Letter to the Elderly

A short letter 'to my elderly brothers and sisters', dated 1 October 1999, written in the year the United Nations dedicated to older persons. He writes, as he says, 'as an older person myself' and as someone speaking to his contemporaries. It begins from Psalm 90, 'Seventy is the sum of our years, or eighty if we are strong', and from the passage of time, and then looks back over the twentieth century he and his readers had lived through, with its wars and totalitarian regimes and its signs of hope. It goes on to old age in the Bible, with figures such as Abraham and Sarah, Moses, Tobit, Eleazar, Zechariah and Elizabeth, and Nicodemus. It speaks of the elderly as guardians of shared memory and of the respect owed to them in the family and in society, and of the meaning of illness, dependence and the approach of death, in the light of faith in the resurrection. It closes with a prayer.