From “On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old” by Parker J. Palmer
One day, Listened to a taped talk that Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, had given to a roomful of would-be monks at the Abbey of Gethsemane, where Merton was novice master. Addressing the super-pious young seekers in his care, Merton siad, “Men, before you can have a spiritual life, you’ve got to have a life!”
Those incisive words – the monastic equivalent of “Get a life!” – laid bare my false notion that “becoming spiritual” meant leaping from the muck of my daily life into godlike clarity and purity. Merton’s words hit me like a one-two punch: “Wow, he’s right, I need to get a life. No, wait! I’ve already got one! It’s a god-awful mess, but I think he’s saying that only there can I find my spiritual path.”
The spiritual journey is an endless process of engaging life as it is, stripping away our illusions about ourselves, our world, and the relationship of the two, moving closer to reality as we do. That process begins with losing the illusion that spirituality will float us above the daily fray. Reality may be hard, but it’s a safer place to live than in our illusions, which will always fail us, and at no point is that more true than in old age. Death is, after all, the end of all our illusions – so why not do what we can to lose our illusions before death strips them from us? That way we are less likely to die disappointed or in despair.