The Future of Aging

As a person who put the "I" into ISFJ it takes persistent encouragement to draw this introvert out. So it was last week at Senior Camp as told in last week's tale, Seven Miles to the Horizon.

Even those senior saints were only partially successful. The ninety-two year old who befriended me desired I party until the wee hours of 10 p.m. When I slunk away per usual, at 8:30, she bid her companions undertake unsuccessful extraction missions.

On travel in Greensboro for the company this week, I read in the complimentary hotel USA Today how Billy Graham is marking his 90th birthday. This time it's personal - he's pictured at his Montreat, NC, mountain-top home, rocking on a porch built by a relative (may he RIP).

The article dangled a too-tempting-to-resist 1960's Woody Allen interview captured on You-Tube. It's worth watching for the good-naturedness alone beyond any notion of the odd pairing.

The interview led to something unexpected. Alongside the clip was another of a Larry King interview I quote frequently in Sunday School where Graham was asked if he thought he'd go to heaven, to which he responded, "I hope so but don't deserve it."

It wasn't this gracious response, but another, which led to something of which I was totally unaware. When Graham responded to King it wasn't for him to judge whether followers of other faiths went to heaven, it apparently unleashed a torrent of condemnation, as cited briefly in the USA article, but not with the intense vigor found on the net, and which subsequently spawned a full-fledged anti-Graham industry.

It shouldn't be suprising to Spotsyltuckian readers that the Greensboro Borders is a familiar and required destination for all my corporate companions prior to dinner. Surveying the magazine rack, I was drawn to purchase the Christian Research Journal containing the article, "Navigating the Emerging Church Highway," the same topic Phyllis Tickle presented at senior camp the preceding week.

Mark Driscoll defines the emerging church 'highway' as consisting of four lanes: Emerging Evangelicals; House Church Evangelicals; Emerging Reformers; and Emergent Liberals. The first three are delineated acceptably orthodox in one way or another; the fourth is described as having "drifted away from a discussion about how to contextualize timeless Christian truths in timely cultural ways and has instead come to focus on creating a new Christianity," i.e. as heretical and apostate.

While Driscoll annoints the sacred trio as cleverly packaged for younger generations, the fourth is condemened, as is the ecumenical Graham, for "discussing the need for unity between all religions."

After a Presidential election which promises the vision of a broader American landscape (absent the disappointing passage of Proposition 8), George Will pictures the South, as "beginning to look less like the firm foundation of national party than the embattled redoubt of a regional one."

Akin to the U.S. Pacific strategy in World War II where only islands suitable for airstrips were invaded (with the exception of the Phillipines as a sop to MacArthur's ego) leaving others to wither on the vine, this is ever the fate of fortresses, orthodox or territorial, where history passes by untouched.

Clive James' Cultural Amnesia profiles Heinrich Heine, a 19th century German journalist, essayist and poet. Wikipedia states Heine was 'born into a family of assimilated Jews, who were subject to severe restrictions, forbidden from entering certain professions, including an academic career in the universities.' Heine justified his Lutheran conversion by describing it as "the ticket of admission into European culture," something I also claim in relation to Virginia. Would it have been otherwise for both of us!

The AP reports conversely on an American woman, who "sought to make a new life for herself as a Jew in Israel." She studied intensively for a year, took a Hebrew name and adopted Orthodox custom and wardrobe. Five years later, Israel's Rabbincal High Court annulled her conversion over the question whether anyone can be Jewish if not born of a Jewish mother.

I note in the same USA Today which jump-started this week's reflections where a sketch, Tiggers Don't Like Honey, from The House at Pooh Corner, sold at auction for $49,770. The value accorded to this drawing implies something about how we cherish the image of simple hospitality.

Whether in relation to family, a circle of friends, the workplace, a parish, community or nation, my faith stands or fails in the existence of real or imagined places like The House at Pooh Corner. Houses, where people who are nicer than I, gently serve, instead of barricading the door shouting all the reasons I can't come in.

As long as there are people in my life who persist in such gentle hospitality, some of their kindness may yet succeed in drawing this old ISFJ out.