has always been at the core of my life, but often in ways I could not have foreseen long ago.

During a walk, one day, in a cemetery in Lenox, Massachusetts when I was in my early twenties, I suddenly felt an inner illumination about the reality of God. It came as an infusion of joy.

The ecstatic joy I experienced on the day of my ordination to the priesthood; the sense of moving toward a new spiritual freedom as I left the priesthood and the Jesuits; the hand of providence in both my marriage and in the birth of my daughter and her subsequent harmonious growing into adulthood — these and many other peak moments convinced me of the primacy of faith in my life and its shaping.

Thus I moved toward old age with a sense of hope and saw this epoch as a time of surprise and adventure.

My lifelong faith led me to think of old age as a vocation in itself. It would be for me a time marked by a continuing search for truth and a plumbing of the mystery in everything. I had already discovered a divine motif in my life: old age would offer the opportunity for its further exploration.

But this would not be a rationalistic enterprise because I would move beyond mere reason toward prayer, poetry, and mysticism.

I could continue to grow in interior freedom, even in the face of the ills that old age typically brings. One can never underestimate how suffering may change the way we think about ourselves and about the world.

When I was a child, I knew many people who had lived in the nineteenth century. Now I know children who may well live into the twenty-second.

By accepting several invitations to read poetry and prose to fourth and fifth graders in a public school nearby, I learned at first hand how 70 can talk to ten and ten can talk to 70. I learned as well that that each age can teach the other about the joy of poetry and the imaginative life.

Children in my own neighborhood also continue to enrich my life. Fortunately, I have also had abundant opportunities to talk with late teenagers and young adults through my continuing association with undergraduates and graduate students. They may have considered me an odd guy but I was determined not to deprive them of contact with oldsters like me.

This formed part of the experience of having the wishes of youth fulfilled in old age. It was the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard who asked: “What is it to be God’s chosen? It is to be denied in youth the wishes of youth, so as with great pains to get them fulfilled in old age.”

I may have just slipped under the wire, but that narrow margin added to the satisfactions adopted. The words of this thinker applied to me. If I had been denied the wishes of youth, it was by my own choice: I wanted the blessings of spiritual life, even if I had to sacrifice to receive them.

But other vital issues were suppressed —  romantic love, parenthood, worldly achievement, experimentation,   — and were not seized till almost the last moment when the opportunity to grasp some of them was running out.

As a result of doing so many basic things of life late, I seemed younger than many other people in my age bracket. I looked younger, acted younger, and had attitudes different from the ordinary. No more than in earlier life did anyone ever accuse me of being normal.

Also, beginning with my seventies I noticed in myself a qualitatively new benevolence toward other people. I now found it much easier to look upon others with compassion, sympathy, and even love. Often I would experience an upsurge of fellow feeling for people suffering hardship or caught by confusion. It was as if many years of living had taught me much about how hard life is, how manifold are the opportunities for making a mess of oneself and others, an how in spite of everything we all share in the same reality.