Aging Matters: Finding Your Calling for the Rest of Your Life

By R. Paul Stevens

  Academy of Parish Clergy’s Top Ten Books for Parish Ministry

Vocational discernment, says R. Paul Stevens, is a lifelong process — one that takes on even more significance in later life. In this book Stevens argues that our calling does not end with formal retirement; to the contrary, we do well to keep on working, if possible, till life's end.

Stevens delves into matters of calling, spirituality, and legacy in retirement, showing that we must continue to discern our vocation as we grow older in order to remain meaningfully engaged for the rest of our lives. He reframes retirement as a time of continued calling and productivity and points to biblical wisdom that can help us redefine aging as an extraordinarily fruitful season of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Apr 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781467444996

R. Paul Stevens

R. Paul Stevens is professor emeritus of marketplace theology and leadership at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia, and a marketplace ministry mentor. He has worked as a carpenter and businessman, and served as the pastor of an inner-city church in Montreal. He has written many books and Bible studies, including Doing God's Business, Work Matters, Marriage Spirituality, The Other Six Days and Spiritual Gifts. He is coauthor (with Pete Hammond and Todd Svanoe) of The Marketplace Annotated Bibliography.

Book preview

Aging Matters

Finding Your Calling

for the Rest of Your Life

R. Paul Stevens

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.

© 2016 R. Paul Stevens

All rights reserved

Published 2016 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

www.eerdmans.com

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stevens, R. Paul, 1937- author.

Title: Aging matters : finding your calling for the rest of your life / R. Paul Stevens.

Description: Grand Rapids, Michigan : Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016. |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015045472 | ISBN 9780802872333 (pbk. : alk. paper)

eISBN 9781467445467 (ePub)

eISBN 9781467444996 (Kindle)

Subjects: LCSH: Older Christians — Religious life.

Classification: LCC BV4580 .S702 2016 | DDC 248.8/5 — dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045472

Scriptures taken from the HOLY BIBLE: TODAY’S NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. TNIV®. Copyright © 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of The Zondervan Corporation and the International Bible Society.

Contents

Introduction

Part One

Calling

1. Reframing Retirement

2. The Immensely Important Matter of Late-Life Calling

3. Late-Life Calling and the People of God

Part Two

Spirituality

4. Aging as a Spiritual Journey

5. The Vices of Aging

6. The Virtues of Late Life

Part Three

Legacy

7. Leaving a Multifaceted Legacy

8. Life Review and Life Preview

9. The End That Is the Beginning

Epilogue: A Reflection at the Graveside

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

Success in retirement depends in great measure on the way we lived beforehand.

Paul Tournier¹

Old age was not a defeat but a victory, not a punishment but a privilege.

Abraham Heschel²

At seventy-eight years of age I am not quite in the oldest-olds category but certainly on the way. According to recent studies even old age now is sub-categorized. Young-olds are sixty to sixty-nine; old-olds are seventy to seventy-nine; and oldest-olds are eighty-plus.³ So I have a vested interest in writing this book, not only for myself but for many friends who also are facing their senior years, many of them with more physical ailments than I. How are we to think of these years? More importantly, how are we to live? And how are we to live with faith (no matter your faith tradition)? Does our calling, that delightful summons on our life that gives meaning and purpose, end with formal retirement? (I retired eight years ago.) Should retirement be redefined, reframed as they say today, which means looking at it from an entirely different perspective, through a different lens? Walter Wright in The Third Third of Life observes, Retirement is being redefined.⁴

Here is another question: Does aging increase our spirituality, that heart for transcendence, or soul search? Are there special vices and virtues in aging, and spiritual disciplines to enable us to grow spiritually in our most senior years? What is our legacy? What are we leaving behind? And how are we to think about and live towards death, as there is a one hundred percent certainty that we will die? Nobody fails this one. But that raises the question of the next life and whether it would be a good thing to prolong our life indefinitely on earth. These are the haunting questions we will take up in this book.

