At the end of a lecture I gave last week about ministry to older people, a member of the audience asked me how he could promote better relations between the younger and the older members of his religious community. He belongs to a Catholic order in Peru where he will be returning after his theological studies here.

To hear him tell it, men of different generations within his religious household have trouble communicating with one another. They experience a fair amount of tension because of differing outlooks and values. He would like to find a way of easing those tensions and opening hearts among older and younger members.

Like many questions posed in public, this one was difficult. Anyone can ask a question that I cannot answer. And what do I know about religious communities in Peru?

Making a brave effort, however, I shared with him my own experience of living in religious communities in a past era when tensions between generations had grown large. It was a time of great change in the church and many older men felt their values and way of life under threat.

I remember one older colleague who, to my consternation, literally would not exchange a single word with me during dinner. If I had asked him for the salt shaker, he would not have passed it to me. Such was the degree of bitterness he felt about people like me who favored changes so threatening to him.

I never did find a way to deal with such divisions within my community, nor did anyone else. Only the passage of time eased the problem as new outlooks gradually took hold and the younger generation grew older.

Since that time, I have learned some approaches to older/younger relationships that may promote mutual sympathy and understanding. Sharing these approaches with the questioner, I hoped he could act as a bridge between the two age groups in his community.

For young people, I suggested, the challenge is to come to grips with their own aging. Though it is extremely difficult for young people to imagine themselves as old, they might try to make this spiritual leap. Doing so would require them to come to grips with their own aging so as to enter with empathy into the experience of people grown old.

For young persons to enter into the experience of the aged might mean: 1) realizing that wealth, success, achievement, – welcome as they are – do not define human life; 2) seeing their own life and aging as a gift; 3) regarding old people, not as a race apart, but as their future selves; 4) recognizing that someday disability and dependence may loom large in their own life as it does with so many older people now; 5) allowing that God may have special gifts in store for them when they get old.

These would be ways for younger people to find the older person in themselves. Another approach might be to see the young self in the old man or woman. Often young people act as if they think the older person was born old. They do not realize how some people, now aged, still still think of themselves as young.

Of course, in looking for the younger person in themselves, all older people have the advantage of actually having been young. They do not have to rely upon imagination to know what it is like; they can remember.

However, it may still require spiritual power to understand how being young now differs from being young two or three generations ago. The year 1940 and the year 2002 show more than a few differences between them. The challenges and opportunities of contemporary culture are not the same as people now old once faced.

Their challenge is to bring empathy and love to younger people and take an interest in the generations that have come after them. Older people who can identify with young men and women in a disinterested and loving way will almost surely find in younger generations a precious source of renewal and revitalization.  

So, ideally, the problem posed by the questioner after my lecture calls forth a spiritual approach. It may require a revision of attitudes and values that will enable older persons to find the hidden youth in themselves and, in turn, for younger persons to discover in the aged their future selves.

Richard Griffin