Do people become more religious as they enter into late life? Does the approach of old age make them gravitate toward religion and its practices?

As so frequently with complicated questions, the answers are not simple. To both, the response would seem to be yes and no.

At least, that is the conclusion of a visiting researcher whom I recently heard discussing her findings at Boston College. Michelle Dillon is an Irish-born sociologist who teaches at the University of New Hampshire.

Professor Dillon reported on a long-term study of Californians born in the early and late 1920s. Over their lifetime they have been repeatedly surveyed to find out their attitudes toward religious practice.

Partway through her presentation Dillon offered a generalization that she considers a valuable rule of thumb: “We tend to exaggerate how religious people were in the past and we also tend to underestimate how religious they are today.” However, on the basis of her research she does believe that the year 1958 was the highpoint of religious participation in the United States.

The answer she gives to the questions posed at the beginning of this column is two-fold. As they approach later adulthood, Americans tend to return to the level of religious practice that marked their years of early adulthood. But, in general, they do not become more religious than they were then.

This latter conclusion can be taken as contradicting widely held impressions. You can easily suppose that, for most people, the prospect of death makes them think more about God and the afterlife. From this viewpoint, the issues connected with the end of life would seem likely to provoke a more active religious practice.

But Dillon’s research does not support this impression. Instead, she believes late adulthood to be a time when people are likely to return to whatever level of activity was theirs at an earlier stage but not to go further.

Also, you have to distinguish male and female. At every stage of life women are religiously more active than men. They take to worship and other forms of practice with greater devotion than do males.

A large factor that complicates this discussion, however, is the question of spirituality. The latter ranks as notoriously difficult to define and frequently is associated with some kind of vague interest in non-material reality.

In her research, however, Dillon takes the kind of spirituality that includes putting into practice the encounter with the holy, a higher power than oneself. This experience of transcendence triggers activity that characterizes meaningful spirituality.

As people approach later life, their interest in spirituality does increase. This may or may not be connected with religious practice. After all, the goal of religion is to support and stimulate the spiritual life and that is the way it works for many people.

For others, however, the institutional aspects of religion have become alienating, even obstacles to their spirituality. They may break with their church, synagogue, or temple in order to find inner freedom. In doing so, they may surrender social involvement and other values offered by institutions.

A question I posed to Professor Dillon drew from her a somewhat jocular response on a serious issue. Does fear of death provoke older people to become more religious?

In general, no; Dillon finds that those who don’t go to church and yet half believe in an afterlife are in the worst position. What she calls “half believing” combined with completely secular living makes one vulnerable to this fear.

Of course, almost everyone dreads the prospect of a long-drawn-out and painful death.

Among the values brought by both religion and spirituality Dillon cites generativity as one of the most significant. Generativity helps people to grow and to share themselves with others. This value can give you a broad approach to society that supports the impulse to help other people.

My own views on about religion and spirituality have been shaped by the experiences of my first career. Mine was an intense experience of a religiously oriented community of men closely connected to the institutional church. I never drew a sharp distinction between religion and spirituality because the two were united in my daily life as a Jesuit.

In later adulthood, I continue to profit from the habits formed when I was young. To me, religious practice has long been congenial despite the bitter travail that has come over the church in recent years. There is much that I do not approve of in the institution that has given me my spiritual life but this disapproval does not incline me to turn away from it.

This does not make me complacent, I hope. I stand prepared to take action to help reform the ways of my church whenever possible. But my perspective remains that of a person who expects fallibility in every human institution, even or perhaps especially in those that consider themselves sacred.                               

Richard Griffin

Among current religious leaders in America, I am tempted to consider Jim Wallis the most important. His name may not yet be a household word, yet he is doing more to mobilize churches and other religious groups than just about anyone else. His Call To Action has brought together a wide range of religiously concerned congregations for joint advocacy.

In recent months he published God’s Politics, his eighth book about faith, spirituality, and our nation’s values. Already a best seller, this work presents, often eloquently, what the subtitle calls “A New Vision for Faith and Politics in America.”

Married and the father of two young sons, Jim Wallis is also a minister in the Evangelical tradition. He lives in the Washington, D.C. area, from which he travels widely, speaking to audiences about values and morality as they affect national well-being.

