I have been told that exactly 50 years ago you could be found at this time of the year earning the wherewithal to procure yourself a suitably festive dinner in Paris, at the entrance of the Bon Marché, being photographed dressed up as Santa Claus delivering toys to children. How does it feel today for you to spend the Christmas season in what is really an old people's home with the difference that all the oldies there are also celibate to boot?
Apparently it is not the case that anything is both Christmassy and suitable for the elderly at the same time. Evidently, honey rings and pudding soaked in brandy are not usually on the recommended diet list for diabetes-prone over 60s. But the religious celebrations are not more elderly-friendly than the culinary. Mass in the midnight chill, probably with a lengthy vigil including the homily delivered by an altar boy (or perhaps today by an altar girl), is not ideal for the age bracket of those lapsing into second childhood.
Most men my age tend to identify themselves with the figure of St Joseph as he is shown in Byzantine icons: sitting in a corner with an uncomprehending stare as if feeling thoroughly out of place knowing that he is not the real father. However, the experience at this season is only a more acute instance of a more general problem that the elderly have wearing their Christian hat.
The big change that Christ brought with Him was this: In order to decide how best to behave, one no longer had to look up the Commandments, the 10 given to Moses and the hundreds spun out of them by the Pharisees; but one could now recall what Jesus did as a model for oneself. But Jesus never grew to be an oldie. He died when He was probably 40. He never underwent that slow decline of health that nowadays often lasts longer than the three score and 10 years allotted to human beings by the Bible. (There are actually a few dozen people in the world today who are approaching the 120-year-old mark).
On reflection, in this Pauline Year, I realised that there actually was a key moment in the life of Christ that ultra-sexagenarians can hitch on to, namely Christmas itself, basing oneself on the little poem that the Apostle included in his letter to the Philippians (Ch.2: 6-11): "Who, though He was in the form of God, did not count (equality) with God to be something to be grasped, but emptied Himself taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of man ... therefore God had highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name."
The Pauline text is very beautiful but how does it answer the quest of the elderly for a model in Christ's life for the happy conclusion of their own?
In this passage with its ballad-like rhythm - the epic sweep of Paradise Lost contracted into a few lines of lyrical intaglio - Paul is obviously contrasting Christ with the first Adam, who in the grievous circumstances of only just having been introduced to his wife, had sought to snatch equality with God. On the contrary Christ is implicitly compared to a pitcher which pours out the wine it contained. His birth as a human being is presented as a kind of self-divesting of His divine power and a diminution of His strength analogous to that of human beings as they grow old and feeble.
Sarah Coakley, a feminist Professor of Theology at Harvard, has, however - in her recent commentary on the Carmen Christi, as the Pauline hymn with its powerful ring of poetic truth, from the Epistle to the Philippians - emphasised that its point is that: "true divine empowerment occurs most unimpededly in the context of a special form of human vulnerability." Paul was, in fact, exhorting the Philippians to humble themselves in order to be re-born with a new strength that Christ brought to humankind. Likewise for us the decline of old age is to be lived as the preparation for our second birth, this time into eternity.
Our hands may be shaking with the tremor of Parkinson's, but they must still be kept open, both for giving and for receiving. It is only with a closed fist that one cannot enjoy the admittedly dramatic experience of the Christian Nativity.
How does acceptance of St Paul's message help you concretely to live old age?
It is perhaps the closest that a male can get to the experience of pregnancy. Old age enables you to get rid of many preoccupations about worldly matters that are in the last analysis of little importance. It enables you to get that feeling of liberation while enduring pain and suffering that St Paul himself compared to the throes of childbirth.
You become clumsy and unable to carry out any delicate work that requires deft fingers, but there develops within your soul a great thirst that only the wine from the Pitcher of St Paul's metaphor can slake. Old age can be experienced also as a time of grace because it also can be lived as the beginning of a sunsetless dawn.
Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.