Frankly, I am writing for myself, but also for you, my reader, who may also be caring for aging parents. If you are a social worker or care giver, wanting to understand what aging means and how to go about it fruitfully, how to help others face it and thrive through it, this is for you. Since this book is about aging it is, truly, about everyone. I will be approaching these questions from the perspective of a Christian faith, and I will be drawing on the Scriptures of the Jewish and Christian people groups. There are rich resources for people of other traditions or some resources from people who have no faith at all.⁵ But I am writing, I trust, in a way that could be accessed by people who are not at this point Jewish or Christian believers and who belong to another faith tradition. But I do so believing that there is within the Christian faith much to turn aging into an adventure and a blessing rather than a tragic denouement. One of my favorite Jewish authors, Abraham Heschel, says, Old age was not a defeat but a victory, not a punishment but a privilege.⁶ Heschel continues, One ought to enter old age the way one enters the senior years at a university, in exciting anticipation of consummation. . . . They are indeed formative years, rich in possibilities to unlearn the follies of a lifetime, to see through inbred self-deceptions, to deepen understanding and compassion, to widen the horizon of honesty, to refine the sense of fairness.⁷ But there is a further reason for this book.

The Gray Tsunami

There is no question that we have a population bulge in the seniors group that, on the population charts, is like an awkwardly large animal going through the long neck of snake. In the late Middle Ages those who survived to twenty could on average live to around fifty. In 1992, 12 percent of the U.S. population — something over thirty million people — were over sixty-five. By the best estimate, 18 percent of us will be that old by 2020. By 2040 one out of four North Americans will be sixty-five or over. In 1776, a child born in the United States had an average life expectancy of thirty-five. By the middle of the twenty-first century, it is expected in some generous estimates that men will live to 86 and women to 92.⁸ According to the Institute of Medicine, starting in 2011, a baby boomer [born between 1946 and 1964] will turn sixty-five every twenty seconds [in the United States].⁹ Baby boomers have delayed growing up, delayed marriage, delayed childbearing, delayed saving for retirement, and almost certainly are delaying retirement, sometimes for financial reasons. So what some have called the second half of life, roughly when one turns fifty (how many people do you know who are one hundred?), there is now what Walter Wright and others call the third third. The first third (one to thirty), he explains, we spend in incubation, education, preparation, exploring identity and purpose, intimacy and relationships. But then, from thirty to sixty, we enter a second third dominated by family and work; we define our core relationships and commit to a career path. But then, from age sixty to ninety, we encounter the unexplored terrain of life after the working career.¹⁰ Formerly this territory was a short trip, but now with better health and longevity it can be much longer, even twenty to thirty years. The point of this third third . . . is this: As we enter the third third of life, our calling will find new texture, new form, new possibilities.¹¹ Walter Wright describes a grandmother who retired for the first time in 1960 and then had four more careers: teaching, volunteering in the hospital, creating a historical society, and working for the library.¹² These striking examples of mid-life and late-life fruitfulness do not ameliorate the double message seniors and aging people hear from society.

How People and Society View Aging

On the one hand classic liberal economists tell us that population control and a declining birth rate are important for a healthy economy. But now, with fewer working persons to support the elderly, there is a crisis looming. Even the government pension plans, which are really in-and-out bank accounts, are in serious trouble because fewer are contributing to them and more are taking money out. So today older persons are often viewed as frail, sick, disabled, powerless, sexless, passive, alone, unloved, unable to learn, and burdensome. Americans have come to view aging not as a fated aspect of our individual and social existence, but as one of life’s problems to be solved through willpower, aided by science, technology, and expertise.¹³ People fear aging partly because they fear death. The logic is circular. It is mostly old people who die. So we fear getting old because we will die. So aging is a paradox. Everyone wants to live longer, but none of us wants to get old.

