Aging: The Master Teacher

Why, you may ask, do some persons age/mature with such patience and grace, with wholeness and peace; while others protest, resist, or simply resign?  There’s no escaping the fact that aging brings losses, it seems that we are given things only to have them taken away.  Our once strong, healthy bodies will eventually let us down.  Our achievements, our reasons for pride, will fade and may even lose their former luster.  We will change, we will be different, and we may not like the process.  I don’t know too many people who can’t wait to be 95!  We live in...

The Christian psychologist Karl Jung once said that “Attitude is the mind’s paintbrush, it can color any situation.”  Certainly our attitude toward maturation (aging) colors our later lifespan.   Human and spiritual growth can be likened to a process of opening new doors, while closing others.  To confidently open the doors to healthy life in our maturing years we need to gently close other doors on our previous life stage.    These doors lead to attitudes in our own mind.  But which doors need opening and which ones need closing?  Doors that say: Being young is good and being older is not,...

 “Aging is the senseless slippage into nothingness.”  I was flabbergasted when I read this definition of aging in an old sociology textbook.  What a stark view of aging, I thought; yet it gave me pause.  When viewed through human eyes alone, aging does become little more than a succession of losses ending in nothingness.   As Christians we are called to view aging in new light.  When we take the logs out of our own eyes, we can see that aging is one of the means that the Holy Spirit uses to teach us who we really are.  Such a new...