SR. JOAN CHITISTER- SPIRITUAL WRITER

In her excellently written book, The Gift of Years, Sr. Joan focuses in her introduction a scene:

It is a January morning in County Kerry. the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of the craggy islands below me is roild with whitecaps and angry palisades of water crashing against the tiny islets in their rocky midst. the windstorm of the last two nights have drenched the hills on which this small Irish stone cottage clings, left them dripping water from bare branches hours later, sent the tiny rivulet of water outside my window rushing wildly down the mountainside to the valley below. It is an average Kerry winter day.

But not average for some. In the last two days of rocking, howling wind, five Irish fishermen and their trawler have been reported missing at sea. This morning, they were pronounced dead, the sea too wild yet to even attempt to recover their bodies.

Who they were, how old they were, I do not know. But one thing I do know - life and time are ghost creatures for us all.

Most of us, inch our way through life, sure on the one hand that it will never end, certain on the other that it will surely be ending for us soon.

Is at moments of such quiet consciousness that is is important come face to face with what it means to age, to be older, to be old, to become an elder in society."

Sr. Joan continues and states that Life is about becoming more than we are, about being all that we can be. Whatever we are doing, however old we are, wherever we fall on the social economic scale

THE GIFT OF YEARS is for those who are on the brink of "old age" ...and knowing themselves to be young and healthy, are very surprised by it.

On the chapter LONELINESS she writes -

A burden of these years is that
we will hole up somewhere and mourn our age,
our change in life, our losses.

A blessing of these years is that
we will make ourselves available to the
world that is waiting for us even now. even here.