Inter-generational Collaboration Building requires new thinking and creativity at a time when longer and healthier lives already are upending our notions about what it means to grow old. The skills that older adults can offer are well-suited to the needs of youth. Inter-generational engagement benefits the participants their faith communities.
You believed you would be welcome and safe in a country full of others yearning to breathe free.
You are not welcome by all in this country. You are not safe because of our faces.
Maybe they hate our faces because we remind them of what they used to be and are afraid of becoming again.
So, what do we do right now?
Every once in a while, I sit and think about one of my first ever challenging youth group kids, who, instead of sitting down with and having a hard conversation without relationship, I just continually loved on, showed respect to, and got to watch Jesus change her life instead. We can preach and teach and lecture and “pull aside,” but if we don’t have love, our clanging cymbals will drive someone away from truth. Love draws in.
“I suspect that many of us who are church members are even more eager to find a new normal. I am sure many of us have suffered a tragic loss of loved ones and friends. Many of us know people who have lost their jobs or are in danger of losing their homes. Thankfully, growing numbers of us are getting vaccinated and looking forward to moving from isolation to having people over again.”
She thinks back to Easter in the home country. Were they still conducting open air Easter sunrise services? Mid-April will probably be really hot. She checks the weather for Hyderabad on her smartphone. It is thirty-eight degrees Celsius there, at six-fifteen in the evening. She is glad she is here in B.C. If only they could see an actual sunrise over the mountains.
It is not the intent here in these offerings to damn the institutional Church for its complicity in ageism. As we well know, “isms” are pervasive and finds their expression in mandates, protocols, exclusion. We have heard it said, maybe, who it is who loves the details. But this “ism” for my focus leads, I believe, to images of fragile, incompetent, disabled men and women with “white collars around their necks.
How difficult to change a holy habit
even for one holier.
They marked the time so they could tend the grave
While, unknown, this bursting Star of life
was finishing the miracle of its own Sabbath sleep –
Or was it sleep?
That Saturday is a secret kept by heaven —
‘ “Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don’t’ have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”’
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Ageism as defined by Ashton Applewhite, author of “This Chair Rocks”, is “stereotyping and discrimination based on a person’s age. We experience it any time someone assumes that we’re “too old” for something—a task, a haircut, a relationship—instead of finding out who we are and what we’re capable of. Or “too young;” ageism cuts both ways, although in a youth-obsessed society, olders bear the brunt of it.”
“We stumble between extremes navigating pandemic, praying for a return to normal but fearing what will come. This is a bewildering era where everything has changed, norms are out the window and etiquette is uncertain.”