If we believe all that those cunning craftsmen, advertisers, tell us, we may not live for ever but we can perpetuate our youth. With some attention to our hair, our skin, our diet, our teeth, we can ensure that we retain a desirable physique into pension territory.
Gone are the days when old age brought in its train respect and readiness to accept that judgment can be honed over the decades. Gone the days when a calculating politician in Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’ could say of Cicero: ’His silver hairs will purchase us a good opinion.’ (Yet we have only to glance across the Atlantic to see that those days are not altogether gone.)
The writer of 1 Kings 1.1 made no bones about it. ‘King David was now an old man, and he always felt cold, even under a lot of blankets.’ (CEV. Check that with the nearest old man of your acquaintance.)
If we turn to the New Testament, we find Timothy is urged to turn from the wayward passions of youth (2 Timothy 2.22). Titus is urged to use his good offices to persuade younger men to be temperate in all things. Clearly, we have seasoned servants of the Gospel message advising younger colleagues about their behaviour; and the dismissal of John Mark (Acts 15) suggests a preference for experience rather than energy when there is serious work afoot.
How is it then that perpetual youth has come to be put on a pedestal in secular and religious zones? Are we going the right way about it when we design church services with music and other features that are thought to be acceptable to a younger generation?
We do indeed need to be reminded that elderly congregations in our parish churches are not auguries of a blossoming future. That emphasis has to be balanced by a recognition that what survives in the long term is, like Charles Wesley’s hymns or Cranmer’s collects, a respect for what is of lasting value rather than what is ephemeral. Of course, good judgment in these choices is not something that is acquired at the drop of a hat; it comes from prolonged attention to the place of revelation, imagination, sensibility, balance.
The poet John Milton was not the first to discover that youth is a perishable product. In his sonnet on this he laments the swiftness with which Time ‘the suttle thief of youth’ has made away with his twenty-third year. But he finds compensation:
‘All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great task Masters eye.’
See Ephesians 6.7 and Colossians 3.23.
WSSM INITIATIVE
Christians in villages near Derby have been working together on their own initiative long before entering a covenant in 2009. Three Anglican parish churches and one LEP Anglican-Methodist church call themselves the WSSM team, servicing West Hallam, Stanley, Stanley Common and Mapperley. Gill Turner-Callis is the Rector of St Wilfrid’s, West Hallam.
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