Seeing ‘Seniors’ as Elders

Jim M. Houston

The title “Age-ing is for Sage-ing” is not mine. It is taken from a popular Jewish book, “From Age-ing to Sage-ing” by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, 1997. As a secular Jew fearing his own ageing, he sought the wisdom of Sufi masters, Buddhist teachers and Native American shamans. He defined an Elder’s Creed: “An elder is a person who is still growing, still a learner, still with potential and whose life continues to have within it promise for and connection with the future. An elder is still in the pursuit of happiness, joy, and pleasure…whose work it is to synthesize wisdom from long life experience and formulate this into a legacy for future generations.” He teaches eleven exercises:

1. Reflect on what eldership means for you? Think of what ageing means to you of the positive models you have seen, and imagine walking in the shoes of such models.
2. Reflect on the cycles of your life noting significant events and people in each stage as well as what has been the integrating continuum that makes sense to your story.
3. Reflect as from a panorama of your life, the significant turning points as well as the unfinished business you still want to complete.
4. Turning inward to oneself as the Elder self – here our journey parts company from this New Age approach to the Secular or to the autonomous Self. Rather, the Christian moves outwardly in freedom from the self, to becoming in Christ, ever leaning by greater dependence upon Christ. We move towards him in further emancipation from the self, to follow in the narrow pathway of Christian Discipleship, i.e. in becoming more Christlike, in increasing selflessness. Yet the journey of self knowledge grows possible in the light of the knowledge of God. This double knowledge progresses upwards in heavenly mindedness, downwards in continual confession and humility, and onwards in patience and fortitude. “Let me know Thee, O God, let me know myself!” (Augustine) becomes our constant pulse-beat.

In a book I have written with Professor Michael Parker, a psychiatric gerontologist, Vision for the Aging Church: equipping seniors for the ministry of seniors (to be published next month), we have the temerity to challenge the North American churches. For we see too many seniors and too few elders populating our churches. But you may ask is there any difference between a senior and an elder? Actually, the term senior was first used in c.1500 to refer to a senior Fellow of a university college, i.e. simply older than his colleagues. In the mid-19^th Century a senior partner in business was also an older business partner. But it has never had moral connotations as the term elder has had. Almost instinctively, primitive societies have recognized an elder as a wise older leader who passed on from one generation to another the relational skills needed to maintain the tribal/communal identity with its own unique customs and beliefs. The thrust then of our talk is simply that youth or seniors do not prepare us for our future longevity, only elders can do so.

For we see in the future demographics of urbanized societies a tsunami ahead of us of a rapidly ageing population. This is because of rapidly falling birthrates, the lack of reproductive rates, and the advancing ageing of life. Yet it is also the argument of our book that these revolutionary demographic changes enable Christian communities to become more counter cultural at many different levels. My co-author found that after the disaster of the storm Katrina had hit New Orleans; between 60-70% of the casualties were seniors over 65 with no difference between church or non-church populations. The handicapped were left helpless to drown. This suggests our cultural treatment of the elderly is like the proverbial canary-in-the-mine as victims of the toxicity of our culture.

Firstly, we practice in ageism, as in sexism, and in colour/racial prejudice, a form of apartheid. When Canada was condemning racial apartheid in South Africa in the 1980’s, the South African ambassador responded by visiting a native American community in northern Canada. He could have visited an old people’s home instead! The strong post war movement in the denial of death, lead to the funeral industry applying cosmetics to the face of the corpse and in designing the funeral parlour as if it was the home sitting room of the living! In the denial of death there developed the exaltation of youth. The market became youth-oriented, even inventing the concept of the teenager for a new market sector. The culture of youth entertainment and sports has exaggerated ageism further. The Church has bought into the cultural assumption that its future lies with the youth, so that youth ministry has overshadowed any role given to the ministry of seniors. In all these trends, forgotten is the Rabbinical proverb: “He who learns from the young is like one who eats unripe grapes and drinks wine from the winepress. But he who learns from the old is like one who eats ripe grapes and drinks old wine.” (Abot 4:20)

A second feature of ageism is the cultural prevalence of giving priority to the value of a professional/functional identity. What do you do is more important than who do you relate with? Indeed the Boomer generation has become the most professionalised generation in human history. To retire then from a profession becomes a dramatic loss of public recognition, and for many people it is like a spiritual death, long before they reach their own physical death. This is no different in the church as in the society, so we tend to have deacons who administer services to do everything, but few or no elders, who foster its communal and family life. Thus programs tend to dominate over personal relationships. Seniors when they do nothing, disappear from the radar screen into anonymity.

