Aging and Quaker Spirituality

“Late light, photographers tell us, is the richest light of all. In the hour before the sun sets, it imbues the landscape with depth and warmth. This is a dynamic and fleeting time. So too, in the last years of your life, your inner light begins to shift. New wavelengths prevail, slower and more beautiful. You can approach your life with greater clarity and tenderness.”

I hope you sense what a glorious future awaits you in old age. No longer will you dread the evening of life as a time of unremitting suffering and futility, but as an opportunity for continued growth in consciousness and service to humanity. What a vista, what a wonderful adventure, what a miraculous window of opportunity awaits us in old age!

“Old age is a great blessing, notwithstanding all the sufferings incident to it; for they are like harbingers, to bid us prepare.”

“Growing old, even when that means facing physical or other changes, can help us focus on what is essential. As we age, our perspective on what has meaning is refined. When we slow down, whether because of physical changes or by choice, we often become more contemplative. We may want to share memories and stories, to forgive or be forgiven, to express gratitude, to focus on our most essential values. Older adulthood offers the opportunity to model peace.”

“There are fewer and fewer things that truly matter. The years have accumulated such a store of inner lasting value that I no longer feel the weight of the perishable…. My life is becoming intensely focused on presence and Presence.”

“In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens.”

“In old age, a person may give birth to new things, in ways that seemed laughable when he or she was young. We strive in our youth for what we want from life. As we mature and grow in our spiritual journeys, we come to understand that what we desire may not accord with God’s will for us.”

“In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens.”

“It is very hard to find anything joyful if you are suffering grief, loss, pain or sadness. However, joy can emerge as a result of our faith; it is one of the “fruits of the spirit”. For Quakers, this can mean silent worship or prayer, either individually or in a group. We seek to come closer to the Spirit and to be open to Divine Guidance. As a result of worship, many of us feel deep connection to each other, to society, to the universe.”

“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God is Change.”

“I pray most for courage, especially as I get older and my bones can be broken more easily. The last time I was arrested, the roadway that I lay on was extremely hard, and I didn’t know what the police… might have in their minds.”

Who made the world? / Who made the swan, and the black bear? / Who made the grasshopper? / This grasshopper, I mean— / the one who has flung herself out of the grass, / the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, / who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— / who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

“We must be confident that there is still more ‘life’ to be ‘lived’ and yet more heights to be scaled. The tragedy of middle age is that, so often, men and women cease to press ‘towards the goal of their high calling’. They cease learning, cease growing; they give up and resign from life. As wisdom dawns with age, we begin to measure our experiences not by what life gives to us, not by the things withheld from us, but by their power to help us to grow in spiritual wisdom.”

“Each morning is new now. I wake to the inner music of thanks for the dear gift of life and with eager plans for the uses of the day. The first sound I hear, whether a flock of chirping birds, or the whispering wind, or of traffic with its urgency, is dear. The growing light is an omen, and a good one. Thoughts crowd in, and the mind’s wheels begin their busy turning like those of the cars and trucks out on the main road.”

“Every stage of our lives offers fresh opportunities. Responding to divine guidance, try to discern the right time to undertake or relinquish responsibilities without undue pride or guilt. Attend to what love requires of you, which may not be great busyness.”

“I am convinced it is a great art to know how to grow old gracefully, and I am determined to practise it… I always thought I should love to grow old, and I find it even more delightful than I thought. It is so delicious to be done with things, and to feel no need any longer to concern myself much about earthly affairs… I am tremendously content to let one activity after another go, and to await quietly and happily the opening of the door at the end of the passage-way, that will let me in to my real abiding place.”

“As I grow older, I seem to need more time for inner stillness…. This can happen in the midst of daily chores or when walking in a crowd or riding in a train. It means being still, open, reflective, holding within myself the crucible of joy and pain of all the world, and lifting it up to God.”

“The ability to sleep may well forsake us, leaving us wakeful for two or three hours in those darkest and most interminable hours of the night, say from two to five. This can be a real affliction: we can toss and turn and try angrily to fall asleep again. Or it can be an opportunity…”

“Sometimes religion appears to be presented as offering easy cures for pain: have faith and God will mend your hurts; reach out to God and your woundedness will be healed. The Beatitude ‘Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted’ can be interpreted this way too, but the Latin root of the word ‘comfort’ means ‘with strength’ rather than ‘at ease’. The Beatitude is not promising to take away our pain; indeed the inference is that the pain will remain with us. It does promise that God will cherish us and our wound, and help us draw a blessing from our distressed state.”

“The most effective workshop for learning how to hallow one’s diminishments is the faithful practice of contemplative prayer…. Loneliness, which is a negative experience, can be transmuted into solitude, which is a positive blessing. Loneliness of itself debilitates. Solitude builds up, affords a conscious setting in which significant growth in the life of the Spirit can take place. Solitude is a gift of time without accompanying distraction, an opportunity to keep company with one’s own soul. It is where the Holy Spirit can help one harness one’s own cross in such a way that it can be carried without too great strain. It is what St. Paul called, ‘the life which is hid with Christ in God.'”

