The New York Province of the Society of Jesus

A Jesuit Approach to Aging Part One: Jesuit Perspectives on Aging Jesuits Don’t Retire We frequently hear it said that Jesuits don’t retire. In a way, this is true. We are always on mission. We are always on mission whether our work involves the high level of recognition that goes with the leadership of a major institution or whether our work goes relatively unnoticed as does praying for the Church and the Society. In this sense, we never retire. But most people who speak about retirement are not speaking the language of mission; they are speaking the language of career. We sometimes confuse these languages. It is important not to. The reason for confusion is not hard to find. From early and mid-adulthood, Jesuits are frequently missioned to what can be described as careers – administration, counseling, pastoral ministry, social ministry, teaching. But to say Jesuits do not retire does not imply that Jesuits do not give up careers, for the simple reason that dedication to a career is not the same thing as dedication to mission. When we become too dedicated to careers, we can fail to recognize and seize opportunities for exercising other talents. This shortsightedness impoverishes the individual Jesuit and the Society. A creative response to aging may invite us to leave behind former careers, dedicate ourselves to forms of service those careers did not encourage or allow, and find ourselves giving our energy to different ventures that are as much a service to the Society’s mission as the careers we thought were essential to our Jesuit identity.

The Challenge of Aging Aging poses numerous challenges. While change is simply part of the life cycle, our culture tends to have a very negative attitude toward the changes aging entails. Our culture sees the process of aging as all loss and no gain. When aging is not seen as an opportunity for growth and development, it is hard for us to approach aging positively. Then, too, our sense of what needs to be done and the diminishing numbers of us available to do it can tempt us to think making changes is a luxury we can’t afford. Such attitudes can make us resistant to accepting the changes aging brings, even though our creative acceptance of these changes may be a countercultural Gospel witness our society sorely needs.

When we embrace what society considers diminishment as an opportunity for spiritual growth, when we refuse to follow society’s tendency to equate activity with accomplishment and measurable achievement with value, we may be offering our brothers and sisters the very service they most need from us as we age. There is another challenge aging poses for us: resistance to change is one of the changes aging sometimes brings. As we age, we can find leaving things as they are very inviting. Giving in to this inviting prospect can be tempting for us, but it is not compatible with our Jesuit charism. Perhaps, then, the place to begin a discussion of how Jesuits ought to approach aging is to consider three Ignatian virtues that invite us to embrace change. They are virtues whose nourishment and practice become more essential, even if more difficult, as we age.

Availability The first of these Jesuit virtues is availability. The mobility imposed on us by our years of formation was a great aid to maintaining availability. In our early years in the Society, we never lived in one community or dedicated ourselves to one work for more than four years. As a result, most of us called at least three if not four or five places home during the decade after our entrance. Most of us were well into our thirties or forties the first time we found ourselves in the same community and the same work for five to ten years or longer. The mobility of our Jesuit formation made it easy to be available because it made it hard to become too attached. Youth made being available even easier. We had the energy for moving on; we had little patience with staying put. Age changes all that. Most of us find as we age that our craving for the accustomed and secure increases while our desire for the novel and untried wanes. We become deeply attached not just to works and places but also to patterns and procedures. Changes like an influx of guests or the rearrangement of meal times or the addition of a weekly Eucharist to the community schedule become the objects of exasperation and resentment. Bigger changes, like moving to a different community or investigating new apostolic options, may seem simply unthinkable. Our contemporaries outside religious life are frequently forced to accept change in ways that we are not. Myles Sheehan, a New England Jesuit and medical doctor in the field of gerontology, has noted that we are insulated from social and economic factors that force many Americans in their late sixties and seventies to abandon the homes and careers of their fifties and early sixties. They have to look for new work opportunities if they wish to remain active, and they have to relocate into a smaller home or an assisted living community if they wish to maintain financial and personal independence.

Most aging Americans are forced to think and plan creatively about their retirement years. We tend not to. While our peers are moving on to find new careers in volunteer or part-time work and new styles of living, including assisted living, we take it for granted we will simply remain in our current communities and apostolates. Only our inability to care for ourselves creates an impetus for moving on, and even then some of us deny the existence of a need for change others can clearly see. This kind of resistance to change is incompatible with our Jesuit tradition of mobility and availability.