A third and profound reason for ageism is the loss of transcendence with the pervasive impact of secularism. Yet the Christian faith evaluates our temporal life to be just the beginning of our eternal journey. For death is not our terminus, just its beginning. As G.K. Chesterton put it humorously: “When I start out for the ends of the earth, I am stopped on the road by an entertaining lamp post, or a vividly signalling window blind; and have not sufficient sense of the scale of difference between the passing questions and the Quest.” To define a senior as stirring out one’s life with coffee spoons, and one’s only monument lost golf balls, as T. S. Eliot puts it, is indeed pathetic. To end up one’s earthly life complaining, “I am bored, I am lonely, I am depressed” is the lament of too many of our aged.

Yet the distinction between a senior and an elder is as slippery as that of an individual versus a person. For both are relationally recognized not officially appointed. In God’s initial covenant with Israel, the Patriarchs were elders not kings. But the people eventually demanded a king to rule over them, to exchange the covenant life that made them worthy of occupying the Promised Land for the power of nationhood in rivalry with the surrounding nations. Then as community became eclipsed by the growing power of the state, so eldership also melted away. Are we also finding that the more we depend upon our profession for our identity, the more impersonal we become? It is a question worth pondering.

I am not questioning the positive benefits of a profession in raising the standards of competence and moral behaviour nor of the facilities to pursue after truth and discoveries for the benefit of humanity, but of making an absolute out of professionalism. Becoming more of a person within a profession is the ideal for then in place of our selfish ambitions we are using the instrumentation of a profession to become a more effective contributor to communal needs and values both in society and within the Church.

Yet as Christians, we should claim a special status for becoming persons as a theological category of being. The Greeks defined the prosopon as a dramatic category of the hero defying the fates in what always ended as a Greek tragedy. For the Romans, persona was the legal status of citizenship for the male head of a Roman household. Women, children and slaves were nonpersons. But expressive of the triune God of grace, the Christian person is acknowledged as being created in the image and likeness of God, to have his or her being in communion with God. The pursuit of godliness is the pursuit of the personal. Even at the end stage of dementia, a loved one is still to be treated as a person God intends for being with her/him eternally. Since probably at least a third of this audience will end their days with dementia, we should start now to review our prejudices about dementia!

A further cause then for the apartheid of the aged is the legacy of the Enlightenment philosophers, Locke, Kant and Hume, who followed upon Descartes’ dictum, “I think therefore I am.” In the ancient world of the Near East, leprosy was more than a dread disease. For it also meant being cast out of the society where one’s identity was social not individual. All the various forms of dementia are now like leprosy a dread social disease for if you cannot remember and think effectively then you are indeed a social outcast. At the first international conferences on Dementia in Britain in the early 1990’s, medical ethicists responded by correcting this Cartesian identity to downplay human identity as expressive only of the thinker.

Now in the first decade of the 21^st Century, the most recent findings of neuroscientists is that the brain is intrinsically relational so that our emotions are expressive themselves of social causes and effects whose actions can be mapped throughout the brain. Indeed most of the adult brain is shaped flexibly by postnatal development of the person to become socialized and conditioned to make the human responses that separate us from the animals. Animals give birth to much more formed animal brains for their immediate need of survival. Infant helplessness is the prerogative of caring human parents. So too, senile helplessness should be the prerogative of the human identity within a caring family.

