"It's the norm now," she said in an interview with Episcopal Life last month. "For the first time in history, you have 60-year-old children taking care of their 90-year-old parents."

Chittister, a member of the Benedictine sisters and a celebrated spiritual writer, crisscrossed the country several times in April to promote her latest book, The Gift Of Years, that looks at the many dimensions of aging and how older people can live into the values they are offered day by day.

"This is not about death or about medical conditions," she said. "This is not pabulum for older people. It's a book that encourages us to face the shape and social environment of this new stage of life, to face it head up and alive, and to make some productive choices of our own."

Chittister, who celebrated her 72nd birthday in April, said training in social psychology caused her to see the need to address issues of living later. "We have to start the conversation now. We have lengthened our years, raised our quality of life and provided health care. Yet we are wasting a whole portion of our society who also feel that they are losing sight of the spiritual purpose of age, which is wisdom.

"Demographers tell us that, after retirement, we still have 20 to 30 percent of our lives to live. [Older] people are a gold mine, a resource, a spiritual base for us to check in and out with every once in a while. They are not living in the past somewhere, but they have the memory of another way to be alive -- and they will tell you very clearly what is better about this way and what is better about that way."

The author of 35 books and writer of a weekly web column for the National Catholic Reporter, Chittister related how her experience within a Roman Catholic monastic community changed her way of thinking.

Give everyone a task
"The Rule of Benedict under which we live is a sixth-century document," she said. "In it, he had written, ‘Let everyone, including the ill and the elderly, be given a task to do.' Now, frankly, when I was an 18-year-old novice, I thought that was terrible. I thought that was some sort of cruelty to elders."

Living with women of different ages under one roof illustrated the wisdom of Benedict's teaching, she recalled. "I began to realize that our house was being carried by our older people. While our younger sisters went into the city into classrooms or soup kitchens or parish ministries, our older people never blinked. They carried the house on their back -- -- the meals the dishes, the cleaning, the guests. They were everywhere, doing everything. They were busy all the time.

"I began to realize that was the sign that we all have a gift to give at all times of our life. Nobody is useless in the community," she said. "Everybody is needed, and getting up in the morning for somebody else's sake is what brings us life – right to the very end.

Chittister, co-chair of the Global Peace Initiative of Women, a United Nations-sponsored organization of female faith leaders, also founded Benetvision: A Resource and Research Center for Contemporary Spirituality of which she is executive director. She is also in demand as a lecturer and keynote speaker at justice, peace and women's ordination conferences.

How does she manage her own busy life and keep spiritually fit?

"It's not easy," she said. "Sometimes I feel under siege, and at those time times I become my own best mate. I have a great sense of humor, and I nourish it. I enjoy parties. Being able to enjoy life is a high priority for me.

"On top of that, I always say I live between keyboards. When I can't stand this [computer] side anymore, I just turn around and I begin to play. When I'm at the keyboard and really working at the keyboard, I can't think of other things."

She writes manuscripts for her books the first three months of each year in a small cottage on top of a mountain in west Ireland. "In that little hermitage of mine, my whole soul comes back together," she said. "All I do is write.

"Then I put the manuscript away, throw it into a filing cabinet when I get back home in April. In August, I take it out and edit it … I read it aloud. I see it as a book someone else wrote and, I know exactly what's wrong with it. I rework it at that time, and then I start my schedule over."

She's been doing that since 1990, Chittister said. "I have a really good balance in my life."

The Gift of Years is not self-help book, she stressed. "This is a spiritual self-development book for the later years in life.

"The whole notion that your spiritual development ends with your retirement check is a sad one in this society. It is one that gives way to a collapsing spiritual life."

THE GIFT OF YEARS
Growing Old Gracefully
By Joan Chittister
BlueBridge, 240 pp., $19.95

Review: Author shares end-time musings

By Lois Sibley

Although she admits she may be too young to write this book -- after all, she's only 72 -- Joan Chittister, in her usual forthright way, tells us about how she feels "to be facing that time of life for which there is no career plan."

In The Gift of Years, she shares what she has learned from her reading and experience, and she writes of what she has observed in her seniors who are facing this transition time. She reserves the right to revise this edition, she adds, when she is 90, in case she has more to say then.

Chittister writes not so much about the physical dimensions of growing older, but rather about the mental and spiritual attitudes that "determine who we become" as we face the challenges and stages of the gift of years. These later years, she stresses, "are gift, not burden." Oh, to be wise enough to know this and to live as if it is true!

In her eagerness to help us know, Chittister wonders at the many "dimensions of the aging process, its purpose and its challenges, its struggles and its surprises, its problems and its potential, its pain and its joys." She believes that "the end-time of life is one of its best" and most important times.

Chittister's book has 40 one-word chapter titles. Each short chapter begins with a quote from a wise, older person. Personally, I like the one on limitations that begins with Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Grey Panthers, who became a modern hero, transcending "both age and physical boundaries to be the strong, thinking, visionary person the world badly needed" in the 1980s. I also like the one on possibility, which begins with this quote from Emily Dickinson: "We turn not older with years, but newer every day."

Some one-word titles are: regret, meaning, fear, joy, newness, accomplishment, possibility, fulfillment, relationships, learning, religion, freedom, time, wisdom, sadness, dreams, limitations, spirituality and loneliness. Almost every subject of interest to seniors can be found.

Each chapter concludes with two thought-provoking summary sentences: the first on the burdens of growing older; the second on the blessings.

Chittister is an irrepressible writer. I wonder what subject she will tackle next.

Chittister responds: "It's a book on liturgical spirituality, on the liturgical year and its spiritual meaning for all of us. I think it will have value in many parts of the Christian world that where they are beginning to look again at liturgical seasons and their place in our lives."