Called to Aging
Three weeks ago I celebrated my 78th birthday. I celebrated it with gratitude, gratitude for the fact that, on the average, we have twenty more years of life than our grandparents had. Aging has been a gift, and at each stage of our lives we can be grateful that we are called to get older. Aging has been an interest of mine for some years and so I would like to take today to speak about the gift of aging we each have.

The credentials I have for speaking on aging include my vice presidency of Episcopal Senior Ministries, my former chairing of the National Interfaith Coalition on Aging, my having taught the first course in aging offered at an Episcopal Theological Seminary, and most of all the fact that I am an aging person. I have exceeded my expected “three score and ten years” by eight years. When I tell people I am 78, the usual response is “You don’t look that old!” It’s offered as a complement, but it comes out of the faulty belief in our society that age is bad and to look old is even worse. The fact is, though, that we cannot escape aging. We are called, by our very nature to age. When people tell me that they don’t want to get old I always remind them that there is only one way to avoid aging, and we then agree that we prefer to avoid that alternative. Let’s face it. We are all getting older. God seems to be calling us to be old.

Two Christian beliefs are central to our life as Christians: the first is the notion of calling, of vocation, the belief that God is calling us at every time in our lives, the second is the notion of stewardship, that everything we have is a gift from God, to be used as a way of showing our love of God and our neighbor. Someone summarized it by saying that “Who we are is God’s gift to us. What we do with it is our gift to God.” Retired people often respond to the question, “What is your vocation?” by saying “I used to be a teacher, or a lawyer, or whatever.” But of course that is the wrong answer. Vocation is what God calls us to do now, at this moment of our lives. We are always being called. Since I retired from full time ministry 13 years ago I have experienced a variety of calls, mostly to interim ministry of various sorts, but also to volunteer work that I can do because I have more control of my time than at any other period of my life. The church today needs to learn how to better guide older people in their several callings. We’re not just called to “stuff envelopes in the church office,” though of course that can be a legitimate calling. We all have skills and gifts to use, often ones we didn’t use in our full time vocations. When I retired I vowed that I would not take on anything I didn’t enjoy doing. One of my favorite cartoons is one showing two children sitting in front of a large house and one is saying to the other, “I don’t know what my father does. All I know is that it makes him sick to his stomach!” While every work has certain necessary drudgeries about it, it shouldn’t make us “sick to our stomachs.” God generally doesn’t call us to be miserable.

God is always calling us to a vocation. It may include doing things for and with our own families that we never before had time to do. It may mean being a better neighbor or citizen or friend. We are being called, even when we are limited by age or infirmity. One of the saints I came to know in the church discovered that when she was confined to her home by crippling arthritis, she could still check up on other homebound people with daily phone calls and she could pray with and for them on the phone. My father, when he was in hospice preparing for his coming death, discovered a calling to relate lovingly to the nurses and others who had the difficult job of serving a community of dying people. God is always calling us.

How do we discover our calling? I have discovered three principles of discernment which have helped me. The first is that where we are is probably where God wants us to be. It is the site of our calling. The second principle of discernment is that our calling is usually in doing something that gives us pleasure. God seldom calls us to be miserable. The third principle is that our calling is to use the gifts or skills God has given us. A wise 85 year old friend once told me about how he had been a white water canoeist in his youth. When he could no longer manage that he took up sailing. When managing a sail boat became too much for him he bought a small power boat. “And now?” I asked. “Now,” he said, “I enjoy walking on the beach.” He also enjoyed using his business skills by being a pro-bono consultant for non-prophet organizations. God is always calling us to use our gifts to express our love of God and our neighbor.

The second thing about our being called to age has to do with one of the not so pleasant things about the aging process, the experience of pain and loss. There is the loss of some of the strength and agility we had when we were younger. There is the loss of people we loved and who were close to us. A friend who taught at a Roman Catholic seminary gave me a useful insight when he said that he was helped by looking at the way our Lord “emptied” himself in entering into human life. Aging, he said, involves some “emptying” of ourselves and we can be helped by seeing our losses in relationship to Jesus’ emptying himself in taking on the limitations of our human existence. Equally bad news about aging is the physical pain associated with arthritis and other afflictions of old age. I’m not very good in dealing with physical pain. I recall coming back to my congregation after a painful recovery from a back injury. Many of my parishioners expected me to come back with some great spiritual insight, but all I could tell them I had learned was that I don’t enjoy suffering. I still don’t like it, and would rather not wake up most mornings with aching joints, but I am learning that suffering can be redemptive. Perhaps the most lasting legacy of the late Pope John Paul II is his witness to this truth. Most of us struggle against pain and only make it worse, like in the pain of childbirth. Accepting our pain, finding in that pain an identification with our Lord’s suffering, can be redemptive. Theresa of Avilla witnessed to this when she wrote, “I accept everything: the suffering which is inseparable from the joy, and the joy which is the crown of suffering.”

The final thing I want to say about our calling to be old, is that we are called to be wise and to discover ways of sharing that wisdom. Rabbi Shalmon-Schacter Shalomi wrote a very good book called From Aging to Saging in which he makes this point beautifully. He points out that we have not really completed our life’s task until we have been able to share some of what we have learned about life with others. In a talk I heard him give in Philadelphia he said that it is like composing on a computer. Until you hit the “save” button, you really haven’t written it. He teased us Christians present by saying that this gives a whole new meaning to that question, “Brother, are you saved?” Of course being a “sage” means having something to pass on. It means that we first need to cultivate our lives with God and have something to offer. It doesn’t mean going on and on with your children or grandchildren telling them all you ever knew. It means being an authentic person and letting people close to you know the truth by which you have lived. Some of the sages who have influenced me have not even put it in words. They put it in the quality of their lives. So often we who are old are tempted to be old grouches, to spend our time complaining about how bad things are, how badly people treat us, how sick and tired we are of being sick and tired. But we are called to give up that sort of witnessing and to cultivate the art of being “sages,” of sharing the wisdom God has given us so that our lives can be a signpost for those who follow us.

Yes, we are all called to be older persons. We are called to pursue our vocations, knowing that we are being called by God all the days of our lives. We are called to experience suffering and loss in fellowship with the God who shares and understands that suffering. We are called to be sages in witnessing to others the goodness and love of God.