This new field of neuroscience is now called interpersonal biology of the brain. It should challenge the Christian, not only to believe right doctrine, but more holistically to also have right emotions, such as is marked by “the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control…”(Gal. 5: 22). Looking after the elderly in our fellowship or at home requires more of these Christian virtues than perhaps with any other age group. Increasingly then, with the rising percentage of seniors in our society, the test of developing a mature Christian character will be tested far more by our aged than by our young! Already we see how the spiritual qualities of saintly leaders of our day, such as Henri Nouwen, were not learned at Harvard or Yale where he was a professor, but by the example and mentoring of Jean Vanier, in L’Arche communities of the mentally handicapped.

This then is the central message of this address: with eyes to see and with ears to hear what God is saying to the churches today, the relational reformation we all need so badly may well come not by skilled teaching of theology, but by simply being challenged to demolish the middle wall of partition. Now it is not only between Jew and Gentile, as the early Church was challenged to do, but today also between young and old, professional and personal, in our present churches.

As a relatively new discipline, geriatric medicine is waking up the entire medical profession by offering a more holistic style of care. In recent decades the medical field has promoted a focus on specialization so that the most specialized doctors earn the most money in treating more patients in much less time. Although geriatricians need two further years of training they are paid much less. Treating the old has many professional handicaps. Often they have more complex histories of sicknesses during their long lifetime; they are less communicable, requiring more patience, more time, more care. They might have more complex interactions with diverse drug treatments, yet be fixated with a symptom which is not necessarily the true cause of present concern. Pastorally, there is the same analogy over soul sickness. Thus both in geriatrics and in the pastoral life of the church, the complexities of the old are challenging us to relate and deal personally patiently in more intimate ways.

But all this challenges our social norms, so it is an ageing population that may force us to become countercultural, and to challenge our demented society about the true issues of dementia! Our churches need to become intentionally more personal. James the apostle says it well: “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry,” because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God demands of us. Right relatedness is both with God and with our neighbour in loving both.

We close then with the issue of how do we become sages as we age? It is an irony that as ageing is being extended, middle aged people are anticipating becoming old much younger than before. Is it the current retirement age which is not realistic with the extension of ageing? Why retire at 65 if you are going to live to 100 years or more? Yet do we have the spiritual resources to live physically longer, if we have lived the trivial lives of seniors? Why should we fear maturity? Is it because we are not being trained and educated for the needs of becoming wise with the extension of our mortal life?

Perhaps there are other misconceptions, even among Christians. To choose to be practical or pragmatic is not an option for becoming spiritual. All Christians are spiritual in seeking to walk in step with the Holy Spirit. Being spiritual is simply living in the presence of God on a daily basis. Our maturity is then primarily not psychological, according to the canons of social psychology – though these may be insightful. Our maturity lies in maturing in the Lord, which is demonstrated in the paschal meal, where we eat and drink in the benefit of Christ’s sacrificial gift of himself. So we live both as dependent on Christ and as gifted by Christ. But the more autonomous we remain in our self management, the more immature we will remain spiritually stagnant. For our future potential depends wholly upon the presence of God’s Spirit within us.  The daily pulse beat of my life for many years has, and is, the incessant prayer of the heart: “create in me a clean heart O Lord…and take not thy Holy Spirit from me.” Spiritual exercises may help us provided they do not subtly become a substitute for a deepening friendship with Christ himself.

Then we find the need to do less and less talking to embark in being more and more being in Christ. Gently we become less and less self conscious and joy in living in His presence becomes less effort and more receiving. For like the woman at the well, we too, will find the promise of Jesus so profoundly true: “Out of you will flow rivers of living water.” This of course is a process usually a very slow process that requires deepening trust, patience and longsuffering humility. For true wisdom is not just being shrewd about other people, rather it is in becoming more of a person within a profession. It is becoming wise unto salvation in living out the truth of the Gospel.

Dr. James Houston, one of the original founders and first principal of Regent College, has just published his most recent work Joyful Exiles, which reflects on the current divergence of Western culture and the Christian spiritual life. Dr. Houston also serves as a Senior Fellow with the C.S.Lewis Institute in Washington, D.C., USA.