The magazine Sojourners, available both in print and online, claims him as parent. He also does some teaching at Harvard University, both in the government and divinity schools. I was fortunate in becoming acquainted with him when he taught in the divinity school, and I can vouch for his thoughtfulness and his skill in dealing with students.

About the current political situation in the United States, he feels regretful.  Wallis thinks that both the Republican and the Democratic parties have misinterpreted and misrepresented the moral issues and the values vital to the common good. He reminds readers that God is neither a Republican nor a Democrat. He explains “why the right gets it wrong and the left doesn’t get it.”

Contrary to what those on the right often suggest, abortion and same-sex marriage are not the only moral issues that face the nation. Poverty, war, and capital punishment also deserve attention.

Mind you, Willis believes that abortion and gay/lesbian marriage are important and need to be dealt with. But, as he points out, the Bible speaks more often about poverty than about any other moral subject, yet you would not know that, listening to some preachers.

He faults the left, as well, for leaving out of account the vital importance of spirituality. In fact, he holds that “history is most changed by social movements with a spiritual foundation.”

An outstanding example of this is the struggle for civil rights. Martin Luther King brought to that struggle a spiritual vision based on the Bible that established his leadership on a solid basis. Similarly, South Africa’s breakthrough toward racial justice happened because Nelson Mandela lived by spiritual principles of nonviolence and loving forgiveness.

The pages of God’s Politics often feature views of spirituality that conflict with those popular in present-day America. Speaking in response, Wallis says: “We are all guilty of succumbing to a diminished religiosity that is characterized by private belief systems, devoid of the prophetic and social witness of Jesus and the prophets─ultimately, nothing more than ‘small-s’ spirituality that is really only ad hoc wish fulfillment or a collection of little self-help techniques we use to take the edge off our materialistic rat-race lives.”

Throughout his writing, Jim Wallis emphasizes a prime teaching of theology. “God is personal, but never private.” That God cares about each person with a deeply felt personal love is a vital part of Wallis’s outlook. Without it, religion would lose its meaning.

At the same time, however, God in the Bible is shown to be concerned about public issues. The Prophets in particular talk about secular subjects such as war and peace, economic justice, and economic division.

When religion loses its public focus, it becomes banal and irrelevant to the real lives of people. As Wallis puts it: “Exclusively private faith degenerates into a narrow religion, excessively preoccupied with individual and sexual morality while almost oblivious to the biblical demands for public justice.”

Like a modern-day prophet himself, Jim Wallis does not shrink from speaking out about the distortions in American values. For example, he asks: “How did the faith of Jesus come to be known as pro-rich, pro-war, and only pro-American

My enthusiasm for Jim Wallis’ vision, however, is not shared by everyone. I have discovered that, like almost everyone else, he has his critics.

One such, the Boston College professor and political scientist Alan Wolfe, describes himself as non-religious and, despite personal respect for Wallis, does not identify with a political agenda that is based on the teachings of Jesus. “Count me out,” writes Wolfe, “because Jesus is not my God.”

Last week I asked Jim Wallis about this objection. “In the public square, the questions become moral issues, not religious,” answers this spiritual leader. “Religion must be tempered by democracy,” he adds in recognition of the intolerance and other excesses that faith often leads to. He believes that moral discourse can create common ground for those of many different religious views as well as for those who do not identify with any religion.

Richard Griffin

Who is so unwise as to talk about wisdom?  It’s a subject that defies the attempt to discuss it. After all, if you think you have it, you almost surely don’t.

Wisdom is found in stories and parables rather than in definitions. That is why I love the tales of the Hasidic rabbis of 17th century Europe, who left such a rich legacy of instructive narratives.

Similarly, I value greatly the stories of Jesus and his parables. They, too, deliver wisdom in ways deep enough to warrant pondering them throughout a lifetime.

The stories belonging to other traditions – notably the Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim – also help me appreciate what wisdom is.

Here’s what wisdom sounds like to me. “You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality. When at last age has assembled you together, will it not be easy to let it all go, live, balanced, over?”

These words come from a woman with a flowery name, Florida Scott-Maxwell, who was approaching 90 when she wrote them. Her phrase “fierce with reality” suggests an appreciation of human life that inspires wonder.

A saying of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel also strikes me as wisdom-graced. “Just to be is a blessing; just to live is holy” said this deeply spiritual teacher. To sustain this approach to one’s existence might prove the key to vibrant living.

