Children love to disclose their ages. They even take pride in counting portions of years.
 Asked how old she is, a preschooler will reply four and a half. She clearly feels boastful about the half part.
Of course, they have better reason than adults to value the extra six months. After all, for them this stretch of time comprises a large proportion of their time on earth, exactly one-ninth for that four-and-a-half-year-old.
For their part, parents commonly welcome those extra six months and sometimes celebrate the half-year as if it were a whole one. Recently, I visited the living room of neighbors who were toasting their six-month-old daughter.
Young people, after becoming adolescents, value the birthdays that will allow them to drive, to vote, and, last of all, to drink legal beer.
Once adolescents become adults, however, they commonly become less ready to disclose their age. By the time they become middle-aged, adults generally feel loath to reveal their age. Sometimes they resort to artifice in order to conceal that vital statistic.
Incidentally, the latter cannot fool me. I have a directory ─ and so could you ─ that tells the year of birth of virtually every resident in my populous city. This makes me a dangerous man in the eyes of some age-concealers.
When old age sets in, many Americans change their approach radically. Instead of taking pains to conceal their numerical age, they often begin to boast of it. It’s as if a key unlocked a bundle full of secrets and everyone now has access to its contents.
The coming New Year will mark this breakthrough for me. The numerals 2008 relate neatly to the year of my birth, 1928. I am now free, not only to acknowledge being in my 80th year of life, but to take pride in it.
Already, a mysterious new process has begun to take place inside me. Difficult to describe, it feels like an arrival, a release, and an achievement, all wrapped up together.
The arrival suggests coming to a new stage of life. August of the year 2008 will bring my 80th birthday. Already I am taking hold of this reality or, more appropriately, it is taking hold of me.
The release comes with not having to observe certain social restraints that have kept me in check until now. It has become easier to accept certain disabilities, for example. And not being the smartest guy in the room, or the most successful.
Achievement is probably the wrong word to describe passage into the 80th year. For me, it is more a gift received than an accomplishment managed.
Yes, I exercise every day and take some care about the food that sustains my life. However, so did many of my age peers, along with friends, relatives, and neighbors who, to my deep regret, have died before me.
Survival is shrouded in mystery. But it now describes my life. Thankfully, I have become a survivor. Many threats could have killed me but it has not yet happened. I’ll try to let you know when it does.
Is 80 the old 50, as some optimists claim? I much prefer to think of it as the new 80. Fortunately, many of my age peers enjoy the same vigor that I have managed to sustain thus far.
Another phenomenon of this ascent to year number 80 offers a welcome surprise. People, especially the young, treat me differently.
They not only offer their seats in the subway and on buses. More subtly, they look at me differently and show a new and unaccustomed tolerance and patience with me.
At times, these differences have their downside. Sometimes without realizing it, people can be condescending as if to say, “You’re old, we have to lower our expectations of you across the board.”
But this distorted approach to age remains rare in my experience. The younger people that I encounter on my daily path are almost invariably respectful and polite.
“You know the wrong people,” critics will perhaps respond. Perhaps, but I plan to keep expecting the best of others.
I have always enjoyed making friends in other generations. The young people of today are a source of endless interest and variety.
Do my younger friends see us elders as their future selves? Probably not; but neither do they seem to see us as a race apart.
I have never been shy about asking for help when I needed it. But being in my 8oth year gives me new freedom to do it. Why should faux independence force me to shovel my own snow?
So the New Year 2008 promises yet another set of experiences in what has become a surprisingly long life. Some of these experiences will surely prove undesirable. But I will try to cope with them, while relishing the benefits brought by the passage of time.

      Richard Griffin

In his late fifties, a man named Ed Speedling decided to leave his work as a high-level health care administrator and find a job that would bring him into direct contact with homeless people. Now he has an important position with a nonprofit that tries both to relieve homelessness and to prevent it.

Sally Bingham married right out of high school and was still bringing up the youngest of three children when she decided to become an Episcopal priest. That meant she had first to go to college, starting at age 45, and then to a seminary. She now preaches regularly and serves as director of a project that brings together her faith and her active concern for the environment.

These people are two of the midlife job-changers who figure prominently in the new book Encore. Author Marc Freedman adds the subtitle: “Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life.”

Founder of the program “Civic Ventures,” Freedman has drawn much attention to new notions of retirement. His movement specializes in helping people middle-aged and older to discover new work that is both fulfilling to them as individuals and beneficial to society.

