Welcome to the final edition of the year, our annual “best of” issue featuring the best content about spirituality and aging of 2015.
This edition of the Digest is especially meaningful as I am experiencing it as not only the culmination of a year’s work, but of the past decade of my life.
It would be impossible to have immersed myself in all of the literature that has been featured over the course of our 4000 Digest entries, not to mention my own 5 books on the subject, and not have been deeply impacted. This issue of the Digest alone has the power to change lives.
Thank you for your support and company on what I am increasingly experiencing as the grand freedom and adventure of growing older.
I close with a favorite quote by Thomas Merton, who writes: “This time is given to me by God that I may live in it. It is not given to make something out of it.”
Fiercely Yours,
Editor-in-Chief, Carol Orsborn
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“No matter how much we’ve shoved it to the back burner for other matters that seemed more pressing at the time, our hunger for awareness greater than this small self, bound by birth and death, can still be ours to fulfill and to experience and to abide in. At this point in our lives, we need to decide if we really want to live and die smaller and more impoverished than we need to be. Are we willing to leave this unimaginably precious gift of a human life unopened?…
The only person who can answer the questions posed by the often painful challenges of aging is the person we will be in the moment we confront those circumstances. The shaping of that person into someone with greater wisdom and equanimity can begin in this moment.”
–Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older
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“What if people began to experience age-related changes in consciousness as essentially mystical in nature?…As we move into old age, our familiar identity loses its importance. It is fading or long gone. We also begin to lose interest in thought itself—our thoughts no longer seen so important and seem to disappear more quickly, along with all the underlying ideas that structure our conventional understanding of identity, time, reality, and story.
As these contents of consciousness empty, we can become aware of consciousness itself, pure and omnipresent. Exploring this experience, we discover, as the mystics before us, that consciousness is not ‘mine’, but rather part of the vast and all-inclusive consciousness we call Divinity pervading the cosmos. When we experience consciousness directly, free of thought, we are literally experiencing Divinity, and a door to eternity opens in the human psyche…Aging is enlightenment in slow motion.”
John C. Robinson The Three Secrets of Aging: Seeking Enlightenment in the New Aging,
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“The idea of most spiritual practice is ultimately to dissolve the practitioner. If that is what you really want, then your desire is not to be spiritual but to be invisible—not to have a special robe to signify your spiritual attainment, not to disappear into the delights of your own psyche, not even to retire from the world…
We have become so culturally addicted to doing, to getting somewhere and becoming someone, that the same tendency bleeds over into the spiritual life. Even relaxation, the quintessential doing nothing, is something you have to practice, and seriously, in a class for which the time slot is logged into your diary…
A fully lived life is not dependent on what we do or on whether we deem it to be worthwhile or not. It is about the sheer simplicity of being. Being what? That we shall discover only when we rest awhile from being everything that we think we are, including being a meditator or a spiritual practitioner.”
–Roger Housden, Keeping the Faith Without a Religion
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DIGNIFY THE SHOCK
In his inspired book Kaddish , author Leon Weiselter writes: “There are circumstances that must shatter you; and if you are not shattered, then you have not understood your circumstances. In such circumstances, it is a failure for your heart not to break, and it is pointless to put up a fight, for a fight will blind you to the opportunity that has been presented by your misfortune.”
At times like these, indeed all the time as we grow older, author and gerontologist Jane Marie Thieboult, who originally shared this quote with me, suggests that we think of our lives not as a journey, but as a pilgrimage. Mature spirituality is not just about smelling the roses on an endless path. The truth is that like it or not, we are all on our way to the same ultimate destination. “Dignify the shock,” she writes. “Sink, so as to rise.”
I first heard the quote from Kaddish and Jane Marie Thieboult’s insights about life as pilgrimage not journey when we each presented at ASA 2014. I first shared them as part of my presentation at the Sage-ing International Conference.
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“In our youth, we are afraid lest anyone see our doubts and insecurities. Self-importance is exhausting. As we get older, our shame diminishes or comes to seem pointless.
Once we see how much company we have in our difficulties, we give our humiliations less weight in our own reckoning and we are more apt to be open about our weaknesses. To welcome being ‘common as mud’ brings us closer to true contently. We have much less inclination to be judgmental, to scorn others, or to find fault.
We are far less impressed by how much money someone has made or how many professional accolades they have piled up. To be wealthy in relationships comes to seem the most valuable kind of fortune. Who is somebody who is nobody? We recognize that we are all essentially the same when it comes to living and dying, and it is a relief.”
Wendy Lustbader, Life Gets Better: The Unexpected Pleasures of Growing Older
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“Though drab outside—wreckage to the eye…inside we flame with a wild life that is almost incommunicable…
It has to be accepted as passionate life, perhaps the life I never lived, never guessed I had it in me to live. It feels other and more than that. It feels like the far side of precept and aim. It is just life, the natural intensity of life, and when old we have it for our reward and doing.
It can—at moments—feel as though we had it for our glory. Some of it must go beyond good and bad, for at times—though comes rarely, unexpectedly—it is a swelling clarity as though all was resolved.
It has no content, it seems to expand us, it does not derive from the body, and then it is gone. It may be a degree of consciousness which lies outside activity, and which when young we are too busy to experience.”
Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days
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“One word describes my prayer for old age—‘nothing.’
I try to keep my mind free of thoughts while becoming present to the sacred and the Holy One. Of course, I do not succeed in jettisoning all thinking but I keep returning to simple awareness of being in the presence of God.
Simplicity is the trait that characterizes my prayer and my other spiritual activities as I grow further toward old age. No longer do I feel it necessary to say much but content myself with just being there. ‘I look at him and He looks at me’ is the way someone describes the prayer of the heart, the expression of a simple simplicity to which I aspire.”
–Richard Barry Griffin, Becoming Merely Human: A Spiritual Journey to Imperfection
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THE SECRET OF ENLIGHTENMENT
After chanting Buddha’s name for years, an old woman suddenly feels “all the falsehoods of her life drop away and she is completely and utterly awake. Thrilled, she rushes to see the great Zen Master Hakuin, telling him that her whole body is filled with Buddha and that all of the mountains and rivers, forests and fields are shining with great enlightenment.
He looks at her: ‘Oh really?” he says. ‘And is this great light also shining up your butt?’
Even though the old woman is tiny, she pushes him over, shouting, ‘Well, I can see you still have work to do yourself, old man!’
They laugh themselves silly and are so happy that they dance and dance and dance—awakeness meeting awakeness.”
–Geri Larkin, “The Secret of Abiding Joy” in Spirituality/Health.com, Nov/Dec. 2015
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Contact Dr. Carol Orsborn at Carol@FierceWithAge.com
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