By common agreement of sages through the centuries of human history, another marker of wisdom is the facing of death. Living with the reality of inevitable dying  affords us a perspective that throws into relief the value of human life. To appreciate fully what Rabbi Heschel said─ “Just to be is a blessing; just to live is holy”─ can be best appreciated when we know that our lives will reach an earthly end.

Wisdom itself often seems too sublime for anyone to reach. Perhaps the best we can do is to desire it. That very desire could turn out to be the truest sign that a person has wisdom.

Another approach to wisdom finds expression in the following consideration: Wisdom is knowing what matters and what doesn’t; what matters a lot and what matters only a little. If you can maintain this distinction, you have perspective, an angle on the world that surely rates as an important part of wisdom.

Closely related to perspective is the Serenity Prayer. It begins: “God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”

These charismatic words were composed by the brilliant Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in 1943 for the church he attended in the small Berkshire town of Heath, Massachusetts. Though it may at first sound individualistic, this prayer uses the plural and calls for gifts─acceptance and courage─not easily cultivated.

How one struggles with the evil in the world counts as a test of wisdom. Complacency about how awful the world frequently is can corrupt the soul; but so can despair about ever being able to change anything, for the better.

Progress toward wisdom necessarily remains ironic. A deepening realization of how much you lack wisdom serves as a sign that you are making some headway.

So does acceptance of one’s own flawed nature and everybody else’s also. Elizabeth Lesser, author of The New American Spirituality, offers this approach:

“Don’t worry about being good. Instead, discover how good and bad live within you. Deeply accept the shadows even as you seek the light.”

Loving more deeply the true, the good, and the beautiful also leads toward wisdom. These three sublime values, if we pursue them, can lift up our lives. This path betokens an openness in us to human experience and to the deepest reality.

When you get older, learning becomes a somewhat different experience. You do not run the risk of becoming prideful because, by this time, if you have any sense at all, you have learned how much you do not know.

This acknowledgement of not knowing can be seen as one of the beauties of religion. So suggests the French writer Madeleine Delbrêl: “Faith is the knowledge of our basic ignorance.”

Wisdom remains a close relative of the two lode stars of religion: enlightenment and compassion. Both give expression to wisdom and lead to its further unfolding. Of the two, compassion remains the more precious. Virtually all the great spiritual traditions of the world agree on this point: when you come right down to it, all you need is love.

That prescription, however, has its own ironies. After all, the truly wise know how sublimely difficult it can be to love.

Richard Griffin

On a recent visit to the home of a longtime friend, I observed something in him that astonished me. To my certain knowledge, I had never seen David react the way he did on this occasion.

Others who were present were almost certainly not struck as much by his reaction as I was. Perhaps it was being an age peer of David that made me notice something that was so subtle as to escape the attention of those others. In any event, they probably would not have attached much significance to it.

What happened was this. David told us the story of the novelist Richard Ford who, when he was a boy, was given a Christmas present by the assembled staff members of a hotel which his family owned. On receiving the gift, the boy looked up and said aloud: “Is that all?” As an adult, he came to understand and regret what he had said, and he has made continued efforts to make up for it.

In telling us about this novelist, whom he admired for his atonement, David choked up and his eyes became teary. Emotion took hold of him as he described the novelist’s efforts to make up for a mistake he had made as a child.

If it had been a friend other than David reacting this way, I might not have felt surprise. But this friend was very intellectual, brimming over with ideas and insights. In all the time of our friendship, I never remember seeing him close to tears.

But David had recently celebrated his 74th birthday and his emotional life seemed to have subtly changed. At least, that is the way I interpret it. To judge from my own experience of life in the seventies, and that of other friends, a delicate transformation of inner life was taking hold.

As if to provide confirmation of my theory, another David, a more recent friend, has surprised me by acting the same way. Against all expectation, he displayed emotion as I had never seen him do before. I dare say that no one of the other friends gathered with us had either.

This David is a widely published poet who told us of having recently celebrated his 70th birthday. For the occasion, he had arranged for some of his poems to be produced by hand press. At our lunch, a young woman from the press brought in the pages on which the poems were printed.

Then David read the poems aloud to us, his friends, much to our pleasure. All of these short works related to his recent birthdays and offered image-filled reflections on their meaning for him. His words were beautifully crafted and emotionally affecting.

