Father Joe Downey on the "Christian End-Person."

Today I completed Searching for the Christian End-Person: An Inside Story, by Joseph F. Downey, S.J. As I noted in previous post, I picked up Searching for the Christian End-Person largely in hopes of gaining insights that would help me minister better to nursing home residents. The major themes I picked up in Downey's book are that our spiritual lives necessarily change as we grow older and that the process of giving up control over our lives that comes with aging can be consoling as well as difficult. The book's focus is a bit wider than I expected when I began reading it, covering spiritual development from midlife onward. Downey sometimes introduces psychological terminology and concepts that the general reader might have difficulty navigating, but he illustrates his points very well with examples from his own life (hence the "Inside Story" subtitle). Given its topic and approach, I can't help but wonder whether - to paraphrase a comment I've heard some people make about Stendhal's The Red and the Black and Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard - one has to be over 40 to really appreciate a book like Searching for the Christian End-Person. I've got a few years to go on that score, but even so I still managed to find the book pretty worthwhile. AMDG.