This was originally published in Linda Hogan and Barbara Fitzgerald (edits), Between Poetry and Politics (Columba Press, Dublin 2003); a ‘Festschrift’ to honour the outstanding Irish moral theologian Enda McDonagh. The original article bore the title, ‘It’s Great to be Alive’. It was also published in The Furrow. The version which follows is abbreviated from the original. In writing the original article I was greatly helped by two recorded talks by Patrick Purnell SJ and Mannes Tidmarsh and by the latter’s excellent pamphlet, Vocation to Retirement (Christian Council on Ageing, Occasional Paper No. 6). Above all, I would like to acknowledge that some of the key ideas in this article have been greatly influenced by the thinking of my good friend, the late Austin Smith CP. I had the great honour of editing a collection of his thoughts, mainly on the theme of ageing, Mersey Vespers: Reflections of a Priest and Poet (Kevin Mayhew, Stowmarket, 2010) which was published shortly before his death.
Life after retirement – stagnation or growth?
It is sometimes said that when we retire we can do what we always wanted to do. That is hardly flattering about the way we have exercised our freedom up to this point in life. A good friend of mine, Austin Smith CP, always insisted that all through life he had tried to do what he wanted to do. And he suggested that is true of most people. A mother sitting by the hospital bedside of her desperately ill child is doing what she wants to do. At that moment, in that particular situation, there is nowhere else she would want to be. Admittedly, when her daughter is back home and better again, that hospital bedside is the last place that mother would want to be. Loving exposes us to a lot of pain and makes us very vulnerable. Yet loving is what we have chosen to do. In that context, disengagement for more radical engagement suggests that we become more focused in our loving. Perhaps, in that sense, it might be true to say that retirement offers us the opportunity to do what we have always wanted to do. Our changed circumstances, though they may be more limiting in some respects, enable us to concentrate on what we regard as the most important priorities in our lives. That is why retirement can be a very enriching time of life. We do not retire from life; we retire deeper into life. In fact, Austin Smith used to describe retirement as ‘disengaging to re-engage’. In other words, it is a process of disengagement for more radical engagement, a time for refining one’s priorities.
A lot of things change in the life of a person who retires. Though some of these changes may be very welcome, at least in the early years of retirement, others will be experienced as losses which touch a person quite deeply. For instance, many losses are linked in some way or other with leaving one’s normal occupation, whether this be the workplace, school, hospital, university or even parish. A loss of personal self-esteem and even identity may be felt when one leaves a position where one’s competence is recognised and most of one’s social contacts are located and which has provided the basis for one’s financial security. One may even feel the loss of an ordered structure to one’s daily life when one loses the discipline of a daily timetable and the creative stress born of the expectations of others.
If retirement is to be a time of personal growth, it is essential that these losses be acknowledged, properly grieved over and in this way laid peacefully to rest. Where these losses leave some important human needs unfulfilled, as far as possible they need to be compensated for. Denial that there are any losses involved could be a recipe for disaster.
Christians are familiar with the gospel image of the seed falling in the ground and dying so that new life and growth can emerge. Maybe that image can throw light on the process of retirement. Disengaging to re-engage involves a reordering of priorities. No longer are we tempted to dance to the tune of the expectations of others. We can look more deeply into the meaning of life and thus focus on the things we see to be most important. In a sense, retirement can spark off a further stage of growth in our more authentic self. In a society which bases personal worth on such indices as economic achievement and capacity as a consumer, facing up to retirement can help us to be more aware that we are more than what we do and what we own. Our self-identity goes much deeper than our activity and our possessions.
Many retired people say how much they appreciate the freedom of their new situation in life. Maybe that is a sign they have past beyond the grief of their loss of work and all that entails and laid it peacefully to rest. However, greater freedom is about more than having ample free time and the ability to set one’s own agenda. It is not just about freedom from external constraints. It offers the opportunity for a deeper level of freedom, a freedom for the more important things in life. This can take various forms. For some it may leave them free for prophetic risk-taking. Seeing more to the heart of things, they can challenge laws, procedures and rituals which have lost or come adrift from their meaning. In that sense, retired people can be powerful advocates for change. They have a sufficiently rich treasury of memories to avoid being imprisoned by the rigidities of a past which has forgotten its roots in a changing history. Like the ageing Simeon and Anna, they can interpret the past as a seedbed of hope and promise. So they are able to read the signs of the times and believe in a future which is in God’s gift but in which God has called us to share as his artisans in building.
