It is being reliably forecast that the working population in the future will have to remain in employment for longer – goodbye to the expectation of retiring in your sixties and spending your leisure years on pensioners’ cruises. Many, if not most, people will have to continue working until they’re 72, because of the way demographics are shaping up (more older people, smaller families, fewer babies).
As if to endorse this trend, the Church of England was this week expected to rule that clergy are to be permitted to be active in ministry over the age of 70 and beyond.
We know this is already happening in all the Christian churches – priests and pastors are on average older than they used to be. The martyred French priest Fr Jacques Hamel was 86 when he was murdered while saying Mass, and it wasn’t unusual that a priest so advanced in years was still carrying out his daily pastoral duties.
Fr Hamel’s killing was a great tragedy, yet on the overall question of staying in harness past the threescore years and ten, I would suggest that there are many advantages. And I say that as a working person who has now passed that Rubicon herself.
It seems to me to be a benefit to go on contributing to a calling even in old age, both for the oldie in question and perhaps – ones hopes – also for society at large. By 70, you have gathered a fair amount of experience, and that should give weight – and measure – to your judgment. Courts of law in most societies tend to choose older individuals to become judges because of this store of experience, and the mellower attitudes brought to judgment.
The passions should have died down by the eighth decade, and that includes destructive anger and aggressive competitiveness (even though certain 70-year-olds, not a million miles from the White House, still seem to be capable of alarming volatility).
We always need the energy of the young. Old age can bring garrulousness and crankiness, but by then we should have accumulated the judgment to correct such failings.
If the clergy are older, surely we should see the positive values in that, and welcome the benefits that long life can bring to pastoral care.
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The film La La Land is covered in laurels from the Bafta awards and is likely to win a batch of Oscars in Hollywood later this month.
Yet many cinema-goers found it more “so-so” than “la-la”. Emerging from the Canterbury Curzon cinema, I heard a couple remark: “Disappointing. Dancing and singing? Not very impressive.” My own verdict was in that old Irish category: “middling”.
If we’re comparing the singing and the dancing to Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds in Singin’ in the Rain, the La La performances seem almost amateur. Ed Balls did as well as a dancer in his Strictly appearances.
However, La La Land is an unusual movie today in that it contains no explicit sex scenes – only quite decorous allusions to intimacy. Mary Whitehouse, she of immortal memory, would have found it admirably wholesome.
Interesting that such a film should now be Hollywood’s favourite, in contrast to the sexual Fifty Shades of Gray, or even the art-house German movie which has garnered so many plaudits in Cannes, Toni Erdmann. That film is a complex exploration of the father-daughter relationship and an indictment of modern business mores, with an explicit sexual scene which can only be described as deeply weird.
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I spend about four or five days each month in Ireland, and for some time now, for technical reasons, I’ve had no access to television in Dublin. However the law in Ireland, as in Britain, is that even if your TV is irretrievably broken you must still pay the licence while you have the apparatus. (In Britain, the only crime for which more women serve prison sentences than men is non-payment of the TV licence, which seems mean, especially as it involves poorer women.)
I duly paid the Irish TV licence, in accordance with the law (and prompted by the deterrent of a €1,000 fine). But actually, I’m finding that it is a calming and rewarding exercise to do without television for five days a month. You reflect more, you read more, you listen more to music. Refreshing.
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