A speaking gig in Florida last weekend has given me contact once more with America’s future. So many people down there have reached age 65 that one gets a glimpse of how the whole country will look in the year 2030. By that time, one in every five of us Americans will have attained that level of longevity.

Certain highlights of my short stay at a church in West Palm Beach stand out boldly. It was impressive to see large numbers of retired men and women come to worship in various degrees of vigor. Some elders obviously enjoyed bustling good health; others displayed bodies in notable disrepair.

I focused with admiration on one couple in particular, she painfully shuffling along hobbled by the effects of stroke, while he cheerfully provided major support, smiling all during his wife’s uncertain progress toward the entrance.

Evidences of such courage buoyed up my spirit. Another retired couple were helping an adult son walk, the latter having been crippled by the effects of a brain tumor. Scenes like these justify what one of the hymns sung in that church calls the world – – “this valley of tears.” Yet I had to admire the way these people struggled with their disabilities.

That is presumably a major reason why they come to church in such large numbers. They want to understand what later life is all about and to derive spiritual strength for its trials. Presumably many learn to balance their experience of physical decline with interior growth. They may even lay hold of the mystical dimensions of their faith and move to a new level of spirituality.

That level finds expression in a prayer I quoted in the course of one talk. The Jesuit anthropologist, Teilhard de Chardin, whose cult flourished in the 1960s, wrote: “O God, grant that I may understand that it is you (provided only that my faith is strong enough) who are painfully parting the fibers of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me away within yourself.”

Not everyone would be comfortable with this mystical language but it expresses the faith of a profound priest-scientist who loved both God and the world of nature.

Another aspect of church life that caught my attention once more was its intergenerational quality. My gerontologist friend Harry Moody likes to point out the power of the church to unify people of various ages. He thinks that it is probably the social institution that does this best and I am inclined to agree with him.

Although the average age in that church was high, still I was glad to see families with young children as well. In fact, at one of the liturgies we celebrated the baptism of a seven year old boy with a name redolent of French history. Clovis was baptized to the acclaim of all the other parishioners, some of them presumably in their ninth and tenth decades of life.

Not all the images from my brief gerontological survey can be called upbeat. One late afternoon I was invited to an early bird dinner at a nearby restaurant. Next to our table was a seventy-something couple, the man facing me. All during their meal I watched to see if he would say anything to his companion. But, so far as I could discern, he spoke not a word to her throughout.

He downed his red wine, fed at his pasta, all without speaking a word and never changing expression. This couple, perhaps married for decades, offered a striking image of later life lived in quiet desperation.

A biblical reading from the next day’s liturgy struck me for its dynamic contrast with that restaurant scene. In the first book of Samuel in the Hebrew Bible, one reads of Elkanah, the husband of two wives.

One of these wives, Hannah, weeps because she has never conceived a child. To console her, Elkanah then says, “Why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?” Not all husbands, it would seem, have attained Elkanah’s level of spousal love.

At a party in another setting down there, I talked with a 70ish woman who spoke of past and future surgeries for herself and her friends. Referring to those who needed and need replacements, she said “We all have hips.” She did so with a spirit blithe enough to retain cheerfulness in the face of burdensome physical problems that accompany aging.

A three-mile walk early one morning with a Florida friend helped implement my ideal of both physical and spiritual exercise every day. Moving along at a brisk pace with an old friend made the experience even better for me as we reviewed personalities and shared events.

However, as often noted previously, I was struck by how few of my age peers were out walking that morning or, for that matter, people of any age. Unhappily enough, pessimistic studies of American exercise habits would seem to be based in reality.

Richard Griffin