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Dear SALT Readers, In this issue of SALT we highlight the BVM experience of the aging process with its potential, challenges and joys. In sharing our attempts to live life to the full in our senior years, we are mindful of you, our readers, who may face similar blessings and challenges either personally or with family members. All of us move into our retirement years within the particular circumstances of our United States social, economic and political systems. We face the common challenges of the precarious nature of Social Security, the escalating cost of health care, and housing appropriate to our changing needs. As a BVM congregation, we made the decision in l973 to participate in Social Security. Today, in solidarity with all the elderly in our country, we experience the vulnerability engendered by the long-term fragility of those funds. With many of you, we realize the cost of health care in a continuing care retirement center and recognize that, within a short period of time, it is possible to diminish rapidly a lifetime of carefully saved funds. In our Mount Carmel Continuing Care Retirement Community we are attempting to assess health care needs within the context of “reasonable health care” and the meaning of simple living for us as women religious. Whether lay or religious, all of us with older family members realize that, as we age, housing needs change. To meet these needs we are renovating our Motherhouse at Mount Carmel to assure a safe, comfortable, simple environment for the aging members of our family (see pp. 20-21). Despite limited material resources and diminishing physical energy, we aging BVMs seem to experience a continued enthusiasm for life, for ongoing personal enrichment, for sharing with others the gifts we have been given, and for bequeathing a legacy that is vital and meaningful to those who come after us. In this issue of SALT you will read about BVMs in their retirement years reading books they never had time to read before, relishing the leisure of long conversations with friends, and traveling to other countries to learn from people of other cultures. You will hear about older BVMs providing volunteer services in their local communities. You will meet BVMs caring for their own aged parents, engaging in creative projects designed to lift the spirits of children near and far, and holding in prayer the needs of our world. Whether religious or lay, the desire to leave an inheritance for those who come after us grows large in later years. Such an inheritance includes the richness of the elders' witness about what matters in life and their testimony to the beauty of each of life's stages as well as the material legacies of land and property passed with care and pride within the family from generation to generation. We believe that the BVM stories of inheritance woven into this issue of SALT parallel many of your own. Even as we plan responsibly for and during our retirement years and engage in a variety of life-giving activities, we realize that we are standing on the edge of an eternal mystery. In these SALT reflections we encourage one another to embrace the paschal mystery of life, death and new life, and move together more deeply into the love of our God present with us in every phase of life. The BVM Philosophy of Retirement states our belief that “life is a gift holding promise and potential in each of its developmental stages; and retirement is a call to live life fully within a community of believers.” Encouraged and inspired by one another, may all of us who enjoy these pages of SALT embrace life to the full in our retirement years.
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