For about ten years I have been promoting an approach to a healthy life based on sound empirical evidence with a degree of good humour. It has proved remarkably robust and the evidence base is getting stronger all the time. (see box). These recommendations are ‘evidence-based’, albeit of various strengths, but they are all supported by research. I pursued the war against tobacco too and although not mentioned in the Ten Tips, giving up smoking remains the single most important action that can be taken to improve health.

The humble cup of tea contains antioxidants, which are thought to protect the body against disease and ageing by locking on to damaging free radicals. Research in Japan has shown that men who drink the most green tea live longer, and are less likely to suffer from lung cancer or strokes. Blood pressure falls and low density (bad) lipoprotein falls as tea consumption rises.

A study in Greece found that men who take a regular siesta each day have fewer heart attacks than those who don’t. British research reveals that people with chronic sleep problems may have increased mortality rates. Taking a cold bath, or at least a tepid shower regularly can improve cardiovascular function, increase immunity, improve fertility and reduce the risk of heart attack.

The alcohol story is slightly more complicated, and in the context of increasing alcohol dependency and binge drinking, a recommendation to take regular alcohol may seem unwise. In small amounts, alcohol can help to lower cholesterol, prevent clotting and cut coronary heart disease risk, and some studies show that this effect can reduce heart disease risk by about a third. Red wine seems to be the best because of high levels of antioxidants. There is a paradox here, as the antioxidants of course are also present in the grapes before wine production. The exact mechanism for the protective action of alcohol remains difficult to explain, but it is present, and is it worth the risk of missing out on this benefit?

Other tips for health follow . . .

It has often been pointed out that for many people in the West retirement comes in two stages. There is the active stage when you still have the energy and health to engage in a multitude of activities, and then there is the stage when you ‘retire’ from retirement, as frailty and loss of faculties begin to take over. A great deal could be said about the active stage, but it is particularly important that it should be seen not just as a continuation of pre-retirement busyness, but rather as providing opportunities for the individual’s continuing growth as a person. Brother Ramon in Life’s Changing Seasons sees the Autumn of life as a time of ‘maturing’ like the fruit in the orchards, and there is a tempo and rhythm which is appropriate to this stage in life, and which should be different from the way we lived previously.

I recently came across some interesting comments on this in the writings of a certain Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi from the Spiritual Eldering Institute in Boulder, Colorada. He divides life into twelve periods of seven years (a biblical number) corresponding to the months of the year. So we reach twenty-one at the beginning of April—in the Spring; and the Summer months see us at the height of our career. Retirement (as in Brother Ramon’s analysis) belongs to the Autumn of life—the time of fruit bearing. In an article entitled Harvesting a Lifetime Jenny Goodman, a psychotherapist and writer, summarises the Rabbi’s teaching by saying: In autumn time ‘we cannot afford to be addicted to habits of rushing and conquering, habits that we acquired in earlier phases of life. When we don’t recognize this, and still try to do things in the old way, we become depressed or angry. One of the gifts of the autumn time is that we can be released from “Commodity Time” (Monday to Friday, nine to five) into “Organic Time”—day and night, summer and winter, harmonising our bodies to the tides and cycles of the natural world.’

The psychiatrist Carl Jung said something similar many years before when he wrote: ‘We cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning.’ Jung saw life as falling into two stages and regarded it as very important that we differentiate between the two. The first half of life he called ‘the morning’, when the sun seems to rise above the horizon and climb slowly to the meridian. The second half is ‘the afternoon’, when the sun begins to sink and finally disappears. What is appropriate for the morning of life is not suitable for the afternoon. Jung said that the morning of life should be given to activity—establishing yourself in the world, finding a wife or husband, raising a family, pursuing your career. The second half of life should be given to something more contemplative. Jung actually uses the word ‘contemplation’, though his more usual word for this activity is ‘individuation’, by which he means seeking maturity through self-knowledge, coming to terms with one’s limitations, asking the deep questions, mending relationships. Jung actually saw this process as beginning well before retirement and was concerned amongst other things with the mid-life crisis. And one would hope that this process would begin earlier—Christians are taught after all about the importance of self-examination and the need for space in one’s life. But the reality is that in retirement we do have more time and fewer distractions—and fewer means of escape!

Dr Marjorie Cotton writes:

There are over six million unpaid carers in the United Kingdom. More than one in five carers spend fifty hours or more a week on caring responsibilities. Carers save the government at least £57 billion a year. More importantly, over 67% of carers believe that their health has been adversely affected as a result of their caring role. This information is taken from the current Carer’s Information Booklet distributed by Carers in Bedfordshire. They, and other charitable organisations throughout the country, acknowledge the need to support carers. They work to ‘prevent today’s carers becoming tomorrow’s cared for’. They provide information and practical and emotional support, also a shoulder to cry on or a listening ear in times of need.