“Six and one-half years into retirement, I ask: what is retirement for? The signposts around me are inadequate and the expectations ill- defined at best. The advice available is of the kind that says, ‘Start saving early so you’ll have enough money for what you want.’ ‘Watch your health so you’ll be able to do what you want.’ ‘Here are the 20 best places to live if you want to play golf, or fish, or enjoy the weather.’ ‘Do this or do that so you can leave to your heirs what you have worked so hard to accumulate.’ ‘Don’t be a burden to your children or interfere in their lives.’ ‘Get a hobby.’ ‘Volunteer.’ None of these seemed to come close to answering the question that opened for me: ‘What is retirement for?'”

“I departed for the wild blue yonder on November 6th, 2025. I look forward to someday meeting you there.”

“I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

“The truest end of life is to know the life that never ends. He that makes this his care, will find it his crown at last. And he that lives to live ever, never fears dying: nor can the means be terrible to him that heartily believes the end. For though death be a dark passage, it leads to immortality, and that’s recompense enough for suffering of it. And yet faith lights us, even through the grave, being the evidence of things not seen. And this is the comfort of the good, that the grave cannot hold them, and that they live as soon as they die. For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity. Death, then, being the way and condition of life, we cannot love to live, if we cannot bear to die.”

“In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?” 

“We must overcome death by finding God in it. And by the same token, we shall find the divine established in our innermost hearts, in the last stronghold which might have seemed able to withstand him.”

“‘I have made, and I will bear, and even to gray hairs will I carry you.’ Precious promise! Forever trust in it. Dismiss all anxious fears, all quailings of the fleshly mind in contemplating your transit to another state. He who gave you your being, and appointed your place and condition in this life, will not fail to be near you when you pass through the valley of the shadow of death.”

“I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

“In the general service of the church of God, the aged men, and aged women in the truth, are to be teachers of good things, as the Lord shall order them with his spirit, to teach and instruct, exhort, admonish, reprove, rebuke, with the holy spirit; for the least member hath an office, and every believer in the light, (which is the life in Christ,) is a member of Christ’s church, and grafted into him; and so he is the holy head of the church, and they are heirs of his order, and of his government, of the increase of which there is no end, in his eternal power and spirit.”

“We are wise when we see beyond certainty to the underlying, all encompassing, ever unfolding Mystery of life. Not only does this lighten our ideological burden and open us to each Other and to Change, but it allows us to befriend the ultimately unknowable Whole. Once we see through the illusion of certainty, humility is natural, humor is natural, and paradox, ambiguity and change become furry friends and teachers on our Journey though life. In the midst of wonder, we encounter each situation with the curiosity and sense of adventure befitting wise and joyful spirits — and our wisdom expands through the learning we do as we marvel at the nuance and vastness we encounter at each bend in the road.”

“Dying becomes the way to everlasting fruitfulness. Here is the most hope-giving aspect of death. Our death may be the end of our success, our productivity, our fame, or our importance among people, but it is not the end of our fruitfulness. In fact, the opposite is true: the fruitfulness of our lives shows itself in its fullness only after we have died. We ourselves seldom see or experience our own fruitfulness. Often we remain preoccupied with our accomplishments and have no eye for the fruitfulness of what we live. But the beauty of life is that it bears fruit long after life itself has come to an end. Jesus said, “In all truth I tell you, unless a wheat grain falls into the earth and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies it yields a rich harvest” (John 12:24).”

“Every spring, commencement speakers take the stage across the country to tell the graduates, ‘Our hopes for the future are in your hands.’ I have an urgent message for these speakers: in the name of God, don’t do it! It’s unfair to lay all responsibility for the future on the younger generation. After all, the problems they face are partly due to the fact that we, their elders, screwed up. Worse still, it’s not true that the young alone are in charge of what comes next. We—young and old together—hold the future in our hands.”

“If we are getting older it will be harder to acknowledge that we have not been called to spectacular service, that we are unlikely now to make a stir in the world, that our former dreams of doing some great healing work had a great deal of personal ambition in them. A great many men and women have had to learn this unpalatable lesson – and then have discovered that magnificent opportunities lay all around them. We need not go to the ends of the earth to find them; we need not be young, clever, fit, beautiful, talented, trained, eloquent or very wise. We shall find them among our neighbours as well as among strangers, in our own families as well as in unfamiliar circles – magnificent opportunities to be kind and patient and understanding.”

“As we age we need to learn how to grow down. Remember when we were children how adults seemed to delight in telling us—quite emphatically at times—to grow up? Sometimes they were impatiently and unrealistically hoping we’d resist the natural inclinations of childhood and conveniently turn into miniature adults. As we grew older, however, the message was really a hope that we would learn to be responsible and live up to our potential—learn how to climb mountains by tackling appropriate foothills first.”

We are all living in mortal bodies, in the grief and sweetness of impermanence, with the Mystery. Life is a tragedy and a gift, and as we age, we hope to nurture a spirituality deep enough to embrace both.  This month we heard from Friends in later life, aging with intention. They are opening to love’s mature fullness, finding meaning in their own stories, shifting their focus to the present, and remaining open to new leadings. Since reading the advice of Bradford Smith (3/8) to “taste… everything, both for the first time and the last,” I sometimes find myself overwhelmed with gratitude for the profound beauty of familiar things. I hope this is a change in perspective I can keep up the energy to maintain.