One thing that is apparent in considering ancient texts and cultural artifacts is this: old age and death, prior to what we call the modern era, were not clearly correlated as they are for us. We put death as the logical conclusion of a long life but the ancients, and even the early Christians, as well as people in much of the majority world, did not expect necessarily to live until old age. In this vein Augustine said, No one has died who was not going to die at some time, and the end of life reduces the longest life to the same conclusion as the shortest. . . . What does it matter by what kind of death life is brought to an end.¹⁴ There are even some gender differences. Women face aging sooner and more realistically because they go through menopause, notes Lewis Richmond.¹⁵ As one doctor said, When it comes to realizing they’re aging, women drop off the cliff, so to speak, while men the same age either ignore the signs or notice them a lot more gradually.¹⁶

So in this book we will first of all approach the question of aging in terms of calling or vocation. We will consider reframing retirement as a positive experience. We will ask whether we are supposed to work until we die, and how we should work. We will consider how we discern our calling for the rest of our lives. In this context we will note the many narratives and teachings in the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures as they relate to aging.

In the second section we will consider spirituality. We will consider whether the aging process itself is a spiritual discipline, a spiritual journey, but we will also ask what vices and virtues are uniquely associated with aging.

In the third section we will consider leaving a multifaceted legacy. We will consider how to prepare for death and what there is on the other side.

In all this I will be presenting aging as a time of potential fruitfulness. A Jewish rabbi points to some exceptional examples of generativity in old age:

Giuseppe Verdi composed Otello at age seventy-three and Falstaff when he was approaching eighty. Thomas Mann wrote Dr. Faustus and Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man after age seventy, while Picasso was producing masterpieces into his nineties. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright began his most creative work at age sixty-nine; philosopher Alfred North Whitehead published his most influential works after sixty-five; and the mind of the scientist-visionary Buckminster Fuller was teeming with creative innovation at age eighty.¹⁷

Few of us will be this creative. But all of us can approach aging with a positive attitude and seize the special opportunities which this new situation affords. And we will explore these.

What You Can Gain from This Book

Perspective — seeing advancing years as a process of maturing that is laden with new opportunities, including the opportunity to reframe the experience of retirement.

Hope — recognizing that faith enables us to see an ultimate future that is even better than the past.

Guidance — in discovering a refined sense of life purpose and meaning that is our calling, our vocation.

Spiritual and personal growth — in helping us see that the very process of aging is a spiritual journey in which we can, through addressing vices, nurturing virtues, and developing spiritual disciplines, become more whole persons, more connected with God, with others, and with the created order.

Practical guidelines — for addressing issues of will-making, doing late-life review, and preparing for death and the afterlife.

Dr. Paul Pearce — with whom I teach the Aging Matters course at Regent College and Carey Theological College — and Dr. Yuk Shuen Wong have outlined the Factors Contributing to Healthy Aging. They list them in an article published in BC Psychologist. First, there is the vocational factor — realigning priorities and commitments, while staying motivated and interested with a meaningful use of time. Second is the wellness factor — taking responsibility for personal wellness and health. Third is the social factor — relationships, friendships, and community connections that provide a feeling of personal security and wellness. Fourth, there is the resources factor — not only having assurance that one has financial stability in time of a changed lifestyle, but also the personal equity and resources that can be used to make a meaningful contribution to family and community. Finally, there is the spiritual factor — a kind of second chance at increasing spiritual depth as we explore life’s mysteries and our relationship with the supreme transcendent Other.¹⁸ In this book we will be explore all of these factors.

How to Use This Book for All It’s Worth

Of course the book can be read by individuals, whether aged, aging, or interested in helping older people. There are many footnotes which point to other resources, as well as a bibliography and an index at the end. But the book has a second possibility. At the end of each chapter are discussion questions and a Bible study on a passage in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. These can be used for individual study, but most naturally they could be used for group discussion. In that case the members of the group, for example, who are committed to a nine- or ten-week study could read the chapters in advance of the meeting and discuss the contents, or do the Bible discussion study when they meet. The Bible studies are not this is what the Bible says but discovery studies with questions to get you into the text for yourself, discovering useful life application. So — enjoy!

1. Paul Tournier, Learn to Grow Old, trans. Edwin Hudson (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1972), p. 19.

2. Abraham J. Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), 71-72, quoted in James M. Houston and Michael Parker, A Vision for the Aging Church: Renewing Ministry for and by Seniors (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011), p. 55.