Caring has been a steep learning curve. I have had to adapt and try to establish a routine. I could regale you with tales of the month Peter spent in a nursing home, six months of carers coming to the house or me, going it alone, as queen of the hoist, since September. As well as sharing just a few tips, I feel that it would be more helpful to focus on how we can bring healing to the caring, or any similar, difficult, situation where we may feel overwhelmed. It may help to think of ‘tracing the rainbow’, in the words of the hymn by George Matheson:

The Revd David Wood writes:

My wife’s name is Di and she has Huntington’s Disease. Her brother also has it, as did her father and three or four of his siblings, and before that their mother. Huntington’s Disease, (often referred to as HD) is an inherited, degenerative neurological illness that affects the personality, movements and memory, although the manner in which this occurs varies from person to person. HD affects some 8,000 people in the UK.

We married in 1976 and by 1982 we had a family of three sons. In about 1986 Di’s father was sectioned under the Mental Health Act and it was then that he was diagnosed as having HD. We subsequently discovered that his family had known about the illness but, for reasons of their own, had buried the fact. Di herself was diagnosed as having the very early stages of HD a couple of years later; this was confirmed by a newly developed genetic test in 1993. The illness has steadily progressed so that now she needs daily care and attendance. She is doubly incontinent and needs help with washing and dressing as well as with feeding. Communication is very difficult although she seems to have a fairly good appreciation of what is going on around her. She can still move about the house (a bungalow) by herself in a fairly chaotic fashion, is prone to falling (which she does very gracefully), has difficulty judging speed and distance so that she frequently bumps into walls and doorposts and outside needs a wheelchair.

The major turning point in Di’s illness came in August 2004 when she suddenly developed auditory hallucinations and was herself sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Particular mental health problems can occur in quite a high proportion of HD sufferers simply as part of the ongoing illness. In all she spent three months in hospital.

It was really only during that three month period, in itself a difficult time emotionally, that I began to appreciate just how much I was actually doing at home in addition to my work as an Anglican minister to three rural parishes. One question I asked myself, and occasionally others, was about what happens when two or more vocations appear to clash. I never really got an answer to that! I was husband, father, carer and minister. Something had to give. The reality is that everything suffered to some extent and family life was by no means immune. HD wasn’t something we refused to talk about, neither was it something that dominated conversations; it was part of who we were and are.

The Revd Dr Barbara Glasson writes:

Forgiving and forgetting are often put into the same package, usually by well meaning people thinking that it is time for us to push some grievance to the back of our minds, or in some way obliterate it altogether. But forgetting isn’t something we can make happen by our own will power and neither is it necessarily something that goes in the same package as forgiveness. These words are often used far too lightly for such crucial facets of human identity.

When I am not with my emerging church community in Liverpool devising quirky themes for Sundays, I am at the Centre for the Study of Theology and Health at Holy Rood House in Thirsk. I am the Director of the face2face project. Face2face is an ecumenical initiative working around issues faced by survivors of sexual abuse within faith communities. If we consider that, in the UK, one in three girls are sexually abused before the age of eighteen, one in six boys before the age of sixteen, we can see that every faith community will have survivors in it. Many of these will be older people, who have lived with the shame and the pain of it all their lives. In some cases it is the faith communities themselves that are responsible for the abuse. It is something that everyone should take seriously, especially the Church.

One of the many challenges faced by survivors is the knotty problem of forgiveness. So often it is considered the duty of a survivor to ‘forgive and forget’, after all, events are often from a dim and distant childhood and what’s the point of ‘raking over old ground’? But abuse by its very nature involves some terrifying and destructive experiences. This push to forgetting by well meaning but misguided companions can become another layer of guilt in an experience that survivors are struggling to recall rather than forget. Like many traumatic experiences, the details of abuse are often blotted from memory by its associated pain. Forgetting may be the last thing that is of therapeutic benefit to a victim, remembering is hard enough.

Re-membering is the process of putting back together those things that have been dis-membered. It is a means of integration which begins with naming. Putting together the story is a risky process for people who have suffered abuse, they need to discover who can be trusted and a place where the disclosure is likely to be heard with understanding and wisdom. The response of the one chosen to hear is hugely significant. We do not have to be trained listeners in any therapeutic sense but we do need to hold appropriate and safe boundaries so that those who have the courage to tell their story are not re-abused by our ignorance.

That wise spiritual guide, Martin Israel, once wrote: ‘To be acknowledged as a person we need caring relationships, work to afford material sustenance and also to provide us with a basis of self-esteem and an interest in the wider world, and a well-disposed society as a member of which we can play our part in the flow of life around us. . . A well-balanced life should be fairly equally poised on this threefold support.’

Many of the problems associated with retirement and with ageing can be traced to the loss or reduction of one or other of these supports. So giving up work can bring with it loss of status and purpose in life. The limitations that come with old age and failing health can cause withdrawal and isolation from normal social contact. And distance, debilitating illness and death can severely damage relationships and destroy much that is most dear and precious in life.

This issue of Chrism is dedicated to exploring what it means to grow old, and in particular how the Christian concept of ‘healing’ relates to that experience. As readers will discover, the overall message is very far from being negative, though the pains and griefs and frustrations are there in the shadows and emerge from time to time to remind us of the realities which many of us face or may one day have to face.