To put this new movement in perspective, it helps to know something about the history of retirement over the past 60 years. After World War II, no one had much idea of a role for retired people. Financial planners and marketers attempted to convince these men and women that they were living the American Dream; but these efforts went only so far.

But, starting in 1960, that situation was to change. A player who looms large in this history is Del Webb, the founder of Sun City in Arizona. He wanted to convince Americans that, after leaving work, they could indeed enter the Golden Age and be made happy by sports, hobbies, and other recreational activities in the friendly climates of the southwest and elsewhere.

This was the beginning of a new concept of retirement that spread across America. Retirement could become an “endless vacation,” filled with pleasurable activity.

As the millennium approached, however, the inadequacy of this model became evident. It has failed to provide the underlying meaning that is needed for long years of middle age and later life. And many retirees have found their income insufficient to support decades without working.

This spiritual and economic vacuum has prompted many people to seek work after retirement. Ideally, at least, that would be work which combines added income with personal meaning.

The old idea of “senior voluntarism” no longer suits a lot of people, especially the well-educated and healthy job seekers whose experience qualifies them for challenging work.

I myself admire the energy and ambition of the new breed of retirees, but I have also benefited greatly from the work of older volunteers in more traditional and less exciting roles.

Civic Ventures is riding high these days in gerontological circles, but it has its critics. Robert Hudson, the distinguished Boston University scholar, knows the program well. He has ably explained, how commentators on both the right and the left find fault with the program’s agenda. Like other such debates, it’s complicated.

Some conservatives feel wary of older people getting more involved in political issues. Following the philosophy of Civic Ventures, the retired people who have become employed again might be positioned to press for even more benefits from government than they have now.

Some liberals see Civic Ventures as elitist, a further expression of the “successful aging” school of thought. It would put a premium on well-being and might push to the sidelines those not privileged by good health and advanced education.

Some liberals also fear that large-scale involvement of elders might make government feel it less necessary to provide services to members of the older population. It would be a pretext for cutting back on social programs that respond to elders in need.

My own view inclines toward the second position. Though I welcome ways of getting retired people into satisfying and meaningful work, I am wary of social pressures making them feel worthless if they don’t seek such employment.
At the same time, I recognize that many of the retired have left work too early to sustain themselves financially and psychologically over what can be a long haul.

A feminist critique also merits attention. A scholar named Martha Holstein writes: “The expectation that our later years will bring a life of discipline and self-control primarily in the public sphere negates the value, place, and significance of what women do at home.”

And she asks: “Can the norms of civic engagement dignify both the 66- year-old Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and the 79 year-old woman who lives in assisted living and recently told me ‘everything hurts?’”

But, as a wise woman friend, Catherine Bateson, reminds me: “You can’t cover everything in one set of recommendations.” Like her, on balance I welcome the Encore initiatives.