What amazed me during this brief reading was seeing David choke up and his eyes watered by tears. Like the other David, he is very intellectual and not given to displays of tender emotions, at least in the company of us friends. Suddenly, he seemed to be acting out of character and advancing into unfamiliar territory.

Finally, I confess feeling this way myself now in my middle seventies the way I never did before. To cite a recent instance, I felt tears running down my cheeks at a recent concert. The occasion was the Boston Symphony’s performance of Wagner’s opera, The Flying Dutchman.

Toward the end of the second act, the Dutchman and his lady love sing a duet that ranks, for me, as the best aria in the opera. When Deborah Voight’s voice soared out over the audience and filled Symphony Hall, I was overcome at the beauty of the music.

This strong a response to an esthetic stimulus would not have happened in my younger days. In fact, as a young person, I was not particularly sensitive to artistic expression, although I have loved opera since my teenage years. An overly rationalistic schooling had knocked some of the emotional expressiveness out of me.

You could dismiss my experience and that of the two Davids as mere sentimentality, emotion outrunning stimulus. But that would be to shortchange the events.

Instead, the sudden emotion described here witnesses to the richness of the inner life in the later years. These are precious senior moments, responses to events that are full of meaning. They can be sparked by small happenings but these interior events suggest changes that enhance the passage to old age.

To see if my observations hold water, I checked with Wendy Lustbader, an esteemed colleague based in Seattle. By reason of her long experience as a social worker, Wendy has a much sharper sense than I of the emotional life of my age peers.

She thinks I’m on to something. For her, tears shed by men often signify the “transition to another emotional life.”

By expressing tender feelings, many men in later life are come closer to experience that has been long familiar to women. In laying hold of inner territory formerly closed off to them, these men can even be thought of as becoming all the more human.

Richard Griffin

In order to ensure a short pontificate, the Catholic Church has found it necessary to elect an old man rather than risk choosing someone young. The previous pope, John Paul II, was only 58 when he succeeded to the highest office in the church; by contrast, Cardinal Ratzinger – –  now Pope Benedict XVI – –  has just celebrated his 78th birthday.

Clearly, the cardinals who assembled in the Sistine Chapel last week wanted someone whose tenure in office would not come close to the 27 years that John Paul served. Most of the electors would probably judge the Polish pope’s reign highly successful, but hardly anyone would wish to follow it with another long pontificate.

In any event the electors opted for an old pope and a relatively short reign. Given average life expectancy, one can anticipate that Benedict will not stay in office for a great many years.

This outcome strikes me as unfortunate because it effectively deprives the church of new and vigorous leadership. You cannot have it both ways: if you choose a relatively young man, you run the risk of having him reign for a long time; but if you select an old man, then your church will be deprived of a youthful leader.

The newly elected pope was born in 1927, one year before my appearance on the scene. So it may seem strange to hear me, his age peer, regretting his election. Add to that my signature appreciation of fully matured talent as evidenced in so many people older than the new bishop of Rome.

However, I think that, in general, institutions need to bring younger people into leadership positions. It is not beneficial to maintain gerontocracies that keep control of things in the hands of old people. Again, I say this, not because of age prejudice on my part, but because I believe in the desirability for the church of allowing younger candidates to rise to the top.

A relatively easy solution lies at hand. The way to facilitate the election of younger candidates without fear of overly long pontificates could be handled if the institution were to establish terms of office for its popes.

One approach to doing so is already at work, namely the requirement that Catholic bishops around the world hand in their resignation at age 75. That applies to all bishops except one, the bishop of Rome. To change the rule would not be easy: to require the bishop of Rome to retire would probably require direct action on the part of the pope himself or, perhaps, the initiative of a general council like Vatican II.

Such a change would also help deal with another problem that confronts the church in modern times. Currently the church has no way to handle a situation in which the pope might fall victim to dementia. Were he to get Alzheimer’s disease, for example, the church does not have at hand a mechanism for dealing with such a disability.

Some observers suspect that John Paul II was basically incapable of managing the business of the Vatican in the last few months of his papacy. Parkinson’s disease had so enfeebled him physically that he must have neglected some matters of importance. The church was fortunate that the deterioration of his health did not cause a more obvious crisis.

However, even a church law that required all popes to resign at age 75 would not solve the problem of electing younger popes without risking long reigns. If someone were elected at age 50 (an age many other institutions do not consider young), he could still hold the office for 25 years before retiring.

