The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully
Not only accepting but celebrating getting old, this inspirational and illuminating work looks at the many facets of the aging process, from purposes and challenges to struggles and surprises. Central throughout is a call to cherish the blessing of aging as a natural part of life that is active, productive, and deeply rewarding. Perhaps the most important dimension revealed lies in the awareness that there is a purpose to aging and intention built into every stage of life. Chittister reflects on many key issues, including the temptation towards isolation, the need to stay involved, the importance of health and well-being, what happens when old relationships end or shift, the fear of tomorrow, and the mystery of forever. Readers are encouraged to surmount their fears of getting older and find beauty in aging well.
The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully Accessories
 Seven Sacred Pauses: Living Mindfully Through the Hours of the Day
Welcome to the Wisdom of the World: And Its Meaning for You
To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings
Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life
Things Hidden: Scripture As Spirituality
Open the Door: A Journey to the True Self
Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God
The Shack
Prayer (Catholic Spirituality for Adults)
Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope
The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully Reviews
These are the years, she says, quoting E.M. "The thing most wrong about this book," Joan Chittister tells us in this vibrant collection of essays on growing old, "is that I may be too young to write it. She writes about regret, relationships, religion; about fulfillment and freedom; about limitations. It is for all those who are searching for ways to learn, grow, and make the best of our gifts in deeply troubled times. reviewing books by, for, and about women.
by Susan Wittig Albert. for Story Circle Book Reviews. The Gift of Years is a full basket of rich gifts: forty-plus short essays on the many dimensions of eldering, "its purpose and its challenges, its struggles and its surprises." Each essay begins with words of wisdom from someone who has considered the meaning of growing old, then tells a brief story or an anecdote, offers a reflection, and invites us to participate in a meditation on the burden and blessing of the years. Chittister's essays are rich in variety, nimble in thought, and resonantly prophetic in voice. The burden of years is allowing time to "hang heavy on my hands," Chittister writes; a blessing of years is to "realize what an important and lively time this final period is.".
This is a book to be kept beside a favorite chair and savored slowly, thoughtfullyno gulping hereand to be reread as we move into "the twilight time," the last years in which we must find the strength to trust others, bear weakness well, and surrender to acceptance. I am, after all, only seventy." She is, she tells us, among those whom gerontologists call the "young old," those who are sixty-five to seventy-four and may not yet have attained the ripest wisdom. It is written not only for those of us who are among the old, but for everyone: we are all growing older, and all of us may eventually undertake the search for meaning and fulfillment that lies at the deepest heart of the aging process. We are indeed fortunate that Chittister decided not to postpone the writing of The Gift of Years, for it is full of the grace of decades of thought and meditation. In "Time," for instance, Chittister quotes Pablo Picasso: "It takes a long time to become young." There is an anecdote about a potter named Thomas, who at eighty had lived long enough "to release the beginner in himself again and again." There are reflections: time ages things; time deepens things; time ripens things. The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully is not just for elders.
Forster, when we must be "willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.". And then there is the meditation.
This book is a gift to all who elect to read it. It invites us to important places. It is full of wisdom about the spiritual tasks of aging.
Great stuff. One of my favorite reflections dealt with the exegis of "emotionally neutral" thoughts and memories. Jay It is a must read for those headed into that time of life as well as those who are there already. This is one of the best books I have read this year. A wonderful and engaging book that is full of wisdom and reflection on the "art of aging" well.
That is wisdom worth pondering, especially when you consider that the average retirement age is about sixty-four, which means the average American also has another twenty years to live and to love. Now that she has passed her seventieth birthday, Chittister explores what it means to grow older gracefully. But we also enjoy the possibilities of the "eternity of the spirit" and the frame of mind we choose to follow.
Having worked long and hard to make a living, Chittister advises that our older years offer us the chance to make a life. In The Gift of Years she writes for a broader audience that is not necessarily Christian or even religious. Our own life.". To do this she has written short (3-5 pages each) meditations on forty themes like regret, ageism, adjustment, letting go, sadness, solitude, success, etc. Which is to say that much of my future of growing older is what I intentionally choose to make it. She begins each chapter with a pithy aphorism from a broad range of poets and prophets, both ancient and modern Plato and Picasso, Browning and Byron, Emily Dickinson and Jung.
I've especially enjoyed Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope (2003) based upon the Jacob narrative, Listen with the Heart (2003), and Called to Question (2004). We all face the inexorable biology of the body and the deterioration of our physical condition. A blessing of these years is to give another whole meaning to what it is to be alive, to be ourselves, to be full of life. On the idea of the future, for example, she writes, "The burden of these years is to assume that the future is already over. After the brief meditation, she summarizes the chapter by observing both the "burden" and the "blessing" of the theme under consideration. Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun, has written over twenty-five books that map the terrain of the Christian life, with special attention paid to issues of feminism, international justice, the monastics, and reform in the Catholic Church.
One can choose to age passively or actively, says Chittister.
This one will not leave my bedroom. Because each chapter is a nearly self-contained, succinct, fascinating reflection full of surprising insights and good questions about aging, I tuck it under the pillow to read a bit just before I turn out the light. I go happily to sleep pondering something better than my aching bones, so I save on Tylenol. This book is a keeper. All my friends love Joan Chittister's intelligence, wit, courage, and style, so we read her books and pass them around. Each little essay is re-readable, and like Shakespeare's plays, keeps giving new insights with each reading. That's the gift of Sister Joan.
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