        Richard Griffin

I’m always eating breakfast. Or lunch. Or dinner. Or I am sitting at the table, snacking on milk and cookies.
Constantly, I am brushing my teeth, getting dressed, going to bed. And wakng up.
Or I am forever swimming, walking home from the Square, taking out the trash.
There I am, perched before my computer, filling the screen with new material, reading email, some of it dubious. Why is that unknown woman from Nigeria always telling me the sad story of her family and urging me to send funds to an address she encloses?
Morning is always breaking and I am unlocking the front door, going out on the porch, and picking up the daily newspapers. This habit, widely abandoned by those under a certain undefined age, remains ingrained in me. Old Gutenberg did not serve us so badly, I still believe.
Alternatively, I am anxiously opening a library book eager to read history and literature. I rest back in the easy chair, not immune to the effects of an afternoon slump.
Afternoon wanes and I am making my favorite drink. Bourbon plus sweet vermouth with a cherry floating on top equals a Manhattan, the closest I will get to that favorite destination today.
Add taking pills to the list of habitual activities. For most of the past decades, I was immune to this requirement. But now my membership in the vast drug-taking conspiracy of America is firmly established.
Do you have sensations like this or is it just me?
You may think the response to these experiences can be put simply: I’m in a rut. You might prescribe a long vacation, a trip around the world, or some other radical change.
What these sensations mean to me, however, is more than that. I have lived a long time. There has been ample occasion for me to have done all those habitual things countless times over.
As of last August, I had lived 28,835 days. This computes to 692,040 hours, the majority of which found me awake. That’s a lot of time to have done many of the same basic things over and over. 
I have become inured to hundreds of actions that go to make up a more or less ordered life. The daily schedule stretches far back into the past and has become ongoing. If you have my mental make-up, there is no escaping these habitual actions. Nor do I want to.
But I have discovered how to milk certain routine actions for added worth. Swimming, for example, can serve as a time for thinking. You can reflect on situations, and sometimes find answers to problems.
Walking also serves reflection, not just on the world as you pass by, observing it. This exercise also promotes insight, even prayer on occasion. The church and academic bells you hear in passing stir thinking about transience.
Fortunately I am never bored. The world is too filled with fascinating people and events for that to happen. And technology. Ever since I bought my first computer, the old Commodore 64, and words from it flashed on my hooked-up television screen, I realized that boredom had been exorcised from my world for the duration.
I also welcome change, at least sometimes. Don’t ask me to give up my routine of daily exercise, however. Nor regular talk sessions with certain friends, and many other habits. To surrender these quotidian activities would mean loss of something precious.
For many of my age peers, it seems, time moves slowly. If you can believe reports, the passage of days for them does not resemble my description.
Having a deadline for this column admittedly speeds the flight of each week for me. The chosen need to produce some 800 words of readable prose every Friday induces “time’s winged chariot” to fly faster.
But other people share this sense of time gathering speed in later life. They are surprised by the arrival of another Christmas, a new New Year, yet another birthday. 
Looking back down the years, you can see the present patterns of activity in somewhat different forms. Reflecting on the past, everyone can find both continuity and discontinuity.
Some stretches of time I regret. Those years in which I listened to dull lectures, not a few of them in Latin, seem wasted. But “wasted’ as a category demands scrutiny. That long-ago regimen was the product of a certain time and place now, long after the fact, impervious to change.
These musings of an increasingly longevitous elder of the community may reverberate in you. If they suggest richness, that’s what I have in mind. The daily repetitions, like so much else, belong to the mystery of human existence.
We are, and therefore we do. And much of what we do we have done before. But the next times we do them may hold the surprise of new insights.
                                                                                                 Richard Griffin
 

Christmas in Wales.

How idyllic that sounds! A fabulous season spent in a land of enchantment.

That’s the way the poet Dylan Thomas described his native habitat in 1955 when he wrote “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.”
As one critic sees it, “Thomas recreates the nostalgic magic of a childhood Christmas when everything was brighter and better.”

As the poet recalled the time, “It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas.”

That weather helped create an aura of mystery for Thomas but perhaps he remembered it with advantages.

My own Christmas in Wales was not like that. No snow fell. I was no longer a child, and I remained far from sharing the imagination of a poet.

Yes, the beauty of the countryside impressed itself on me. From a hill on a clear day, I could look to the north and catch a glimpse of the Irish Sea. To the west, I was awed by Mt. Snowdon rising above the plains.
Nearby flowed the River Clwyd, and not far from the house where I stayed, sheep grazed peacefully. .

Another poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, had seen the same landscape long before, and had written: “Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales,/All the air things wear that build this world of Wales.”

Offsetting this beauty for me, however, were the discontents of absence. In a letter to my mother on December 24, 1963, I wrote (not too gracefully): “Adjustment to an uncongenial style of living, a good deal of confinement, all go to account for this finding life difficult.”

For a year, I lived in a castle-like house belonging to the English Jesuits near the town of St. Asaph. The place was isolated from population centers because, on their legally-allowed return to Britain in the 19th century after long years of exile, the Jesuits wanted to keep a low profile.

I found this isolation difficult to bear, and the lifestyle of my English colleagues did not always sit well with me. Christmas served to bring out some of these feelings.

My purpose for being there was to complete the final stage of my spiritual apprenticeship. This was an austere enterprise, involving none of the usual novelty and variety of travel abroad.

On many mornings, I would look out into a courtyard hoping that the Royal Mail truck would soon arrive with a letter for me. And, all that year, I did not learn a single word of the Welsh language.

The warmth and kindness of some of my colleagues could not make me forget home Christmases. I remember promising myself never to live in such isolation again.

During that Christmas season of 1963, I felt particularly bereft because of President Kennedy’s assassination a few weeks previously. In the days following the event, colleagues from around the world had rallied around us Americans, but it was still difficult to find any consolation for such a loss.

In a letter to my mother on December 15th, I had described my anguish. “This news rocked me for a few days,” I wrote, “and even now, I still feel bursts of sadness and regret sometimes.”

I added that she could not know “the affection people had for him over here.” We had been permitted (by way of exception) to watch television, and my companions grieved with me.

Perhaps the experience of being abroad explains why my most frequent dreams even now involve finding myself far from home with uncertain prospects of getting back.