The Jesuit, Patrick Purnell, prefers the expression, ‘Sabbath People’, to the more politically correct ‘Senior Citizens’. He is not suggesting that retirement is a time for rest, in the sense of sitting back and doing nothing. Although the Bible pronounces the Sabbath holy precisely because God rested on that day, God’s rest was not a long lie-in but consisted of enjoying the goodness and beauty of his creation. Our consumer culture is a restless culture. Advertisers are so busy trying to create new ‘wants’ with which to whet our appetites for the latest gadgets or computers, people have little time or inclination to sit back and simply enjoy the wonder, beauty and simplicity of life.
Another expression for the retired is ‘Ulysses People’. This highlights another essential ingredient of a happy retirement, namely, to continue our lifelong voyage of discovery by having a searching mind and heart. People also stress the importance of the mind-body interaction and insist that a healthy lifestyle with exercise appropriate to one’s age holds the key to maintaining mental alertness throughout the ageing process. Maybe, unconsciously the ‘Ulysses People’ name had a bearing on why I included the theme of ‘Odyssey’ in the title of this book!
As human persons we are essentially social beings. Eugene C. Bianchi, in his article, ‘Living with Elder Wisdom’, in the April 1996 special issue of The Way on ageing (pp. 93-102), writes that ‘creative elders oppose the ageing stereotype of withdrawal from social involvements’ and quotes some inspiring examples, including one lady who insisted, ‘My aches and pains are less important than my agenda’ (p. 98). All stress that inspiring social contacts and strong social support groups come high on the agenda for making retirement a continuing growth experience. For some, these groups will offer motivational inspiration and help people to maintain their social commitments. For others, they can help to compensate for the loss of former friends. New friendships can also offer a further stimulus for personal growth in retirement. A retired person’s increasing dependence on others can in some cases result in the blossoming of new and very profound friendships.
Retiring ‘Grace-fully’: Towards a Spirituality of Retirement
I am always a little suspicious of spirituality language. I well remember being at a meeting with Enda McDonagh in which someone remarked that the key to spirituality lay in discovering one’s inner self. Enda commented: ‘When I look within myself, I can never find any inner self. All I can find is a cluster of relationships.’
Made in the image of a Trinitarian God, we are essentially relational beings. If spiritual growth has any meaning, it must be about growth in the way we live out the truth of all the relationships, human and divine, which lie at the core of our being human persons. That growth needs to continue all through life, including the years of retirement. A whole variety of factors specific to the retirement and ageing process will affect the way we grow during these years. In that sense it is possible to speak in terms of a spirituality of retirement. However, what we are ultimately talking about is how we grow as human persons during the retirement process.
Retirement can be a time for contemplation, looking at life with eyes of wonder and enjoying its goodness. In a sense, prayer and contemplation are retirement activities. In fact, it could even be argued that retirement offers a very privileged opportunity for experiencing in an even deeper way the mind-blowing truth that we are made in the image of God. It can give us the opportunity to grow as Sabbath People, that is, people who are thankful for the giftedness of life and for the gift of other people – and ourselves. Appreciation of such giftedness lies at the heart of contemplative prayer. All is sheer gift and God is all-giving. Human growth in the period of retirement will often take the form of a deepening of prayer-life into contemplative prayer, though it will probably not be recognised as such. The contemplative prayer-life of some may be gleaned in the way they talk about the great pleasure they get from gardening and how it brings them closer to nature. For others who take up painting or poetry in retirement, it might be seen in the way these creative activities take them out of themselves. For others who are grandparents, their experience of contemplative prayer might be found in the wonder of the gift of their grandchildren and the love they awaken in their grandparents. For others it might be in the way they experience a deeper dimension of life on a long walk, or whilst listening to a piece of music, or reading a good book. Contemplative prayer enables people to see beneath the surface of life.
