Aging
The Feast of St Barnabas is the Patronal Festival of the Diocesan Rest Home in Ings Avenue which was originally started by our Parish. The care of the elderly has certainly become a growth industry since its foundation: you can’t move in Dunedin, it seems, without falling over a new rest home here, there and everywhere. One of them even clings to the side of a cliff!
No doubt there have always been such places - but not on such a enormous scale. I can’t help wondering how they fit into our understanding of life at the end of the second millennium. I imagine that families are so small and so private these days that it has become less easy for them to cope with more than a couple of generations at a time. I also imagine that the present cult of individual fulfilment means that fewer people are prepared to sink their own individuality in the needs of their families.
But I also wonder what value - if any - we put on old age. Ours is a society which is obsessed with youth, and the things of youth. Physical fitness is a consuming passion - together with the physical attractiveness which is supposed to go along with it. Much of our economy is geared to stimulating our purely physical and material needs - and making a handsome profit out of doing so.
The elderly are an affront to such obsessions. They fail the fitness test more and more as time goes by. Silver threads are not always so becoming among the gold. In the bad old days of communist rule in Eastern Europe, the Iron Curtain was always drawn aside to let elderly Czechs, Hungarians and Poles emigrate to the West. As far as the People’s Republics were concerned, such people had clearly passed their use by date. Despite every development of science and technology there is no turning back the tide of time. Sooner or later (and for the old it’s likely to be sooner) the tide of earthly life runs out altogether - and you can’t take your abs with you, I’m afraid, no matter how firm and well-developed.
Formerly, we paid lip-service to such things as the wisdom of the aged. Now even that has gone. Young technicians tell us all we need to know, and who needs to know more than they do? Wisdom can only come with time, experience and insight, and unfortunately all too many even among the elderly seem more impressed by the somewhat quicker answers of technicians. Oddly enough, it often seems as if the young are more interested in traditional wisdom and spirituality - and as they are the elderly of tomorrow, I suppose there must be hope!
We hear of the terrible trials that often befall the young, but what of those which the elderly must so often undergo?. Just as your health is going, your eyesight fading, and your hearing failing, you not only lose the spouse with whom you have shared the last half-century or more - you have to leave the only home you have known for decades and start anew in a large rest home with a hundred strangers for company. I am constantly amazed at the courage and resourcefulness of elderly men and women in facing a whole series of trials which would entirely demoralise many of young - not to mention middle-aged clergy!
Ever since the sixties the young have been the fashion. Not a bad thing, of course - but let’s not be ageist about it all. There is much about the elderly to respect and admire too. Perhaps they themselves need to rediscover the qualities which have traditionally been their strengths. We all need to be reminded that the journey to God, and the acquiring of spiritual wisdom on the way, is actually what life is all about. Would any Christian say otherwise? Would you?
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