That is why I favor a term of office for anyone who is elected pope. Church law currently does not allow this constraint on papal service, but I believe it should. It would allow the electors to choose the relatively young without risking too many years of any one papacy.

Yes, there can be some disadvantages to my scheme. Giuseppe Roncalli, who became Pope John XXIII at age 77 and stood the church on its head in the first half of the  1960s, could not have been elected under this plan. And we would have missed out on a epoch-making five-year papacy.

It remains possible that the former Cardinal Ratzinger will prove to be a dynamic leader for the early 21st century. If so, he will have to become more flexible about certain moral and theological positions he has held in the past. I hope he turns out to be like John XXIII, capable of change and responsive to the needs of an incredibly diverse church and world.

But, looking toward the future, I believe the church, if it is to exert the influence it should, needs to open a path for younger leaders to succeed to the papacy.

Richard Griffin

“Compassion in the Service of Money” is the provocative title of a book review that has caught my attention. Writing in the current issue of The Gerontologist, a professional journal in the field of aging, James Callahan discusses the American health care system, with a special focus on the needs of older citizens. As his title suggests, he feels highly critical of it.

In one hard-hitting paragraph, he summarizes what is wrong with the system. It is “extremely expensive as measured as a percent of GNP; inefficient as measured by resources wasted on administration, billing, and marketing; unjust as measured by the number of citizens uninsured; corrupt as documented by valid government and private sector reports; questionable in quality as measured by tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths documented by the Institute of Medicine; and fallible in satisfying the needs of long-term caregivers.”

Reading these words impelled me to seek out Jim Callahan, the Newton resident who wrote them. I wanted to discover what prompted this blast from a person long known to me, and to a wide public, as mild mannered and low-key; I wanted to find out what prompted this blast.  

It is hard to imagine an indictment so sweeping as this one. In a single sentence Callahan brands the American health care system as expensive, inefficient, unjust, corrupt, of dubious quality, and, when it comes to caregivers, fallible.

Of all these accusations, the one that I judge most devastating is corruption. For a delivery system that is so huge and complex, there may be some excuses for its other faults. But for corruption, it is hard to find any extenuating circumstances.

In his own career, Jim Callahan has seen up close instances of “fraudulent billing, nonexistent patients, Medicaid mills, bundling and unbundling rates to the providers’ advantage, exploitive nursing home real estate deals, split prescriptions, provider excuses,” among other misdeeds.

No wonder that Jim Callahan now says about some of his experience: “It made me a firm believer in original sin.”

What makes his charges so shattering is that the author is no armchair theorist or negative observer, but a practical leader who has had a long and distinguished career in the field of human services. He has held top positions at several of the public agencies that serve Massachusetts residents.

Among these agencies are the Medicaid program, with the largest budget, and the Mental Health department, with the largest number of employees of any state office. In addition, he became Secretary of the Department of Elder Affairs in the first Dukakis administration, after having been director of two state hospitals at the same time.

In these positions, he did not simply skillfully manage large and complex agencies, but he also made it a point to have personal contact with the people he served. Among them, he still recalls a 22-year old woman suffering from cancer who could not get coverage for treatment, and patients he encountered in his visits to all of the state’s mental hospitals.

In addition to practical know-how about managing public agencies, Jim also brought strong academic credentials to his various roles. With a Ph.D. from the Heller School at Brandeis, and several research projects that focused on the delivery of human services in his résumé, this public servant understands the way systems work or don’t work.

“I’ve been at all levels of this thing; I have a good idea of how things work,” he says, modestly understating the case.

Now retired, this high-level administrator recently shared with me his doubts about a health care system that resists all efforts to control it. He compares it to Godzilla in the Japanese movie who, out of anybody’s control, keeps on growing larger.

It would be reassuring to report that Callahan feels optimistic about fixing the system.  He doesn’t. One is confronted, as he views it, with this formidable combination:  socialism in the delivery of services and capitalism in their support. And when you try to change it, a wide variety of interest groups get involved.

In a crunch, generalized systems almost unfailingly prove weaker than specialized ones. And, given the American bias toward the market culture and reliance upon the private sector, public authority will find it hard to devise an effective approach to reform.

Nor does he think the American public can do much to change the system. “We as citizens lack the intellectual, political, and moral resources to create a good health care system,” he says with regret.