And it is not only the beauty and wonder of life that they face; they become more aware of the suffering and tragedy that seems so much a part of life. This ‘God’s-eye view’ can make them more tolerant of situations of ambiguity. Similarly, seeing beneath the surface of life can help people to appreciate the goodness of diversity, whether in cultures, or lifestyle, or even in religions. This can even lead to a change in their image of God or the divine. A God of laws and institutions can give way to a more compassionate God whose being is shrouded in mystery rather than enunciated in the precision in dogmatic formulae.
Although initially retirement usually offers a person greater independence, factors such as diminishing strength, mobility, eyesight and hearing along with the greater likelihood of sickness and hospitalisation may eventually increase the level of a retired person’s dependence on others. Active acceptance of dependence need not be seen as giving up the ghost or entering into a period of second childhood. Active acceptance of dependence can be a very important human characteristic, provided it is then matched by the dependability of those on whom one is depending. Throughout the whole of our lives, we live in a state of interdependence with each other. That is why dependability (reliability, faithfulness) is such a central Christian virtue. God is the utterly dependable one, the faithful one. A powerfully moving expression of this comes from Pedro Arrupe, the former General of the Jesuits. Towards the end of his life, when severely disabled by a stroke and hardly able to speak, he said in a message to his brother Jesuits:
More than ever, I now find myself in the hands of God. This is what I have wanted all my life, from my youth. And this is still the one thing I want. But now there is a difference: the initiative is entirely with God. It is indeed a profound spiritual experience to know and feel myself so totally in his hands (Documents of the 33rd General Congregation of the Society of Jesus, St Louis; Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1984, p. 93).
Mary Elizabeth Kenel, in her article, ‘Preparing for Retirement, in Human Development’ (Vol. 23, Summer 2002, pp. 13-18) draws attention to this phenomenon:
encouraging others to demonstrate an appropriate level of care toward us and to do so in such a way that the very act of accepting care is in itself an act of caring. Caring behaviour does not denote a one-sided dependency. Instead, it is a complex interchange that defines an enduring relationship between persons. Accepting care and resources from another does not transform the recipient into a needy, passive burden. As we prepare to enter the retirement phase of life, let us ask ourselves whom we allow to grace us with the gift of caring (p. 17).
Retirement and Theology
Is there a theology of retirement? That is a question I was tempted to explore in this article – and it is certainly worth looking at. However, the more I got in touch with the real-life experience of retirement, whether through conversation or reading or personal reflection, the more I came to see that it would be much more interesting to explore retirement as a source of theology. To be even more specific, I began to suspect that, for many theologians, embarking on the process of retirement seems to have had a significant impact on their theology. It is almost as though experiencing the human process of retirement is itself a theological source. Maybe this should not be surprising. After all, if theology is more an activity (‘theologising’) than a finished product (e.g. books or an article), then it is only natural that a major human experience such as the retirement process should strongly influence a theologian in his or her doing theology. In these days when the subject tends to be seen as centre-stage, that is only to be expected.
‘Retirement theology’, if I may coin a phrase to describe this phenomenon, is likely to reflect a number of those features which we have seen to be associated with the retirement process itself. I would suggest that ‘retirement theology’ might exhibit some of the following characteristics:
The retirement activity of disengagement for re-engagement in a more focused way sounds rather like a description of the process of conversion and renewal. If that is so, perhaps retirement is not just a passing phenomenon in the Church due to the increasing numbers of ageing priests and religious. Maybe the lifegiving potential inherent in the retirement process is actually a sign of the times for the Church in our day. It could be that God’s spirit is calling the Church into a new phase of its continued growth rather akin to the retirement process. Perhaps there has to be a lot of letting go in the Church in all sorts of ways, especially as regards power and structures and even traditional styles of liturgy and Church-life. If this is true, such losses will need to be named and owned and even grieved over, if we are to let go of them in a life-giving way.