3. George Vaillant, Aging Well (New York: Little, Brown, 2002), p. 23.

4. Walter C. Wright, The Third Third of Life: Preparing for Your Future (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012), p. 33.

5. See Richard John Neuhaus, ed., The Eternal Pity: Reflections on Dying (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000).

6. Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom, 71-72, quoted in Houston and Parker, A Vision for the Aging Church, p. 55.

7. Quoted in Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, From Age-ing to Sage-ing (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1995), pp. 21-22.

8. Schachter-Shalomi, From Age-ing to Sage-ing, p. 4.

9. Houston and Parker, A Vision for the Aging Church, p. 35.

10. Wright, The Third Third of Life, p. 9.

11. Wright, The Third Third of Life, p. 16.

12. Wright, The Third Third of Life, p. 19.

13. Carol Bailey Stoneking, Modernity: The Social Construction of Aging, in Stanley Haurerwas et al., Growing Old in Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 69.

14. Augustine, City of God, 1.11, quoted in Rowan Greer, Special Gift and Special Burden: Views of Old Age in the Early Church, in Stanley Hauerwas et al., Growing Old in Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 23.

15. Lewis Richmond, Aging as a Spiritual Practice: A Contemplative Guide to Growing Older and Wiser (New York: Gotham Books, 2012), p. 175.

16. Richmond, Aging as a Spiritual Practice, p. 175.

17. Schachter-Shalomi, From Age-ing to Sage-ing, pp. 43-44.

18. Yuk Shuen Wong and Paul Pearce, Factors Contributing to Healthy Aging, BC Psychologist, Vol. 3, Issue 2 (2014), pp. 11-12.

Part One

Calling

1. Reframing Retirement

2. The Immensely Important Matter of Late-Life Calling

3. Late-Life Calling and the People of God

1

Reframing Retirement

Two weeks is about the ideal length of time to retire.

Alex Comfort¹

Retirement is . . . not in the language of the Christian.

James M. Houston²

I have a serious proposal to make: We should work until we die. I realize that this sounds outrageous to people who have been longing for freedom fifty-five, are planning on getting out of the rat race just as soon as they can, have just been laid off or given an early retirement exit package, and are now looking forward to a life of leisure, playing or consuming their way to death. But I am serious.

The Christian and Jewish Bible know nothing of what we call retirement except one obscure reference in Numbers 8:23-25, where the Levites were to retire at age fifty. Perhaps it is a great idea for religious leaders to retire at fifty and spend their senior years mentoring younger men and women. Perhaps there are reasons for this strange, isolated reference to retirement, since people in Bible times rarely lived to what we call old age. They did, however, work until they died. In an agrarian society with people living in extended families, there was always work for older people to do, even if it was done with less energy, including helping with the preparation of meals, getting water, and assisting in the care of grandchildren. In much of the developing world, this is still the case. But with increased life expectancy,³ meaning that many people can live twenty or thirty years after retiring from their career, and with the advent of the industrial and information society, many people plan to retire from work around sixty-five. Some people dream of early retirement at fifty-five. But then what? Certainly, retirement is changing.

The Changing Face of Retirement

In their book Age Wave, Ken Dychtwald and Joe Flower describe how the old way of retirement has changed:

We are witnessing the end of yesterday’s retirement, with grandpa asleep on the porch, the gold watch the company gave him ticking in his vest pocket, and his friends coming over later to go fishing or play cards or checkers. Later life is rapidly becoming a time when you do not stop working completely, but instead shift gears to part-time, seasonal, or occasional work, mixed with productive and involved leisure activities.⁴

The surrounding culture in the north and west of the globe gives a complicated message on extending our work life. I have two books on my shelves. One is titled Joy at Work. The other has the title The Joy of Not Working. A couple profiled in The Vancouver Sun say, Our goal would be to use the next 20 to 25 years of healthy living to do what we want. We just haven’t been able to figure out what that means, except we know it means as little work as possible and a warm climate. We don’t plan to leave an inheritance to anyone.⁵ Essentially this secular approach wants no work, no health challenges, no commitments,