So both the two main articles are full of suggestions as to how to achieve ‘well-being’ in old age—physical, mental and spiritual. And note how they overlap. Peter Tiplady is a priest as well as a doctor, and his article is as much about attitudes as it is about tips for healthy living. At the same time I hope mine makes it clear that a realistic ‘spirituality’ for our later years involves quite as many practical decisions as spiritual ones. But there must be no ‘armchair medicine’ or ‘armchair theology’. Here is where the remaining articles come in. They provide a strong dose of reality which more than counters this. So Barbara Glasson’s description of the face2face project is a healthy reminder that we do not enter old age with a clean sheet, but as damaged persons, sometimes seriously. And then there are the ‘carers’ stories. Marjorie Cotton wrote to me recently: ‘There have been so many “last straws”. I know that I must use this whole episode to grow spiritually. It is as though there are a series of steps and when on a step there is time for the ripples to settle and get a clearer vision. At the moment I am reaching for the step and struggling to keep my head above water.’ Here is the reality of ‘tracing the rainbow through the rain’. It is experiences like this which lie behind even the lightest things that are said in this issue about growing old, and must give to the whole subject a particular depth and seriousness.

+George Hacker, Editor

Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. (1 John 3.2)

This morning, as usual, I listened to the radio as I got ready for the day. Important enough to rank alongside reports of wars, crime and global warming was the news that if we make some changes in the way we live, eat and exercise most of us could add another fourteen years to our lives. My eye fell on the array of bottles and jars on my dressing table: ‘anti-ageing’, ‘time-defying’, ‘turn back the clock’, said the labels. Last night I watched one of those ‘look ten years younger’ television shows. I might make the excuse that there was nothing much else on, but I’ll admit I was hooked—moved by the participant’s joy at her transformation—and, yes, even made a mental note of some of the tips.

I am not immune to the seemingly universal preoccupation with youth and dread of ageing. C S Lewis suggests that the fears and taboos surrounding death in most cultures point to an innate and intuitive knowledge that death is unnatural and temporary—God’s ultimate plan for us is life. I would guess that the same is true of ageing. It seems cruel and wasteful. ‘Youth is wasted on the young’, yet the wisdom of age goes hand in hand with a diminishing of faculties and the likelihood of dementia. We acquire enough experience to make free and healthy choices just when our weakening bodies curtail our ability to live out those choices. It is unfair!

Lent is a time when we notice the passing of the days more keenly—our English name for the season refers to the lengthening of the days in spring. This year, the early Easter will be upon us almost before we know it. Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata advises us to ‘take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. . . You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.’ Is that much comfort, though? Against the vast timescale of the life of a star, or even of our millennium oaks and yews, our life is over in an instant. As humans we are uniquely self-aware; we can celebrate our seasons, reflect, re-live and sometimes regret. On a cosmic timescale, however, we rank only a little above the one-day span of the mayfly. Even tortoises do better!

Rather than ‘gracefully surrendering’, many of us would rather follow the example of Jenny Joseph’s Warning: ‘When I am an old woman I shall wear purple, with a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me. . . And run my stick along the public railings and make up for the sobriety of my youth. . . And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens and learn to spit. . .’ An exuberant rebelliousness that comes from a knowledge deep within us that this is not all there is to life, and this is not how it’s meant to be.

A few years ago, in an issue of Chrism concerned with dementia, I wrote about a sufferer called Ivy. It’s long enough ago, I hope, for you to forgive me for repeating myself:

We don’t normally equate the weakness of a baby with suffering because we know that it is temporary, and life in all its fullness lies ahead. Perhaps God looks on all of us, including the person with dementia, from a similar perspective. ‘The glory of God’ said Irenaeus ‘is a human being fully alive.’ He said too that we are all created ‘as little children’, with the potential to grow into the full likeness and glory of God. None of us—artist, theologian, athlete, or person like Ivy—is yet ‘fully alive’. But the promise is there for us all. Irenaeus again: ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, of his boundless love, became what we are that he might make us what he himself is.’

So if our Lenten purple is a sign of our longing to become more fully alive, an image for us for Eastertide might be the Celtic cross. Its shape is that of the round sun shot through with the cross: creation shot through with redemption. Perhaps it could also suggest the wheel of the years, season following season as we grow older, intersected by Christ’s breaking into history and vanquishing the old enemies of ageing, bereavement and death.

Today we often think of the thirty-three year old Jesus as a man dying tragically young, but two thousand years ago that would not have seemed so. Part of the mystery and poignancy of that long wait before his public ministry began is that even before the Cross he might well have suffered some of the painful diminishment of advancing age. Yet in the art of early Christian times, when presumably this would have been more obvious, the risen Jesus is sometimes shown as a beautiful young man, in imagery drawn from ancient spiritualities whose myths told of our human longing for a heavenly Land of Youth. What we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

A Blessing

I end with a blessing from John O’Donoghue’s new book Benedictus:

Alleluia; Amen!