Sunday, November 1, 2026
All Saint’s Day
Father Richard Rohr uses the language of “ripening” to describe the process of aging with wisdom and grace:
The word “ripening” helps us move beyond any exclusive concern with physical aging, because our concerns are much more than that. We want to talk about notions of maturity, eldership, staging, sequencing, growth, and direction. Where is this thing we call “life” headed? Who sets the standard? Is there any standard?
Unless we can somehow chart this trajectory, we have no way to discern growth or maturity, and no ability to discern what might be a full, fuller, or fullest human response. Neither do we have any criteria for discerning an immature, regressive, or even sick response. There must be a direction to ripening, but we must also recognize that any steps toward maturity are by necessity immature. An understanding of ripening basically teaches us the wisdom of timing, love, and patience, and allows us to be wise instead of judgmental.
If I am to believe the novels, myths, poems, and people I have met in my life, old age is almost never described as an apex of achievement as one sits atop a summit with the raised arms of a victorious athlete. It is almost always something else—and usually something other than what was initially imagined or even hoped for.
Ripening reveals much bigger or very different horizons than we realize. The refusal to ripen leads to what T.S. Eliot spoke of in “The Hollow Men,” lives that “end not with a bang but with a whimper.” I trust that we are willing to move toward our own endless horizons and not waste time in whimpering, trusting that we are, in fact, being led. Life—your life, my life, all life—is going somewhere, and somewhere good. We do not need to navigate the river, for we are already flowing within it.
Ripening, at its best, is a slow, patient learning, and sometimes even a happy letting go—a seeming emptying out to create readiness for a new kind of fullness—which we are never sure about. If we do not allow our own ripening, an ever-increasing resistance and denial sets in, an ever-increasing protection around an over-defended self. At our very best, we learn how to hope as we ripen, to move outside and beyond self-created circles. Youthful hopes have concrete goals, whereas the hope of older years is usually aimless hope, hope without goals, even naked hope—perhaps real hope.
Such stretching is the agony and the joy of later years, although one can avoid both of these rich experiences too. Old age, as such, is almost a complete changing of gears and engines from the first half of our lives, and does not happen without many slow realizations, inner calmings, lots of inner resistance and denials, and eventual surrenders. All of them by God’s grace work with our ever-deepening sense of what we really desire and who we really are.
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A Spirituality of Ripening
Monday, November 2, 2026
All Soul’s Day
Father Richard describes how a spirituality of ripening allows us to hold greater paradox through an increasing awareness of our union with God:
Reality, fate, destiny, providence, and tragedy are slow but insistent teachers. The horizon of old age seems to be a plan that God has prepared as inevitable and part of the necessary school of life. What is gratuitously given is also gratuitously taken away, just as Job slowly came to accept. And sometimes we remember that his eventual pained response was “Blessed be the name of the Lord!” (Job 1:21). We all live in the same cycle of unrequested birth and unrequested death. Someone else is clearly in control, yet most of our lives are spent accepting and surrendering to this truth, and in trusting that this “someone” is good and trustworthy besides. It is the very shape of faith and the entire journey of faith.
If we are to speak of a spirituality of ripening, we need to recognize that it is always (and I do mean always) characterized by an increasing tolerance for ambiguity, a growing sense of subtlety, an ever-larger ability to include and allow, and a capacity to live with contradictions and even to love them! I cannot imagine any other way of coming to those broad horizons except through many trials, unsolvable paradoxes, and errors in trying to resolve them.
Without such a gradually renewed mind and heart, we almost certainly will end with a whimper—not just our own, but also that of the disappointed souls gathered around our sick bed or gravestone. Too many lives have indeed been lives of “quiet desperation” and God must surely rush to console and comfort all humans before, during, and after their passing. Many put off enlightenment as long as they can.
The ripening of mind and heart is most basically a capacity for nondual consciousness and contemplation. Many might just call it a growth in compassion, but surely no growth in compassion is likely unless one learns how to forgive as a very way of life, and to let go of almost everything as we first imagined it had to be. This is possible as our understanding of faith deepens, requiring a careful pairing of not-knowing (the apophatic way) with knowing (the kataphatic way). The Jewish and Christian traditions balanced our so-called knowing with trust, patience, allowing, waiting, humility, love, and forgiveness, which is very nearly the entire message, and surely the core message, necessary for the possibility of ripening. Otherwise, we all close down, and history freezes up with all of its hurts, memories, and resentments intact.
So my guidance after over eighty years of life is a simple reminder to recall what we will be forced to learn by necessity and under pressure anyway—the open-ended way of allowing and the deep meaning that some call faith. To live in trustful faith is to ripen; it is almost that simple.
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Individual Reflection
What would your hope look like if it had no goal attached?
Group Discussion — choose one
- Where do others see an over-defended self in you that you’re only beginning to notice?
- Which contradiction in your life have you stopped trying to resolve, and could you ever come to love it?
- Does “aimless hope” feel like freedom to you, or like giving up?
