Category: Older People

  AGEING AND CARE OF THE SOUL   Thomas Moore has described the fundamental psychological problem of contemporary life as a lack of “soul.” As Moore understands the problem, “soul” is not exclusively a religious term but rather “a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, […]

BEDE GRIFFITHS: THE MONK GROWS OLD Father Bede Griffiths was a a Catholic monk who spent most of his life as a “Christian Yogi” in India, where he expounded the unity of world religions: “(Father Bede) said at the age of 85 he begged to differ with those who think that life is all over […]

In old age something special happens to reality. Its hardness is softened by the  experience of transitoriness. Persons who once seemed indispensable die. One after another disappears — parents, teachers, onetime superiors first, contemporaries next. One has the feeling that a former generation has come to an end and that the following, one’s own, is […]

The Master said, ‘At fifteen I set my heart upon learning At thirty, I had planted my feet upon firm ground. At forty, I no longer suffered from perplexities. At fifty, I knew what were  the biddings of Heaven At sixty, I heard them with a docile ear. At seventy, I could follow the dictates […]

The poet Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006) wasn’t too old, as shown in this poem, written when Kunitz was nearly a hundred years old: “The Layers” I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. […]

One very old way of depicting that shape of our destiny and humanity  is to picture life as a banquet, with a succession of courses through which one proceeds —    and also, to be sure, having a stopping point beyond which the banquet cannot be prolonged without destroying its pleasure. Both host and guest at […]

  Rainer Marie Rilke’s poem “The Walk” invokes an image of later life, a time of life by which we are grasped even if we cannot grasp it– that “sunny hill” which belongs to old age imagined as ‘our future selves:’ My eyes already touch the sunny hill, going far ahead of the road I […]

From the vantage point of youth, sorrows in later life seem so relentless that we cannot imagine living through them. We watch elders lose friends and relatives, give up beloved houses, and relinquish cherished involvements.  It an seem that later life is composed of interludes between disasters.  What consolation could there be?  We conclude that […]

Aging is no accident.  It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose: the fulfillment and confirmation of one’s character. […]

How do you view your ageing?     In this culture aging is a dirty word. Youth is the thing.  Old people make themselves up to look like young people.  You think you have to do it because youth is what’s “in”.  It’s a cultural thing.  Still, it’s a fact of nature that the body inevitably […]

Here is the opening to my lecture in Southwark Cathedral last night In a science museum, there is one exhibit in particular which attracted long lines of children: “Face Ageing”. A child sits down in front of an automatic camera and has their portrait taken. They wait and their digitized bust appears on a TV  […]