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Illustration: The Building of Noah’s Ark (painting by a French master of 1675).
Pope Francis Catechesis on 16th March 2022
Will old age save the world, I wonder?
Catechesis on Old Age – 3. Seniority, a resource for carefree youth
Reading from the book of Genesis (6:5-8)
The Lord saw that the wickedness of human kind was great on the earth and that every intention of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually and the Lord was sorry that he had made human kind on the earth. And aggrieved him to his heart. So the Lord said I will blot out the human beings I have created from the face of the ground, people and beasts and creeping things and birds of the air I am sorry that I have made them. But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.
Dear brothers and sisters,
The biblical story (above) – with the symbolic language of the time in which it was written – tells us something impressive: God was so embittered by the widespread wickedness of men, which became a normal way of life, that he thought he had made a mistake in creating them and decided to eliminate them. A radical solution. It may even have a paradoxical twist of mercy. No more humans, no more history, no more judgment, no more condemnation. And many predestined victims of corruption, violence, injustice would be spared forever.
Doesn’t it happen sometimes to us too – overwhelmed by the sense of helplessness against evil or demoralized by the “prophets of doom” – to think that it was better not to have been born? Should we give credence to certain recent theories, which denounce the human species as an evolutionary detriment to life on our planet? All negative? No.
In fact, we are under pressure, exposed to opposing stresses that make us confused.
On the one hand, we have the optimism of an eternal youth, ignited by the extraordinary progress of technology, which paints a future full of machines more efficient and more intelligent than us, which will cure our ills and think for us the best solutions not to die: the world of the robot.
On the other hand, our imagination appears more and more focused on the representation of a final catastrophe that will extinguish us. What happens with an eventual atomic war! The “day after” of this – if we are still there, days and humans – we will have to start from scratch. Destroy everything to start from scratch. I don’t want to make the subject of progress trivial, of course. But it seems that the symbol of the flood is gaining ground in our unconscious. The current pandemic, moreover, puts a no small mortgage on our carefree representation of the things that matter, to life and its destiny.
In the biblical account, when it comes to saving the life of the earth from corruption and the flood, God entrusts the undertaking to the faithfulness of the oldest of all, the “righteous” Noah. Will old age save the world, I wonder? In what sense? And how will old age save the world? And what is the horizon? Life beyond death or just survival until the flood?
A word of Jesus, which evokes “the days of Noah”, helps us to deepen the meaning of the biblical page we have heard. Jesus, speaking of the last times, says: “As it happened in the days of Noah, so it will be in the days of the Son of man: they ate, drank, took a wife, took husband, until the day when Noah entered the ark and the flood came and made them all die” (Lk 17:26-27). In fact, eating and drinking, taking wife and husband, are very normal things and do not seem to be examples of corruption. Where is the corruption? Where was the corruption there? In fact, Jesus emphasizes that human beings, when they limit themselves to enjoying life, even lose the perception of corruption, which mortifies their dignity and poisons their meaning. When the perception of corruption is lost, and corruption becomes a normal thing: everything has its price, everything! You buy, you sell, opinions, acts of justice … This, in the business world, in the world of so many trades, is common. And they also happily experience corruption, as if it were part of the normality of human well-being. When you go to do something and the thing is slow, that process of doing is a bit slow, how many times you hear people say: “But, if you tip me I will speed this up”. So many times. “Give me something and I’ll go further.” We all know that well. The world of corruption seems to be part of the normality of the human being; and this is bad This morning I spoke with a gentleman who told me about this problem in his land. The goods of life are consumed and enjoyed without concern for the spiritual quality of life, without care for the habitat of the common home. Everything is exploited, without worrying about the mortification and debasement from which many suffer, or even the evil that poisons the community. As long as normal life can be filled with “well-being,” we don’t want to think about what makes it empty of justice and love. “But, I’m fine! Why do I have to think about problems, wars, human misery, how much poverty, how much wickedness? No, I’m fine. I don’t care about others.” This is the unconscious thought that leads us to live in a state of corruption.
Can corruption become normality, I wonder?
