Inevitably the time comes when we see that the road ahead of us is much shorter than the one we have already traveled. We can give in to sadness, or we can savor the abundant graces all around us, even now.
The idea of “journey” as a metaphor for human life is at least as old as Dante. His Divine Comedy begins,
Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost.
Like Dante, many writers and thinkers have focused on middle age as a time of crisis, change, and self-discovery. There is a vast popular literature on midlife crisis as well as articles and publications directed to psychologists and other professionals. Even Cicero’s classic De Senectute (On Old Age), written in the century before Christ, has recently been published in a modern translation subtitled Ancient Wisdom for the Second Half of Life. The Australian theologian Gerald O’Collins popularized the term second journey to describe these experiences. He cites the stories of Ignatius, St. Teresa of Calcutta, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the disciples on the road to Emmaus, among others, as examples of sudden changes of direction in midlife that led to profound spiritual growth.46
If we use the metaphor of journey, there is no reason to divide it into only two parts. Shakespeare, of course, described seven ages of man, although he found little to aspire to in any of them. O’Collins refers in passing to the possibility of “one last journey” at the end of life. Whatever the divisions, the boundaries are often indistinct. On the spiritual journey, there are many detours and wrong turns, and we sometimes seem to be caught in an endless roundabout. Those of us who have left middle age behind but are not in Shakespeare’s “second childishness and mere oblivion” are in another stage of the journey. I invite you to consider its potential for grace by looking at where we have come from and where we are going.47
No matter how old we are or how we have lived, we all have some “unfinished business.” There are disappointments that still hurt: the couple who couldn’t have children; the manager who was downsized from a satisfying job. There are missed opportunities that we recognize only with the wisdom of maturity, “the road not taken,” in Robert Frost’s phrase. There are old hurts and resentments that still burn.
We cannot change the past, but we can mine it for spiritual wisdom. As a way into the graces to which our memory may lead, I suggest a variation on the examen, covering not one day but a longer period. A retreat is an optimal setting for this exercise, but it can be done whenever you have an uninterrupted period of quiet.
Ask the Holy Spirit for guidance in choosing a period of time to focus on. You may want to start from the last major transition in your life or go further back. The period can be long or short—whatever seems right to you. I usually try to do this on New Year’s Day, looking back over the preceding year.
Next, focus on feelings and memories. Each person’s life story will present different questions, but some examples are as follows:
Of all that happened in that period, for what am I most grateful?
Have I expressed my gratitude to the people involved? To God? Can I do that now? Often, the people who have been instruments of grace for us are no longer with us, but we can hold them in our hearts as we thank God for them.
What are the most powerful emotions that surface as I look back?
What gave rise to joy, anger, disappointment?
Did these emotions spring from an action, an event, or an attitude of mind or heart that prevailed at that time?
Which ones led me to God, and which ones led me away?
Can the memory of these feelings lead me to God in the present?
Are there emotional doors that were closed in the past that I can open now?
How can the wisdom of the present illumine my understanding of the past?
The answers to these questions will often lead naturally to the next:
For what do I need forgiveness?
Is there someone, living or dead, whose forgiveness I need to ask?
Is there someone I need to forgive for past hurts, trivial or serious?
Can I forgive myself for missed opportunities or mistakes or the persistence of negative feelings?
Has God forgiven me?
Have I asked God’s forgiveness?
Finally, ask God for the grace to look forward in hope.
At some point in the aging process, we confront financial planning, estate planning, health-care proxies, and other matters that look to the end of life and beyond. It can be difficult to deal with these things; some people postpone taking action precisely because doing so involves thinking about death. Ignatius’s rules for decision making and discernment, discussed in the previous chapters, can be helpful here. Following are some suggestions to pray about:
A health-care proxy and a living will can relieve the anguish of a loved one who might be called upon to make difficult decisions.
People who have no close relatives also need someone to make decisions for them if they cannot. Is there a friend who knows and shares your values about end-of-life care? If he or she is willing to be named as your health-care proxy, you are more likely to receive care in accordance with your own values and wishes than if the decisions are left to doctors and nurses.
Pre-planning of funerals and burial arrangements saves money and reduces stress on survivors who would otherwise have to make these decisions on short notice, with little time for research.
Thoughtful estate planning can reduce the possibility of quarrels or animosity among children or grandchildren, especially in large or blended families or where some children or grandchildren have special needs.
Even people with few assets should have a will, especially if they have no immediate family. A friend of mine, a psychologist who worked with developmentally disabled adults, used up most of her savings during a long illness. She steadfastly refused to make a will on the grounds that “I don’t have an estate.” When she died, the few thousand dollars in her bank account went by default to the State of New York. It wasn’t much money, but it could have been put to better use helping the people to whom she had devoted her entire career.
But what about our spiritual legacy? Have our loved ones, our friends, and those whose lives we may have touched without realizing it experienced grace because of us? My immigrant grandparents died when I was in my late teens. I often think of questions I wish I had asked them. Children and teenagers growing up today have an unparalleled facility with audio and video technologies that can lend themselves to oral history projects. Tell them your stories.
Can you share your spiritual journey? For some people, the feelings they share with Jesus are too intimate to be shared with anyone else. For others, there may be some insights that are so powerful they cry out to be shared. It isn’t necessary to preach to your friends and family about what you have learned. But don’t overlook opportunities to share your story.
As we age, especially in the later years, it can be all too easy to focus on the past and to think of the future in terms of planning for death. But we are alive in the present, and no matter how long or short our life span, we live our spiritual life in the present. Prayer, always a constant in a God-centered life, can become ever richer with the experience of years.