Humility Humility is the appreciation of truth that freedom from disordered attachment brings. Just as the simple fact of being young can help us be available, it can help us be humble. When we are starting out at anything, our desires are more aimed at developing what we lack than at protecting what we have. We want to perfect skills; we want to acquire expertise. With time, this changes. Our skills may never become perfect, but we do hone them. Our expertise may never become total, but it is recognized and relied on by others. And we learn to rely on our skills and expertise. Gradually, we find our desires are no longer projected toward what we are seeking; they are wrapped around what we have acquired. This is how attachment begins. We become attached to what Ignatius would classify as honors: being head, not assistant; being fulltime, not part-time; being an employee, not a volunteer; receiving a salary, not a stipend. The first in each of these pairs seems to confer status and offer stability; the second does not. As we grow accustomed to status and stability, we may find it harder to see the second of any of these pairs as a desirable choice. It may be something we fall into, it may be something we are pushed into, but it is not something we could ever see ourselves discerning as the Lord’s will. We may be tempted not to pay attention to any evidence that decreasing energy, decreasing resilience, even decreasing rapport with the population we serve are indicating the time for a change may be drawing near. We can develop a blindness that isolates us from reality. Myles Sheehan notes some of the debilitating effects of this blindness. Sometimes we stay in communities that do not really provide for our needs. Sometimes we stay in apostolates in spite of decreasing effectiveness. We may end up in living situations that mount no effective challenge to loneliness, inactivity, and inertia. We may end up in work situations where we feel disregarded and left behind. This breeds depression, depression breeds bitterness, and the combination of depression and bitterness is detrimental to our mental and physical well being, to our effectiveness, and to our community life.

Trust Ignatius had clear goals in mind when he legislated the experiments that should be part of the novitiate experience. One of those goals was to place the novice in situations where the inadequacy of his own talents and skills became so patent he would have no choice but to cease relying on his own capabilities and abandon himself to trust in God. For many of us, the experience of aging can be a greater challenge to trust in God than any novitiate experiment Ignatius could have imagined. If we are to age well, we have to rely less on our own resources and ask for a deeper trust in God.

Ignatius not only calls us to trust in God, he also calls us to incarnate that trust in specific human relations. Ignatius believed the body of the Society will only be maintained by obedience, which means Ignatius believed the Society will only be maintained by bonds of mutual trust. Like all acts of trust, obedience can only be practiced in a milieu of transparent communication. Engaging in spiritual conversation with our brothers, seeking spiritual direction with a trusted companion and guide, and honestly sharing our desires and fears with our local and provincial superiors are all acts of trust. In the rush of career-driven lives, we can forget to rely on these forms of communication. We can even forget how to engage in them. This weakens our ability to trust. Rededication to these forms of communication is an essential element in making aging a time of grace. Of all these forms of communication, spiritual direction is perhaps the easiest to neglect. Nonetheless, only prayer is more essential for helping us maintain a trusting attitude toward God and a discerning attitude toward our experience. Becoming aware of God’s gifts leads us to deeper trust. Reflecting on our response to God’s gifts as they unfold is essential to genuine discernment. Spiritual direction invites us to pay attention to the interplay of gift and response. That makes fidelity to spiritual direction a key element in our growth in trust and in our ability to discern.

Part Two: Practical Challenges of the Aging Process The divisions of the following section by the decades of our lives are approximate; that is why the divisions overlap. Individual cases will vary, but no one should consider himself exempt from engaging in the discernment process the various divisions outline. Our seventy-fifth year may find some of us engaged in the same work we were doing in on our fifty-fifth year, and for some of us, this might be quite appropriate. But something is amiss if this happens without our engaging in a discernment of its advisability involving honest self-examination and frank conversation with friends, colleagues, and superiors.

The Tasks of Our Fifties and Sixties The primary task of our fifties and sixties is planning and experimentation. Since these decades of our lives tend to be a time when the demands of the present consume us, it is easy to assign a very low priority to planning for the future and experimentation with apostolic options. Freedom is a grace, and at this time in our lives, we need to beg for that grace and begin to explore alternatives. First, there are questions to ask. What do we see happy and effective Jesuits in their seventies and eighties doing? How do we see them balancing work and leisure to make the most effective use of their energies? What do we see ourselves doing in our seventies and eighties? Are there talents and interests we have put on hold because of our careers? Might the future provide opportunities for exercising them? How do we see ourselves balancing work and leisure to make the most effective use

