Michelle Mitchell, charity director for Age Concern and Help the Aged,
said: "Attitudes to older people are stuck in the past, the care and
support system for older people is on the brink of collapse and older
people's experiences of isolation and exclusion have largely been
ignored by successive governments." This quote comes from this report on life getting worse for the elderly.
So much for Robert browning's Victorian optimism a century and a half later and 60 years after the Beveridge Report!
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God:
see all, nor be afraid!"
Obviously Browning's optimism about encroaching old age isn't shared by everyone. In a society in which the average age is rising, and where the increasing number of elderly people is now spoken of as a looming care crisis, ours isn't a culture in which old age is revered, and the care of elderly people a priority. And in our culture priority is far too often preceded by the dread word "funding" – care of the elderly as a "funding priority" is an almost quaint thought for many.
Sunday night I watched The Secret Millionaire. Leaving aside the quite complex ethical questions about being an undercover millionaire, like the fairytale of the prince who becomes a pauper in order to understand the struggles of the poor, last night as I watched, a collision of values took place in my head. A couple, weeks away from their 50th wedding anniversary, now live in one room of their house. For eight years the woman has been diagnosed with and suffered from Alzheimer's disease, and her husband now cares for her in an increasingly constricted life for both. The local charity that gives respite, and allows the man a few hours a week with his pals may have to cut the service for lack of funding. A cheque for £10,000 keeps it going for another year. The wee calculator in my head (it works with both figures and ethics) didn't take long to go ping. You could fund 70 charities like that every year to that amount for the equivalent of a recently early retired bank CEO's annual pension.
The value we put on human life, its quality and dignity, and the crucial question of how we care as a community, is just as tough a test of a government's credibility, as rescuing financial institutions addicted to greed. Sure, economic efficiency, fiscal revenue, GNP, financial stability, lending liquidity, consumer confidence, and a catena of other phrases from the Revised Financial Liturgy have necessary reference to the economic realities of our globalised markets. But long before the credit crunch the disturbing question was being asked, how we fund community care into an expensive future, both financially and with sufficient resources of human compassion and dignity. That question is now both urgent and defining of what matters most when the chips are down – to use the ugly phrase, how important is "the bottom line" when the choices get hard.
Holy week is a good time to ask questions about what we do when we encounter bottom line choices. How will we deal with the vulnerable anxieties, the life choices open to those whose purchasing powers have gone, the essential compassions of support, resources and friendship that enable carers to go on caring? When will we insist on a revision of what constitutes "the bottom line"? Because that is what Holy Week does – it reconfigures all priorities, God reads the bottom line, and pays it.
Reflecting on what it means to grow older, Christina Rossetti's poem touches on the ambiguity of blessing that's hidden in the experience of growing older. To retain a sense of value, meaning, fundamental worthwhileness beyond mere usefulness, she thought herself into a different future. Whatever else eternal life is, both now and then, it is about renewed life, restored hope, the affirmed value of what it means to be, what it means to die into God and thus to live forever in Christ – who comes, and comes again.
If I might only love my God and die!
But now He bids me love Him and live on,
Now when the bloom of all my life is gone,
The pleasant half of life has quite gone by.
My tree of hope is lopped that spread so high,
And I forget how summer glowed and shone,
While autumn grips me with its fingers wan
And frets me with its fitful windy sigh.
When autumn passes then must winter numb,
And winter may not pass a weary while,
But when it passes spring shall flower again;
And in that spring who weepeth now shall smile,
Yea, they shall wax who now are on the wane,
Yea, they shall sing for love when Christ shall come.
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