Introduction
As the years fall away, what matters most becomes clearer.1
As we live, we inevitably age. In these times, when so many are blessed with length of life, old age occupies an increasing share of the human lifespan and can extend across decades.
Ageing can be a revealing process—one that invites honesty, humility, and grace. As we age, our physical features become more marked by time, and our personalities more accentuated. Our quirks may shine through more clearly, and our inner selves, fears and vulnerabilities may gradually come to light. We experience changes that may limit what we are able to do, curtail our familiar activities and perhaps even shrink our social circles.
Yet, we have all met those exceptional elders who radiate peaceful calm and gracious serenity. We all wonder whether we could ever be like them. While not everyone reaches this state, their example reminds us of what is possible.
Regardless of the challenges that ageing brings, it offers opportunities for reflection, growth, and deepening wisdom. In old age, more than ever before, our need to live life from a spiritual perspective becomes increasingly evident. Even if we have coasted spiritually through our younger years, this quiet shift in life’s season can feel like a profoundly timely invitation to deeper reflection and renewal. This is wise, for spirituality has much to offer us through these final passages. Yet the relevance of spirituality to ageing, and the specific ways in which it can be applied in the context of ageing, are seldom explicitly discussed or explored.
Drawing on the Carmelite tradition, this article proposes two maxims which present themselves as essential to any spirituality of ageing. The first is to graciously let go of everything that will inevitably be stripped away. The second is to doggedly cling on to what cannot be taken from us.
Graciously letting go
As we grow older, and increasingly towards the end of life, we may find ourselves needing to let go of prestige, relationships, possessions, and capabilities. Many of these things were central to us in our younger years. Yet, all of them have their days numbered. One thing is for certain – whether it happens sooner or later, instantly or infinitesimally – everything that can be lost will be lost.
Carmelite spirituality affirms the central role of detachment—a grace into which ageing gently invites us. In her ‘Way of Perfection’, Teresa of Avila identifies love, humility and detachment as the three sustaining pillars of the spiritual life.2 Perhaps less familiar than the other two, detachment operates as a kind of ‘proto virtue’, a foundation on which the other virtues can build. Paradoxically, truly selfless love of another calls for detachment from anything that we may personally seek to gain from the relationship. Humility, equally, calls for detachment from self-image and personal agendas.
John of the Cross is sometimes known as the ‘doctor of detachment’. In his famous sketch of the Ascent of Mount Carmel, he describes the narrow central path up the mountain as one of ‘nada, nada, nada’ (‘nothing, nothing, nothing’), leaving aside both the temporal riches that encumber us to the right, and the spiritual riches that (it turns out) equally encumber us to the left.3
In practice, detachment may mean holding on to everything lightly or having things as though we do not possess them. This entails a conscious loosening of grip, so that when something is lost, it happens without any kind of resistance or struggle – let alone tug of war! We simply allow things to slip easily through our fingers. As Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians, ‘What I mean [. . .] is that the time is short. From now on those who [. . .] buy something [should live as though] it was not theirs to keep; those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away.’ (1 Corinthians 7: 29-31).
An important part of this can be the practice of gratitude, precisely because it helps us to avoid any sense of entrenched entitlement. If we experience everything as a gift that is renewed each morning, and each evening returned to God, then nothing stays in our hands for very long. This leads us to live out of our spiritual poverty, the fundamental truth that we owe everything to God, having nothing we can really call our own. All earthly things are on loan to us. Then, we can say with Job, ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’ (Job 1:21).
In our youth, we may be tempted to regard detachment as some kind of optional practice for the spiritually zealous, those who go in for voluntary mortifications, giving up the good things of this life in apparent perversity. However, as age advances, detachment no longer becomes a matter of choice. Things will be taken away from us, whether we like it or not, and irrespective of whether we are able to make any sense of it from a spiritual perspective. The ageing process will inevitably make ascetics of us all. Seen from this later vantage point, the voluntary mortifications of early life are there to train us for what is to come, to exercise our spiritual faculties in the practice of detachment.
In the last analysis, there are basically only two options available to us: either we detach from things or things detach from us. Either we give everything away or everything is taken from us. The outcome may look much the same, but spiritually there is a world of difference. So, becoming a gracious elder starts earlier in life, as we intentionally learn to let go of things before this is forced upon us.
