April Week 3: Spiritual Aging Study Guide
Slipping through the Cracks
Welcome to this week’s study guide. For more about our study and support group and the Spiritual Aging Study Guide, click HERE.
This Week’s Reflection
This week, we begin by telling the truth that in some ways, you are not who you used to be. You thought your image of yourself would go the distance, but it’s cracking. And if that weren’t unsettling enough, who are these poor neglected souls tumbling out through the fissures? The parts of yourself you’d thought you’d stashed neatly away long ago?...
It is tempting to experience their uninvited presence as a betrayal of all that you worked so hard to construct. On these days, to assent too quickly will not be acceptance but denial. But things begin shifting the moment you find the courage to open the door anyway, and let them in.
—Excerpt “Third Week of April, Year One”: Spiritual Aging: Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life
Questions for Journaling and Discussion
1) In what ways are you experiencing your old images of yourself developing cracks?
2) Are you surprised at this age and stage of your life to be encountering aspects of yourself you thought you’d laid to rest years ago?
3) Viewed from an expanded perspective, can you ascribe a well-meaning even if misguided function to any of these resurfacing character traits? Anger provided self-protection, for example, even if you learned you had to repress its outward expression to fit in?
4) What strategies did you employ in the past to keep these inconvenient aspects of yourself at bay?
5) Why do you think this is happening now?
6) How do you feel about this? Do you tend to think of this as personal failure? Or, on the other hand, can you imagine why and how this could be a good thing?
Spiritual Exercise:
This is as good a time as any to become reacquainted with inconvenient aspects of yourself who are starting to slip through the cracks in your façade. Instead of running from them, attempting to ignore them or whatever coping strategy has worked best for you in the past, try something new.