On Spirituality of aging Part 3

I am a writer at heart and have kept journals over the years. The journals are a mix of reporting on recent events and spiritual reflections. Occasionally I will take out an old journal and read through it. It is a helpful variation on the autobiography exercise. It gives you a sense of where you were ten or twenty years ago on your spiritual journey and allows you to compare your understanding at that point with your understanding today. You can still ask the same questions I suggested above, but this gives you a point of comparison.

Another approach is to focus on your personal qualities, your strengths and weaknesses. It requires a bit of reflection to honestly assess our strengths and weaknesses. We are often blind to our personal qualities.  In some cases, we are narcissistic and think that we excel in qualities that others might not perceive in us. In other cases, we are too self-deprecating and fail to see the very qualities that others identify as the most obvious.

As we identify qualities, it is important to find examples of those qualities and to see how those qualities have played out in our life and how they have affected other people. We may discover that are identified strengths may have had a negative impact on others, or even on the course of our life. What we may initially perceive as weakness may have ultimately had a positive effect.

For example, a person may perceive a stubborn clinging to his or her goals until they are achieved as a strength. Yet, in the process the methods to achieve those goals do damage to many others and cause a great deal of suffering. Is that self-perceived strength truly a strength or a weakness? Is the virtue in reaching the goal or in acting for the benefit of others?

One of the ideas that is argued in “The Good Place” is that no one has gotten into heaven in the last five hundred years. This is because life has gotten too complicated.  While we may act with good intentions, there are many unintended consequences of our actions that do harm to others.

For example, a person may buy a bunch of flowers to give to his or her mother as a sign of affection. While the intention was positive and virtuous, the fertilizer used to grow the plants was not environmentally safe, the plants were genetically modified which may have long term negative effects on the environment, and the workers who tended the flowers were paid substandard wages. The unintended consequences of purchasing the flowers were to harm the environment and to exploit migrant farm workers. While the person purchasing the flowers was unaware of the negative consequences, a bit of research on Google could have made him or her aware of these negative consequences.

“The Good Place” seems to hold humans to a higher standard that Catholic moral teaching, which acknowledges that ignorance mitigates our culpability for the unintended consequences of our actions. Our ignorance is not an excuse that allows us to ignore unintended consequences. If the ignorance was not deliberate, then it mitigates culpability. If the ignorance was deliberate or could have easily been overcome then culpability remains high and there is a responsibility to restore balance.

The point of this digression is that we might argue that we cannot be held responsible for unintended consequences of our actions, which is true in most cases. However, the exercise we are undertaking is to help us assess the quality of our lives and to help us become better people. If we encounter areas in our lives where the unintended consequences of our actions have done harm to others, it may be a flag that this is a part of our life that needs closer examination.

A variation on this approach is to write your own obituary or your own eulogy but be as honest and open as possible. Another variation is to pretend that you are a ghost and present at your own funeral. As the guests come up to view your body and as they stand around talking, what do they say about you? Are you surprised to hear what they say? Do you agree? Disagree?

A few years ago one of my adult children was trying to come to some sense of his beliefs. He questioned some of the more commonly held beliefs in society, yet sincerely believed that there was more to life than birth, eating, sleeping and dying. This attempt to sort through one’s beliefs is a normal and healthy sign of movement toward spiritual maturity. I encouraged him in his spiritual search. He asked me to explain my beliefs, which I did in a series of letters. The letter format allowed me to think through exactly what I believed and what lead me to that belief. It allowed a more thoughtful approach to the task than simply talking off the top of my head. It also left a written document that he could return to every now and then.

Putting those letters together was a very useful spiritual exercise for me. It forced me to think seriously about my beliefs and how I came to those beliefs. It wasn’t just a repeat of catechism answers but reflected the intellectual and spiritual struggle that shaped my belief, as well as appropriate nuance in those beliefs. I wanted my son to understand how I came to my belief and what impact it has had on my life. Since then I had a similar conversation with another of my children and shared the letters with him as well.

What ever approach you take to reflect on what you have done with your life, it is good to get some feedback from another person you can trust. If you have a spiritual director, he or she would be the ideal person for this feedback. Such feedback is a healthy reality check. Is what you see in yourself, like what others see in you? Are you blind to important points? Are you making unwarranted assumptions that would benefit from clarification?  The feedback of others can help with all of this.

I began this reflection by describing self-assessment as a particular project of one’s “Golden years”. While it is certainly a project that is appropriate to one’s “Golden Years”, self-assessment is a task that is beneficial throughout one’s life. Socrates described the unexamined life as not worth living. On-going self-assessment is the work of living an examined life. It is a basic tool in making the best use of the time on Earth that we have been given.