of our energies? Our own apostolates can be a great source of volunteer and part-time options. All of our middle schools, secondary schools, and colleges include at-risk students in need of assistance. Our parishes sponsor outreach programs, spiritual development programs, and renewal programs that can benefit from supplemental staffing. Our retreat houses not only rely on volunteer assistance in many areas, they also offer training in retreat direction and spiritual direction that might open new doors for us. Our institutions of higher education provide their students opportunities for service by sponsoring some volunteer organizations and cooperating with others. Jesuits themselves might find working with these volunteer organizations rewarding. The possibilities are not limited to our own institutions or to the network of volunteer organizations that have links to our institutions; we simply need to exercise some creativity and imagination in seeking them out. Once we have some ideas for the future and have discussed those ideas with superiors and friends, there may be some experiments we need to undertake. If we have let a language skill that could be apostolically useful go fallow, now may be the time to refresh it. If we have not worked in a parish or a hospital since tertianship, now may be the time to take part of a summer to do so. If we have not kept up with developments in theology or in pastoral practice or in approaches to the Exercises, now may be the time to engage in some investigation and updating. Most importantly, now is the time to ask men in their seventies and eighties who have made apostolic transitions well how they did it. Their experience can be invaluable to us as we plan. And now is the time to ask superiors, colleagues and friends what possibilities they see the future holding for us and how we might equip ourselves to respond to those possibilities. Their knowledge of us and their concern for us can make superiors, colleagues, and friends useful guides.

The Tasks of Our Sixties and Seventies The primary tasks of our sixties and seventies are evaluation and implementation. Jesuits should always be evaluating their apostolic effectiveness. Once we have reached the age of sixty-five, however, making an evaluation of our apostolic effectiveness a central theme of an annual conversation with our superior, with the director of the work to which we are assigned, and with peers whose opinion we trust becomes even more imperative. More often than not, evaluation is no easier for the evaluator than it is for the one evaluated. Superiors and supervisors may send out signals so subtle we miss them. Or we may simply ignore signals anyone else would think are quite clear. In either case, we can find ourselves unprepared when we are told a point of no return has been reached and a change is not only called for but called for immediately. That is fair to no one and hurtful for everyone. We can avoid problems by making the evaluative process an intentional process in which we ourselves play a part. Annual conversations are a way to do that. Putting an evaluative process in place also helps us implement the plan for modifying or changing our apostolic commitments we have developed. Sometimes our plan will involve engaging full-time in something new; sometimes, moving from full-time to part-time work in an apostolate we are familiar with; sometimes, a shift to volunteer ministry where our services can make a real difference. A wellimplemented evaluative process gives us time to put the pieces of our plan in place and act on them.

The Tasks of Our Seventies and Beyond The primary task of our seventies and beyond is monitoring our situation so we can progressively introduce any further changes we may need. By the time we have passed our mid-seventies, we should expect to be in part-time or volunteer work. As we move into our eighties we need, with the help of our superiors, colleagues, and friends, to examine whether our new work arrangements continue to be beneficial to us and effective for those we serve. At this time in our lives, our living situation may need more monitoring than our work commitments. Many of our communities are ill equipped to respond to the legitimate expectations and needs of Jesuits whose mobility is limited or whose health is not as robust as it once was. No one’s interests are promoted when we continue to live in communities that serve others well but under serve us to the point where our health is put at risk. Here, too, it is important to take the initiative. If it has not become so in our seventies, the adequacy of our living situation to our needs should be the topic of an annual conversation with our superior by the time we reach eighty.

Part Three: Opportunity and Commitment Gratitude is the source of all graces, and accepting our aging can lead us to gratitude. The first step is accepting that we cannot do what we did when we were younger. This can inspire us with gratitude for what the Lord has allowed us to do. The second step is accepting that the Lord no longer calls us to do what we did when we were younger. This second step can inspire us with gratitude for the opportunities aging brings: the opportunity to develop latent talents, the opportunity to entertain new desires, and the opportunity to grow in reflectiveness and inner peace. Our province’s Statement of Purpose and Policy for Sabbaticals was meant to encourage every Jesuit in the province to reflect on his apostolic effectiveness and look for ways to become more effective no matter where he stands in the life cycle. Establishing a sabbatical policy is just one element in the province’s commitment to helping all of its members serve the Lord to the best of their ability, and taking advantage of the opportunities that policy offers can be useful for Jesuits who are planning for later life. In order to serve the Lord to the best of our ability, the province also needs to commit itself to helping every member deal with the challenges of aging. However, framing a policy for dealing with these challenges is simply not possible. We cannot write hard and fast rules for determining when a Jesuit should move from full-time to part-time ministry or from employment to volunteer work, for when a Jesuit should leave a career behind, or for when a Jesuit should change community. These are things each Jesuit must work out with his local and provincial superiors. Instead of a policy, then, this document has offered guidelines for dealing with the challenges that arise as we age and for undertaking the tasks these challenges call us to. Let us pray for one another that we will be given the grace to face these challenges and tasks courageously and creatively. 9/15/06