Ministry of Prayer. Whether or not we are engaged in active ministry, some of us may have the time and space to develop a more contemplative attitude. Thomas Clarke, SJ, has argued for a ministry of intercessory prayer:
If intercession, then, is the name of the game, I believe that the group best fitted to lead it is the world’s elders. We qualify for that role not through our wisdom or even through our prophetic gifts, if we have them, but through our special brand of poverty. In generational terms, it is we who are the anawim—the poor—through whom God works wonders. However reduced in physical, mental, emotional powers, and whether we are still “active” or “retired,” we can model for all that intercessory offering of “prayers, works, joys and sufferings” through which the world is graced.48
Fr. Clarke is not advocating a passive attitude of prayer as a substitute for an active life. Rather, he is inviting those impoverished in the ways particular to old age to claim their place in the communion of saints, as active instruments of grace for all the people in their lives and many they will never know. In the words of the popular hymn, “The Lord hears the cry of the poor.”
Praying through the Pain. Anyone who has ever tried to read the Bible or use a popular prayer app while recovering from surgery or undergoing chemotherapy can describe how difficult it is to pray in these circumstances. The words swim on the page; the meanings don’t register; the mind wanders; the pain blots out all other thoughts; when the pain subsides, drowsiness takes over; some passages trigger worries and anxieties; the joyful ones seem irrelevant.
At first glance, Ignatius seems an unlikely guide to prayer in such circumstances. As a soldier, he prided himself on not showing any sign of pain and, for a period after his conversion, he was drawn to extreme penances.49 Where his wisdom speaks to the aging, and particularly the suffering aging, is in the overriding objective of modeling ourselves after Jesus.
To know, love, and follow Jesus means experiencing pain as Jesus experienced it. In reading the Passion narratives and about the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, applying the principles of imaginative prayer or lectio divina may show us how to let go of our fears and lead us to a new experience of hope. Or, as Jesus told the disciples at the Last Supper, “Where I am going you know the way” (John 14:4).
The early Christians had a much deeper appreciation of the continuity of earthly life and life eternal. For St. Paul, the disciples who had died after seeing the risen Jesus had merely “fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:6). For his and the immediately succeeding generations, martyrdom was an imminent threat. St. Perpetua, imprisoned in Carthage around AD 202, wrote of a dream of heaven in which a deacon of her community called out to her, “Perpetua, come, we are waiting for you.”50 Those who faced martyrdom, or who knew the stories of those who had experienced it, identified with the death and Resurrection of Jesus as the meaning of the Christian life. For them, the Resurrection was not merely a proof of Jesus’ divinity or a fact to celebrate at Easter; it was a promise of eternal life that was as real as the Christian’s life on earth.
In modern times, we have lost that sense of the continuity of earthly and eternal life. The martyrs’ stories—so long ago in such a different world—have no immediacy for us. Where cancer and terrorism are more immediate threats than dying for the faith, there is little feeling of connection with the martyrs. Even those listed in the Roman Canon (now Eucharistic Prayer I) are rarely invoked, since at least in the United States the shorter forms of the Eucharistic Prayer are much more common. In a secular society where belief in the afterlife is a minority view, we keep our thoughts to ourselves.
Although Ignatius prescribes a meditation on hell for the First Week and includes among the criteria for decision making the advice that we imagine ourselves “at the point of death” or “on judgment day,” he has little explicit advice on how one should look on death.51 This is not surprising, since his expectation was that the Exercises would most often be made by young people making decisions about their state of life.52 For those of us who are long past such milestones, it is significant that a person making the full Exercises spends the entire second half of the experience meditating on the passion and Resurrection of Jesus. While anyone, at any stage of life, can experience abundant grace meditating on the passion and Resurrection of our Lord, these mysteries can be particularly consoling to those who are aware that the time remaining on their spiritual journey is diminishing.
In the previous chapter, I mentioned my experience meditating on the women at the foot of the cross, deep in sorrow because they did not know about the Resurrection. We don’t know when or how our own stories will end, but we do know how the story of Jesus ended. Instead of looking backward toward what has been lost or given up, we can ask for the grace to look forward with hope to life eternal, remembering the promise of Jesus: “I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice and no one will take your joy away from you” (John 16:22).
At the end of the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius prescribes the following prayer, usually called the suscipe, from the first word in the Latin version:
Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and all my will—all that I have and possess. You, Lord, have given all that to me. I now give it back to you, O Lord. All of it is yours. Dispose of it according to your will. Give me your love and your grace, for that is enough for me.53
This kind of surrender is vastly different from giving up material goods. I have often wondered whether the middle-aged Ignatius had any inkling of the reaction this prayer might evoke in someone whose liberty was circumscribed by declining health, whose short-term memory was fading, and who was worrying about loss of understanding and will in the event of dementia. I venture to suggest that people in their seventies and eighties might have a fuller grasp of the magnitude of this prayer than a young person choosing a state in life.
Can a person confined to a nursing home after a stroke or an accident freely and sincerely ask God to “take . . . my liberty”? What about surrendering my understanding? It is no surprise that some people find this prayer difficult or impossible. But even for those of us who have difficulty with consenting to the diminishment that comes with age, the words of the suscipe are a reminder that everything is God’s gift: every breath we take, every beat of our hearts, every memory we cherish, every thought that fills our minds. God may not be asking us to give up any of these gifts, just yet. But as we grow older, we should be able to be more grateful for all the graces God has showered upon us and never cease to thank and praise God every day of our lives. When we are asked to surrender, the grace will be there.
John 14:1–7
John 21:18
Revelation 21:1–3
Passion narratives: Matthew 26:1–27:61; Mark 14:17–15:47; Luke 22:31–23:55; John 18:1–19:45
Post-resurrection appearances: John 18:1–19:45; Mark 16:1–8, 9–19; Luke 24:1–51; John 20:1–21:23; Acts 1:3–9; 1 Corinthians 15:5–8