Our Sacred Story: The Eminent Journey to the Center

Dr. Beverly Musgrave began her wonderful session by quoting Richard Rohr reminding us that “God comes to us disguised as our life.” Using our own sacred story, she explored with us the spiritual dimensions of ageing as the unfolding of the divine human drama in our lives where there is no perfect offering. Each part of her presentation was punctuated by many questions for self-reflection.

Our own ongoing story of pilgrimage is the same as the magi who were invited and led by a star. Ultimately, our pilgrimage, is a setting out every day to meet and discover God, exciting, yet sometimes difficult. The task of our sacred journey is to surrender self – trustfully, hopefully into the insoluble mystery we call God. As we age, the journey takes on new meaning. God is the goal of this pilgrimage, close, yet sometimes remote, leading us through a developmental process to an ageing process. Many of the stages of the developmental process we meet again in a new way as we age. As each of us is God’s work of art, we are unique revealing the ever-present nature of God and nobody else has that same story.

In the second half of life, we are invited to find meaning in a new way, discovering our shadows and those of others. Again, quoting Rohr, there is a “gravitas in the second half of life held up by a much deeper lightness.” Ageing and transitions go together, where new thresholds are crossed, and new doors are opened or closed requiring us to leave one aspect of life or self and move on and we must mourn what is changed. Again, she reiterated that as we advance through life, the divine human drama of life is constantly unfolding, loss comes to us differently, but it is central to our lives. As we age, we are invited to hear the silent cry in ourselves, others and the world. She closed by reminding us that we eventually come to realize that in this life, some symphonies must remain unfinished.