What we owe the old is reverence 2

Gerontology is the scientific study of ageing. Growing old is the existential reality of ageing in people’s experience. Heschel’s remarkable essay, ‘Growing in Wisdom’ is remarkably prescient, given its date in 1964, and that this plea for a theology of ageing first appeared in a publication Geriatric Institutional Management. Even in the 60’s he recognised the dangers of celebrating youth at the expense of age. ‘Youth is our God and to be young is divine….The cult of youth is idolatry.’ Sounds like overstated rhetoric, but Heschel had already identified the impatience a consumer society with the less productive, less economically powerful. For many older people old age comes to be seen as defeat, a chronic form of capital punishment, because life, excitement, vitality, productivity now seems to be consigned to memory. The compassion and passion Heschel had for human beings, especially vulnerable human beings, gives his words an essential moral authority.

By what standards do we measure culture? It is customary to evaluate a nation by the magnitude of its scientific contributions or the quality of its artictic achievements. However, the true standard by which to guage a culture is the extent to which reverence, compassion, justice, are to be found in the daily lives of a whole people, not only in the acts of isolated individuals. Culture is a style of living compatible with the grandeur of being human.

The emphasis is his, and the statement is a searching performance indicator for our own culture, now, here. On free care for the elderly, Heschel asks, ‘Is there anything as holy, as urgent, as noble, as the effort of the whole nation to provide medical care for the old?’ His choice of words is odd, for a consumer society. Not a hint about affordability, budget constraints, waiting lists; instead care for the old as holy purpose, comfort of the old as humanly urgent, support for the old as noble task.

‘The aged may be described as a person who does not dream anymore…’ This for Heschel is a spiritual matter. To grow old should not mean the loss of dreams, but opening up of the self to whatever future awaits as goodness and mercy surely follow us, all the days of our lives. For that reason heschel insists that the spirituality of ageing is less important than the spirituality of the aged. With poignant impatience he observed, ‘to be retired does not mean to be retarded’. he identified three spiritual ills of old age that need to be addressed: i) The sense of being useless; ii) the sense of inner emptiness and boredom; iii) loneliness and the fear of time.

The essay title, ‘To grow in wisdom’, explains the profoundly biblical substratum of this way of thinking. To study, to grow, to toil and to mature, to work and worship, to live life in its fullness, both celebration and sorrow, achievment and failure, and to do so nourished by prayer and honoured in our humanity, that is something of the rich meaning of shalom. And for old people, that shalom will require a culture which honours the grandeur of being human.