Blog

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.

Hain defends job for mother 80.

That’s the headline at the end of a week when polls suggest MP’s are unpopular, are in the relegation zone of the public trust league, when an MP has been suspended for employing his two sons for £45,000 worth of work for which there is no paper trail, and Mr Hain himself just over a week into a police investigation about undeclared donations. In the light of very dodgy forms of nepotism (promoting or rewarding on the basis of family connection rather than talent, entitlement or right) what offends me about the headline is the number 80.

Of what relevance is the age of a secretary who still does efficiently the job she began in 1991, and possibly better than younger alternatives when it comes to life experience, literacy, discretion and overall reliability? An octogenarian does a good, honest job, all above board, and is sucked into a row about dodgy deals involving MP expenses, and family connections.

Apart from the murky machinations of MP’s financial choices, it’s also been a week of widespread debate about massive shortfalls in future funding for care of the elderly. As each year passes our impartiality is undermined by the realisation that one day we’ll be old too. Given that we need a radical overhaul of policy, and a realignment of public and Government attitudes, and a recovery of the moral values that underpin a humane society, I am also in search of a theology of ageing. Such a theology grows out of the kinds of values that expose the above headline for what it is – a piece of engrained prejudice based on a narrow, utilitarian view of human capacity. And it disguises itself as a morally defensible enquiry about whether or not an elderly woman should be employed by her son and paid by taxpayer’s money.

At different stages of the church’s history specific doctrines have played a major role in overall theological restatement. Christological and trinitarian controversies dominated the first few centuries; at other times ecclesiology, the doctrine of justification and / or the doctrine of Scripture, the work of the Holy Spirit and again in the last couple of decades further review and reflection on the nature of the Triune God. But in an age of genetic technology, ecological crisis, globalised consumerism and religious transmutation from radicalism through extremism, it may be that the Christian understanding of the human will become a crucial counter narrative.

The dignity and value of each human person, the God-givenness of existence and identity, the common humanity of all and yet the scandal of particularity witnessed to in the incarnation of Jesus, makes a Christian anthropology an important line in the sand when we talk about how we treat the elderly, protect the vulnerable, cherish human life, resist dehumanising politics and protest against the bar-coding approach to the cost of caring for and nurturing human life throughout the life cycle. Practical issues of funding and resources may become acute; economic choices will have to be made, and that may not be to our economic advantage in the global market; and human welfare is sustained by finite resources just as our economies and communities are.

But what a Christian anthropology seeks to provide is a nexus of values that secures a reverence for human life, a respect for all who share this planet, and a working assumption for Christians that every human being is one for whom Christ died, who bears the image of God however dishonoured, and who lives in the tragic ambiguity of a fallen world. But a world invaded by the grace and truth that came by Jesus Christ. Jesus the Jew was immersed in the spiritual wisdom of the Torah, the instruction of God that shaped and gave texture to the shared life of Jewish communities.

Which brings me to my favourite rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, who wrote a quite remarkable celebration of age, wisdom and humanity. After fifty years, his essay carries the moral rebuke of a prophet who knew the importance of an anthropology rooted in the values of the Hebrew Bible. Here are the first two paragraphs:

I see the sick and the despised, the defeated and the bitter, the rejected and the lonely. I see them clustered together and alone, clinging to a hope for somebody’s affection that does not come to pass. I hear them pray for the release that comes with death. I see them deprived and forgotten, masters yesterday, outcasts today.

What we owe the old is reverence, but all they ask for is consideration, attention, not to be discarded and forgotten. What they deserve is preference, yet we do not even grant them equality. One father finds it possible to sustain a dozen children, yet a dozen children find it impossible to sustain one father.

I’ll come back to this essay. In its indictment of a culture impatient of the elderly, resentful and grudging of the resources that will be needed to care for the old, it offers an altogether different vision – in which octogenarians go on doing a good job without their age being held against them.

Walter Brueggemann explores the Psalms through the experience of orientation, disorientation and reorientation. The same approach can at present be applied to my study. The painter is half way through decorating it, and I’ve decanted books to various surfaces around the house, and sit here with abandoned bookcases, bare windows, painter’s sheets with a few years of paint drippings draped around the place, sets of steps standing at the door, the pictures removed – and a sense of inner disorientation to match the mess around me.

