“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.”
“Old age is a great blessing, notwithstanding all the sufferings incident to it; for they are like harbingers, to bid us prepare.”
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!
March 2026: Friends share their experiences aging with intention. We read about older people living life in wholeness and joy, embracing quiet years, finding the spiritual dimension of illness and pain, grappling with their fear of death, and finding satisfying ways to share their wisdom.
“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.”
“For the first time, our monthly theme was based on one quote: ‘Truth will not lose ground by being tried.’ Isaac Penington wrote these words in a letter to a friend in 1670, assuring her that truth will always prevail, saying, ‘Darkness is afraid of the light, because it has a secret sense that it cannot stand before it.’ In our era of ‘fake news,’ we explored what it means to live truthfully, to seek Divine truth, and to share it with others.”
“When I was taught to draw, I was told to look carefully at my subject if I wanted to faithfully reproduce it. When you try to sketch a flower, if you approach it thinking you know what a flower looks like and you draw that, you’ll produce a flower—maybe a good-looking flower—but not the flower. You need to take the care and time to reject what you expect and draw what you see: shadows, shapes, absences, and blemishes, details that might surprise you.”
“Simply acknowledging our dual citizenship in the world and in Christ brings the Spirit of Truth into the ways we live our lives daily. As we begin to see the ways we act out of our separateness, out of our small selves, we step out of illusion and into Christ where Love and Truth work hand in hand… The movement of the Spirit is toward wholeness, toward healing and binding what separates us.”
A rebuttal to a pamphlet slandering Quakers:
“Oh! was here ever the like in any age seen, who professe Christ, live in so much Impudency, breathing of lyes and slanders, what an unsavoury smell is this, that comes from those, that calls themselves Christians, and Churches, but we see thy fruit, in thy paper, and thy smell is gone out into the Nation, and recorded thou art, and answered shall be to that in thy conscience, in the day of thy condemnation.”
“We stand at a perilous moment. Truth and integrity are being undermined to the extent that democracy itself is under threat, exactly when we need to work together. Many of those in power seem to act with impunity, disregarding facts and scientific findings. Respect for the judiciary is being undermined and trust in our institutions threatened.”
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