March Week 3: Spiritual Aging Study Guide
Passion that Endures
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
“There was a time you thought of passion as a thing of the past, something that attaches itself to a flammable object, burning out quickly or smoldering over time into something often taken for granted or even become boring. What a surprise when you come to realize that aging can be glorious, ready to burst into love or joy or an explosion of all your senses at the least provocation…
“You do not need to work at this feeling of being overtaken to make it happen. Aging, itself, is the elixir that thins the veil between the illusion of your separation, and your merger with divine consciousness. The erosion of ego, the marginalization, the losses: all those things that you dreaded most about aging turn out to be the very means of your deliverance. Over long spans of time, at last you come to understand that growing older is not something to fix or cure, but rather aging, in and of itself, holds the potential to be a spiritual, even mystical, experience.
—Excerpt “Third Week of March, Year One”: Spiritual Aging: Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life
Questions for Journaling and Discussion
1) What do you think of when you hear the word ”passion” in regards to age?
2) Do you have lingering regrets about a passion for someone or something that you used to think was essential but the feeling flamed out? Have you made peace with this or this a work in progress?
3) How do you think the mystics experience passion as compared to popular conceptions?
4) In what ways do loss, diminishment, physical challenges—the things you feared about aging—help thin the veil between ordinary life and the divine? Is this something you’ve experienced?
5) By your evolving definition, in what ways can you say your passion has grown over the years? What surprises you about this?
Carol’s Commentary
Aldous Huxley wrote: “To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner worlds not as they appear to (one) obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by our souls”