“We go on growing right to the edge of the grave. So grow …"

That’s the summary message of a new book called The Gift of Years by Sister Joan Chittister, popular author and Benedictine nun in Erie, Pennsylvania. Here are other nuggets on the spirituality of aging from The Gift of Years:

The Buddhists tell the story of a man fleeing from a tiger who went plunging over a cliff and saved himself only by catching hold of a small strawberry plant growing between the rocks of the precipice. Caught between the tiger above and the gorge below, the man clung to the bush with one hand — thought for a moment — and with the other hand picked the most luscious strawberry he had ever eaten in his entire life.

It is age that teaches us to enjoy life, to savor every moment of it, to spend our time on what counts, to be present where we are and see it for the first time.

Indeed age simply teaches the rest of us that we have nothing at all to fear from any stage in life. The aging of any of us gives the rest of us permission to keep on growing, keep on changing, and keep on living!

Or as Gelett Burgess puts it: "If in the last few years you haven’t discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead."

What we celebrate when we celebrate the passages of life is the valor of people who every day of their lives teach the rest of us clearly that we, too, can learn the three great lessons of life:

Happiness in little things;

Fearlessness in everything,

And the presence of strawberries everywhere.

In every situation, clearly, we too like Abraham and Methuselah, like Sarah and the Prophetess Anna, like Moses and the matriarchs, can learn to live life well, to taste life wholly and, most of all, to pass on the meaning of life to those who come stumbling after.

A tourist tramping the mountain villages of northern New England came upon a grizzled old woman sitting in silence on her cabin stoop. "Have you lived here all your life?" the visitor asked.

"Not yet," the old lady replied.

Is life over after retirement has come and golden jubilees have been passed and the gold watches are all passed out and the home has been sold and work is no longer the reason we get up in the mornings? Are the markers of life simply subtle but insidious signs that all the really important things of life are really over? Oh no, my friends, not yet, not yet, not yet.

And how can we be so sure? That’s simple: because the rest of us still have so much to learn from those who are going the way before us, who have tasted life and found it full of every flavor and come to appreciate them all — because you and I still have so much life yet to live and because we still have so much to learn about happiness, about fearlessness, about tigers and strawberries.

There is no doubt about it: in a world where newness has become the neurosis of the age, we need the elderly now more than ever, so that as Jonathan Swift counsels — we may learn to live all the days of our life.

It is just then, when all the baubles and bangles of life fall away that people begin to teach the really important lessons of in life: how to live without living for things; how to love without loving for personal gain. How to last beyond the million little deaths of life.

It is just then when younger people need the older generation most of all. It is just then that the older generation achieves its greatest stature and carries its greatest responsibilities to the rest of us. It is time for this world to discover a new respect for wisdom; to bring new attention to the spirituality of aging. It is time for the aging to realize their value and claim their responsibilities to the spiritual development of us all.

Indeed, the book of Proverbs teaches us well: "The beauty of the aged is their gray hair." Because scripture knows well that when a world loses its memory, it loses its way.