These fantasies have value for me because they reveal thoughts and feelings otherwise suppressed. As the Swiss psychologist Jung says, “The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul.”

More than four decades after the experience of first being an ocean away from home, I look forward to being once again at home with family and friends in the warmth of Christmas.

Two realities temper my joyous feelings, however.

I feel continued anxiety about what has been happening to our country, our homeland. We are still at war; our political leadership is held in contempt; the planet itself is in peril.  It is difficult to be optimistic.

The second concern is related to the first. Even in our country, flowing with wealth, people without homes can be counted in the hundreds of thousands, if not more.

In Dafur, in Iraq, in Congo and elsewhere, millions wander in search of basic shelter. According to St. Luke, the child at the center of the Christmas celebration and his parents were homeless as well.

These sober thoughts, however, should not be allowed to take away the joy that many of us feel at Christmas. “Joy to the World” says the carol.

Seekers after light can, without scruple, open themselves to let this joy flow in and gladly place a greater value on their own lives and on those whom they love.

     Richard Griffin

During my early growing-up years in the Boston suburbs, I used to believe Catholics had to be Democrats. To a person, the adults known to me belonged to that party, and anything else seemed unthinkable in my young worldview.

In teen age it came as a shock for me to discover many members of my church, especially those living in the Midwest, were actually Republicans. That seemed to me almost unnatural.

Later on, when I first studied Catholic social teaching, the issue became more complicated. I wondered how Catholic Republicans could reconcile the doctrines of their party with those of the church.

I never expected to see the day when, as happened in recent national elections, Catholics were almost evenly split between the two parties. In fact, members of my own extended family became Republican, in their voting habits if not in their voter registration.

Feelings connected with this question arose last month, when the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston spoke out in criticism of the Democratic party.
 

In an interview with Boston Globe reporter Michael Paulson, Sean O’Malley said: “I think the Democratic Party, which has been in many parts of the country traditionally the party which Catholics have supported, has been extremely insensitive to the church’s position, on the gospel of life in particular, and on other moral issues.”

What struck me was how narrow O’Malley’s assertion was. The “gospel of life” addresses many concerns ─ war, economic deprivation, and capital punishment, among others. Why is abortion such a privileged issue?

And why are today’s Democrats a particular target? We should note that one of the leading Republican candidates for the presidential nomination is strongly pro-choice and perhaps not otherwise dedicated to the gospel of life.

O’Malley’s hard line differs from that of his fellow American bishops. In response to a statement they made, one knowledgeable commentator, Thomas Reese, spoke to the New York Times. “Can a Catholic in good conscience vote for a candidate who is pro-choice?” he asked. “What they are saying is, Yes.”

I myself am strongly against abortion. I think that everything possible should be done to help individuals to avoid that option.

At the same time I am against criminalizing abortion. Even though I regret the loss of unborn human life, I certainly do not want to send women to prison, or even to court. This I hold even if they have chosen what I regard as a highly undesirable and, at least sometimes, immoral course of action.

To my mind, criminalizing abortion represents a self-defeating and unwise policy that many Democratic and Republican elected officials have correctly resisted.

To focus Catholic teaching on this one issue strikes me as a serious mistake. Threatening Catholic politicians with exclusion from the Eucharist, as some bishops have done, makes it worse.

We should remember, too, that no law can ever eliminate abortion. Instead, to criminalize abortion inevitably creates a gulf between rich and poor. In fact, some current data show that abortion tends to be more prevalent in countries where it is forbidden.

A psychiatrist friend strongly committed to Catholic doctrine and practice has told me of her experience during medical training in New York when abortion was illegal.

She personally observed what others have noted ─ that wealthy women had access to safe abortions, while poor women were limited to dangerous and sometimes lethal procedures.

The day after the Paulson interview, his paper published an op-ed by my old friend David O’Brien, Professor of Roman Catholic Studies emeritus at Holy Cross in Worcester. In his article O’Brien rejects O’Malley’s “unwise assault” and explains the reasons why a wider view must be adopted.

Catholics who vote for politicians who support abortion rights do so, O’Brien argues, because they are pro-choice, not pro-abortion. In taking this stand, they are being accountable to voters.

The same writer argues that the cardinal and his fellow bishops must take responsibility for the advice they have given to voters in national elections. He explains this responsibility emphatically. 

“Voters who made antiabortion politics their priority must share responsibility for disastrous domestic, foreign, and military policies that violate almost every tenet of Catholic social teaching,” says O’Brien with devastating accuracy.

