What’s So Good About Getting Old

p. 14

In the editor’s own essay (“Graying Gracefully: Preaching to Older Adults”) we find this: “You have aged when 40 or 50 sounds young; almost everything hurts, and what doesn’t hurt doesn’t work either; you’re not more moral than you used to be, but you do choose your sins more wisely; at 90 peer pressure thins down; it always feels like the morning after, even when you haven’t been anywhere.” Then there’s Jay Leno’s hard-edged joke: ‘The man who had created the Bic disposable pen and the bic disposable razor finally died, and at first they were going to do a big funeral for this man who had done so much, but then they decided to just throw him away.”

 

p. 38

In David G, Buttrick, “Threescore, Ten, and Trouble,” same volume,  ‘The shadow of senile confusion hangs over us all; are old people automatically wise? In the Bible they are not. Think of Isaac who becomes so muddled he blesses the wrong son and doesn’t know the difference. Or think of the priest Eli and old King Saul, both of whom end up confused and incapable of further leadership. Likewise King David . . . can no longer handle the intrigues of his own court’ because his mind has taken a hike.”