You have to get citizens to act in their own interests, as he writes in the published review. And that’s not going to happen until they “stop listening to the cleverly designed disinformation campaign of private sector solutions, free enterprise, and competitive markets.”

Callahan concludes his review with a plaintive question: “Who will lead?” He does not know the answer. If he does not, one wonders who does.

Richard Griffin

Some rituals are worth repeating. One of them, to my mind, is the Read-a-thon staged each year by the Hosmer School in Watertown. Invited to be a guest reader again this spring, I met last week with the fifth graders in Ms. Christine Kennedy’s class.

This year, I thought that it might be particularly difficult to attract and hold the children’s attention. They had just finished taking the MCAS test now required of all public school students. How would they respond, at the end of what had been for them a demanding morning?

Entering the classroom, I found the children sitting on the floor in a half circle, ready and waiting for me. It struck me then, as it always does, how sharply today’s schools differ from the ones I attended as a boy. Miss McDonough, my fifth-grade teacher, was a hardnosed taskmaster whose charges would never have been invited, or allowed, to sit on the floor.

Memories of my own fifth-grade experience prompted my first question to the children. I promised a prize for the right answer. “What year,” I asked, “was I a fifth grader in a Watertown public school?” The first guess was 1953, a stab not absurdly far off. To my astonishment, the second guesser scored a direct hit: 1940.

That an eleven-year-old could produce the correct date astounded me. Reaching back into unfamiliar history like that takes flexibility of mind. The student who pulled off this trick received the first of the many prizes I had brought along that morning.

I had chosen to read poetry, and to start with short, easy and amusing works. That’s why Ogden Nash seemed a good point of departure. So I first read the students three brief, light pieces: The Lama, The Fly (“The Lord in His wisdom made the fly/And then forgot to tell us why”), and The Eel (“I don’t mind eels/Except as meals/And the way they feels).

Then we moved on to the same poet’s precious, multi-stanzared, masterpiece: The Tale of Custard the Dragon. Custard is a “realio, trulio, little pet dragon” belonging to a small girl named Belinda. Until the climactic event in the story Custard is a coward, longing for a nice safe cage.

But all that changes when a nasty pirate climbs through Belinda’s window. Faced with this peril, Belinda’s other pets flee but not Custard. No, this alleged coward jumps up and devours the pirate at a gulp. He then reverts to character and cries again for his cage.

Only one of the children was familiar with this staple of childhood reading but all of the kids seemed transfixed by it during my reading. Its sprightly rhythm and overall playfulness commended it to their attention. Yes, poetry can be fun.

But poetry must challenge as well. That motivated me to move to poets who might stretch the children’s powers of understanding. EE Cummings, Robert Frost, Billy Collins, and James Tate were some of the others we read.

Cummings I introduced as a boy who grew up a few blocks from where I live in Cambridge. He went to the then Agassiz School in my neighborhood and underwent taunting by some of the local toughs. More to the point, he was an innovator, I explained, a writer who loved to break with the conventional by breaking with capital letters, among other ploys.

Though the morning outside the classroom was rainy and raw, I wanted to honor spring with Cummings’s ode to the season. So I read “I thank you God for most this amazing day,” emphasizing the poet’s thanks for “everything which is yes.” A short dialogue helped the children appreciate what that affirmation can mean.

When we came to Billy Collins, the former Poet Laureate, I read his “Afternoon With Irish Cows.” Its images can be followed easily, but the most significant line is more difficult to grasp. The poet interprets one cow’s bellowing cry as expressing the “large, unadulterated cowness of herself.”

There was more, much more, but this slice of an amazing morning can serve to underline the value of intergenerational contacts. No wonder most grandparents feel wildly enthusiastic about their children’s children, and the latter’s children too.

It’s only elementary to find value in association with the young, no matter how many decades our juniors they are. Once again, I have found it not only entertaining to talk with them but invigorating as well. If you welcome the spirit of rejuvenation, what is better than such encounters with the young?

George Bernard Shaw cleverly remarked that youth is wasted on the young, but the reality is that many children make the gift of youth look good. If we elders are their future selves, they can be seen as our past, present, and future.

To me, it has once again come as reassurance: 76 can talk with 11, and 11 can talk with 76, and both can emerge better for the exchange.

Richard Griffin