In his conclusion, O’Brien calls for the two sides to find common ground, a realistic possibility, though a limited one. Abortions can be reduced in number by actions shown to be effective.

Like my friend, I freely admit the mistakes of the Democratic Party in its treatment of pro-life politicians like Bob Casey, the late governor of Pennsylvania.

At the same time, I cannot feel that the church’s credibility is increased by Cardinal O’Malley’s pronouncements.

The cardinal could have spoken words helpful to people trying to weigh issues of life and death in this political season. I, for one, regret that he chose to send out heat rather than light.

      Richard Griffin
 

The name of an obscure Austrian farmer became known to me decades ago when a scholar friend published a book about him. His story inspired me then, and it still does now that he has received undreamed-of recognition.

That Austrian man’s name is Franz Jägerstätter, and he has just been declared blessed by the Catholic Church. His beatification, the last step before he is declared a saint, took place in the cathedral of Linz, Austria, last month,.

The book, In Solitary Witness, first appeared in l966, and was written by the historian Gordon Zahn, who was then on the faculty of UMass-Boston. Its significance came from the central figure ─ one of the few Austrian Catholics who publicly opposed Hitler.

The Vatican’s choices of people to be recognized as saints do not always please me. For instance, the church recently decided to so honor 498 Spaniards who were killed in the Spanish civil war by the forces opposing Franco. This decision.smacks to me of being more a political action than a religious one.

But the Vatican deserves praise for honoring Franz Jägerstätter, especially because he defied the Nazis despite church authorities who told him he was wrong to do so. The conscience of this farmer, who had minimal schooling, proved to be far more authentically religious than the stance of his bishop and the pastor of his parish.

Important to the story is Jägerstätter’s family. He and his wife had four daughters, a fact used by those who counseled him to report for duty in a war he recognized as evil. But he refused even while knowing this decision would lead to his execution and leave his family without him.

His wife Franziska, now 94, feels happy about his recognition by the church. At the beatification ceremony she wore red, the color of martyrdom. Even though his sacrifice made her life difficult, in retrospect she recognizes the value of his decision despite the effects it had on her family. His four daughters, now in their 60s and 70s, also attended the beatification liturgy.

In refusing to serve in Hitler’s army, Jägerstätter resisted pressure from dozens of people, officials and others, who continued to plead with him to reverse his stand. He was decapitated in a Berlin prison in August of 1943.

His executioners tried to terrify him by denying him a hood over his head and making him lie face up to the guillotine. His body was cremated and his ashes ultimately brought back to his native village, St. Radegund in Upper Austria, where he is now honored as a saint.

Of significance is the way this beatification and other factors have changed the church in Austria. For a long time after the war had ended, Austrians were generally reluctant to face up to their country’s collaboration with the Nazi regime. Now, all of the current Austrian bishops welcomed the honor given to Jägerstätter, an amazing turnaround for leaders of a church that had enthusiastically welcomed the Nazis in the 1930s.

When the 1938 Anschluss was proposed, whereby Austria would become part of Germany, the predecessors of today’s Austrian bishops had issued a command to all Catholics to vote for it. In 1939 one of the bishops instructed the troops: “It is God Himself who is behind what the Führer commands.”

My old friend Gordon Zahn, who first uncovered the story for American readers, todoes not know about Jägerstätter’s beatification. The historian, now 89, has suffered Alzheimer’s disease for years and recently entered into hospice care. How poignant that he will never be aware of what his book helped bring about!

To my mind, the life and death of one Austrian farmer shines out from the awful darkness of the Nazi era. His witness to truth, paid at such a great price, stands as an example for our time as well as his own.

What the leaders of the church did by way of acceding to Hitler still makes me cringe. Though only one person among so many, Jägerstätter leaves me with hope. He dared take a stand in conscience when everyone and everything said not to.

Normally I resist hero worship. So many of the people proposed by popular culture as heroic turn out to have hidden baggage. You have to be careful about putting your faith in any one person unreservedly.

About anyone who shows the way for others, Rabbi Abraham Heschel once said: “A prophet is a pain in the ass, by the grace of God.” I imagine that the newly recognized Austrian saint was difficult. Perhaps even more than we all are difficult.

But that’s not the point. As he grew into maturity he learned to put conscience first, even when that led to an awful fate. And it was a conscience solidly founded in a great spiritual tradition.

So I gladly recognize him as a saint and see him as a model for myself and others.

Richard Griffin