Remember – this is the guy who likes his books in neat rows on the bookshelves, the same distance from the front of the shelf, arranged in a system so familiar I can tell my PA at College exactly where a book is – bookcase, shelf and roughly where. Same at home; except tonight my study suffers the first two of Brueggemann’s rubrics – orientation has given way to disorientation. It will be Saturday before the painter returns, and probably Sunday before there’s a hope of reorientation.

No big deal to most folk I suppose. And I’ll survive. But moving 23 metres of shelved books is an exercise in dismantling the familiar which raises questions of attachment, comfort zones. Moving around the furniture reminded me of the elderly couple who first gave me somewhere to stay in Glasgow when I started University. Lily was one of the most unassuming, generous and open people I’ve ever met. Well into her sixties and seventies she went to the chapel next door to ‘the jigging’, while Bill stayed in the house and watched the telly. When I first met them and we agreed I’d be staying with them Bill warned me,

‘Son. When ye come in at night, put the light on before you get into bed. She’s aye shifting furniture, an’ yer bed might no be where ye left it’.

And true enough. Lily was an experimenter with space and furniture. She was a tireless exponent of orientation, disorientation and reorientation.

Bill painted the ships with red lead, and worked alongside Jimmy Reid. Lily served in the newsagent and grocers downstairs. She smoked like a chimney and always apologised for some of what she called her ‘bad adjectives’. They never referred to me as anything but ‘the boy’. They were at our wedding, and some years later, within a couple of years of each other, I took their funerals. And the two years I spent in the four up two room flat in Dumbarton Road made it possible for me to afford being at University. We had several arguments about what I should pay. Not how much, but how little – she was mortified, embarrassed, annoyed, when I paid the first week’s rent. In the end she agreed to take a fraction of what they could have asked. I look on their friendship as one of those gifts that teach us the connections between hospitality and humanity, and demonstrate the sacrament of unselfconscious generosity.

But Bill was right. Several times in those two years, I put on the light before getting into bed – to make sure it’s where it was when I left it! May they rest in peace, whose home was a place of reoritnetation for a young man whose life was going through that disorientation that is an inevitable consequence of hearing Christ’s call, and following.

Millet’s ‘The Gleaners’ has been reproduced on jigsaws and biscuit tins. It portrays a different age, culture, pace of life; and it shows our wasteful, extravagant ways when contrasted with people whose daily lives depended on ‘what was left’. The large stacks in the background, the loaded horse and cart, the bundles of harvested straw and grain, contrast with the fingerpicking, back-breaking thrift of the gleaners. I don’t want to wish myself back into an era when so many of our technologically derived life comforts and provisions were uninvented or unavailable.

But a picture like this argues for a way of treating our world less as a machine that produces the goods, more like the place where we find what we need; what we need to live humanly and humanely, not what we need to live at the expense of life itself. Stewardship presupposes an accepted responsibility for looking after and using wisely, that which is entrusted, given and therefore not mine. It shoudln’t take an old story about a woman’s fight for survival to make us aware of the fragile hold we have of this delicately poised, gloriously gifted, and now humanly threatened place where we live.

Millet’s picture, those three gleaners who know the value of grain, and the story of Ruth and the providential accidents of divine happenstance, are enough to reflect on for today. I write this as the dustbin lorry comes up the street to take away our rubbish by the big bucket load – even our rubbish bins are getting bigger. I feel a lenten theme emerging here – suppose we give up producing rubbish for Lent? And suppose we apply the gleaning principle as a way of cutting down what we waste, throw out, use up? So instead of asking how much holier my soul is at the end of Lent, suppose I ask how much emptier the bin is of rubbish? Instead of denying myself luxury, I’ll deny myself the luxury of producing rubbish.

How?

Need to think about that – maybe I need to find a modern equivalent of gleaning, not wasting, valuing grain….

By the way, we have a wee cheap print of Millet’s masterpiece, in a wee cheap frame, which came from the home of one of the most generous, gentle and merciful people I’ve ever known. Married later in life, and a widow much too early, Ruth was her favourite book in the Hebrew Bible – which was only one of the things which she and I had in common, enriching a friendship founded on honest questioning about what God is about, turning lives upside down and yet, as Winnie believed, faithfully working all things together for good.