Brothers and sisters, unfortunately yes. You can breathe the air of corruption as you breathe oxygen. “But it’s normal; if you want me to do this in a hurry, how much do you give me?” That’s normal! It’s normal, but it’s a bad thing, it’s not good! What paves the way for it? One thing: the carefreeness that is aimed only at self-care: here is the gap that opens the door to corruption that sinks everyone’s life. Corruption benefits greatly from ‘not good’ carelessness. When a person is okay with everything and doesn’t care about others: this light-heartedness softens our defenses, dulls our conscience and makes us – even involuntarily – accomplices. Because corruption does not always go by itself: a person always has accomplices. And corruption always spreads, it spreads.
Old age is in the right position to grasp the deception of this normalization of a life obsessed with enjoyment and empty of interiority: life without thought, without sacrifice, without interiority, without beauty, without truth, without justice, without love: this is all corruption. The special sensitivity of us old people for the attentions, thoughts and affections that make us human, should become again a vocation of many. And it will be a choice of love of the elderly towards the new generations. We will be the ones to sound the alarm, the alert: “Be careful, that this is corruption, it does not bring you anything“. The wisdom of the old takes so long, today, to go against corruption. The new generations expect from us old, from us elderly, a word that is prophecy, that opens doors to new perspectives outside this carefree world of corruption, of the habit of corrupt things. God’s blessing chooses old age, for this charism so human and humanizing. What is the meaning of my old age? Each of us old people can ask ourselves. The meaning is this: to be a prophet of corruption and to say to others: “Stop, I have taken that road and it leads you to nothing! Now I’ll tell you my experience.” We elders must be prophets against corruption, as Noah was the prophet against corruption of his time, because he was the only one whom God trusted. I ask all of you – and I also ask myself: is my heart open to being a prophet against today’s corruption? There is an ugly thing, when the elderly have not matured and become old with the same corrupt habits as the young. Think of the biblical account of Susanna’s judges: they are the example of a corrupt old age. And we, with such an old age, would not be able to be prophets for the younger generations.
And Noah is the example of this generative old age: it is not corrupt, it is generative. Noah does not preach, does not complain, does not recriminate, but takes care of the future of the generation that is in danger. We elderly people must take care of the young, of the children who are in danger. He builds the ark of hospitality and lets men and animals into it. In caring for life, in all its forms, Noah fulfills God’s command by repeating the tender and generous gesture of creation, which in reality is the very thought that inspires God’s command: a new blessing, a new creation (cf. Gen 8:15-9:17). Noah’s vocation remains ever timely. The holy patriarch has yet to intercede for us. And we, women and men of a certain age – not to say old, because some are offended – do not forget that we have the possibility of wisdom, to say to others: “Look, this road of corruption leads to nothing”. We must be like the good wine that in the end as an old man can give a good message and not a bad one.
I make an appeal, today, to all people who are of a certain age, not to say old. Be careful: you have the responsibility to denounce the human corruption in which we live and in which this way of life of relativism, totally relative, goes on, as if everything were lawful. Moving on. The world needs, it needs strong young people, who go forward, and wise old people. Let us ask the Lord for the grace of wisdom.
Summary
Dear Brothers and Sisters: In our continuing catechesis on the meaning and value of old age, viewed in the light of God’s word, we now consider the vital role of the elderly in handing on to new generations life’s true and sustaining values. In the very first pages of the Bible, God entrusts to the elderly Noah the task of restoring the goodness of his creation, which had become corrupted by the spread of violence and wickedness. Jesus himself speaks of the “days of Noah” in warning us of the need for conversion in view of the imminent coming of God’s Kingdom, which brings mankind definitive salvation and spiritual renewal. In every age, as in the days of Noah, we can be tempted to accept sin and corruption as normal, to avert our eyes from the unjust suffering of the poor and the destruction of our natural environment. In our own day, these are the fruits of a materialistic, self-centred and spiritually empty culture of waste. The elderly, like Noah, can warn us of this danger and remind us of our God-given call to be guardians and stewards of his creation. May Noah’s example and prayers inspire our elderly to appreciate this, their special charism, and help to build a new “ark” of welcome, care and hope, for the future of our world and the dawn of the new creation.
