People who need our prayerful thoughts

Lewis Richmond’s book Aging as a Spiritual Practice: A Contemplative Guide to Growing Older and Wiser speaks about ageing not as a time of decay, but as a time of fulfillment. If each pebble is a week left in your expected lifespan, Richmond writes, then you can still run your fingers through then.

Richmond penned one of the most beautiful quotes on ageing that I have read yet. This resonates with me deeply: “One of the inevitable consequences of growing older is that each of us has an ever-expanding list of people who need our prayerful thoughts.”

Praising God for our limits

Kelly M. Kapic’s moving book You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News is all about the “gift of finitude” — human limitations are a gift from God and an essential part of God’s design. Kapic writes that “[…] we might even praise God for our limits.”

This book also invites us to take a wider perspective on life and, in the limited human lifespan, see a balanced and meaningful life that we might struggle to connect with day-to-day: “[…] [O]n any given morning, we dislike the person we see staring back at us from the mirror. We see bags under our eyes and anticipate a day of laying bricks or cleaning or being stuck in endless and unfruitful meetings. […] When we step back to imagine things from God’s perspective, we might get a fresh view of what a faithful and rich life looks like: my guess is that it is much slower, more ordinary and earthy, but also more beautiful than we anticipate.”

Dedicating oneself to spiritual practice

Carmel Shalev’s book In Praise of Ageing: Awakening to Old Age with Wisdom and Compassion explores similar themes. Shalev writes: “In certain Eastern wisdom traditions, [ageing] is perceived as the start of a spiritual journey toward the end of life. Once one has taken care of their own [family and professional responsibilities], in the third stage of retirement, one may pass on household responsibilities, take an advisory role and gradually withdraw from worldly life. In the fourth and final stage, one is free to leave home, renounce material desires and dedicate themselves to their spiritual path.”

The privilege of ageing

Given the themes of the books from which I have quoted above, you might be surprised to see this article concluding with a sapphic romance novel. But Margin of Error by Rachel Lacey, while a cozy love story, explores themes of mortality, meaning, and pursuing one’s dreams.

Early in the novel, Marin and Charlotte are brought together by the trauma of a car crash, which leaves Marin seriously injured.

Two years later, during the main plot of the story, Marin has largely recovered but is still limited by those old injuries.

I found this passage touching: “Marin squinted at her phone. In her distraction, she’d forgotten to grab her reading glasses, and these days she was helpless without them. Losing her perfect vision had been one of the more humbling aspects of entering her forties, at least until she’d gotten hit by a car. Now glasses seemed a small price to pay for the privilege of getting older.”