Doggedly clinging on
But the Good News is that not everything is lost, because not everything can be lost. What cannot be lost is God himself. God who dwells in us. God who is—as John of the Cross would have it— ‘the centre of the soul’.4 Or, in the words of Paul, ‘Christ in you, the hope of glory’ (Colossians 1:27).
Jesus speaks of storing up heavenly – rather than earthly – treasures, precisely because the former cannot be taken away from us. Speaking to the apostles, Jesus says, ‘Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.’ (Matthew 6:20). Paul identifies this treasure that we hold in ‘earthen vessels’ as none other than ‘the light of the knowledge of the glory of God’ (2 Corinthians 4:6-7).
Yet, for much of our lives, and for most of our time, we are out of touch with this fundamental truth. Indeed, only through a deep life of prayer can such awe-inspiring theology become a lived reality. Teresa of Avila describes how, while God is dwelling all along in the innermost mansion of our Interior Castle, we often remain oblivious, preferring instead to wander about outside the castle beyond the moat.5 Prayer, she explains, is the means of entering the ‘castle’, turning our attention inwards and gradually journeying towards the interior dwelling place of the Divine King.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus transposes this same message into the context of the Eucharist. ‘Do not labour for the food which perishes, but the food which endures to eternal life.’ (John 6:27) This food he identifies with his Eucharistic self. ‘Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up on the last day.’ (John 6:54) In this way, Jesus makes clear that participation in the Eucharist is itself a practical means of clinging on to God’s life within us. In the context of ageing, as so many other things begin to fall by the wayside, it becomes ever more critical to adhere to this ultimate reality.
It is to hope that we must ultimately cling in the later reaches of life. Our hope is that Christ – with whom we are fully identified as heart of our heart, and soul of our soul – has already conquered death and gone to prepare a place for us (John 14:3). In the words of Paul, ‘We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where our forerunner, Jesus, has entered on our behalf.’ (Hebrews 6:19-20).
This clinging to God eventually enables us to let go of ourselves completely. John of the Cross identifies those moments of union with the Beloved as moments of utter self-forgetting, as he lyrically elaborates in the last stanza of his ‘Dark Night’ poem:6
‘I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.’
Conclusion
A spirituality of ageing, then, entails a combination of graciously letting go of everything that we know will ultimately be taken away from us in any case, while at the same time doggedly clinging on to that inalienable connection with God that we enjoy in the depths of our soul. What is undoubtedly a desirable spiritual path at any point in life becomes both essential and inescapable, as we advance in years.
Clearly, these two fundamental spiritual dispositions go hand-in-hand, and are mutually reinforcing. It is the fact that we can cling on to what is most precious in human life – our connection with God – that gives us the courage and strength to relinquish all lesser goods. At the same time, the more we disencumber ourselves of our temporal goods, the freer we become to receive everything from God. As John the Baptist says, ‘He must increase, I must decrease.’ (John 3:30). Indeed, ‘half of this equation never comes into operation alone, always both parts together, because God has bound them together in interdependence’ (SLG, 1990)7
Ageing is God’s way of preparing us for Himself, by weaving into the very biology of our lifecycle some of the central practices of the spiritual life.
Lastly, in the words of the writer to the Hebrews: ‘Therefore, we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. […] So, we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.[…] For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.’ (2 Corinthians 4:16-5:3)
- An original quote that reflects an acquaintance’s personal perspective. ↩︎
- See Teresa of Avila’s Chapter 4, no.4, in The Way of Perfection. Study Edition. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D, transls. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000), p. 66. ↩︎
- See John of the Cross’ Sketch for ‘The Ascent of Mount Carmel’, in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D, transls. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2017), pp.110-111. ↩︎
- See John of the Cross’ Commentary on Stanza 1 of ‘The Living Flame of Love’, no. 12 in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D, transls. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2017), p. 645. ↩︎
- See Teresa of Avila’s First Mansion, Chapter 1, nos.5-7, in The Interior Castle. Study Edition. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D, transls. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000), pp. 36-38. ↩︎
- See John of the Cross’ poem ‘The Dark Night’, Stanza 8 in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D, transls. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2017), p. 359. ↩︎
- See Sister Anke. The Creativity of Diminishment. (Fairacres, Oxford: SLG Press, Convent of the Incarnation, 1990). ↩︎
