Thought For The Day 25th July (BBC Radio 4)

Good morning
The award winning actress Estelle Getty, best known as Sophia Petrillo in the US hit comedy The Golden Girls, died this week. Obituaries paid tribute to her clever contribution to an 80’s American revision of what it means to get older.

The American population, like ours, is getting older and fitter. Old age in the Golden Girls means fun and naughtiness; taking risks and branching out; it’s about the transfer of wisdom and the telling of stories from one generation to the next. Though funny, it is also poignant.

The rise and rise of a generation which would have been regarded as over the hill two decades ago, is only just hitting home. Note how media froth over Dame Helen Mirren in her bikini or news that a 90 year old has just become Cambridge’s oldest PhD recipient is suddenly all a bit ‘old hat’.
All this getting old business needs further, urgent, revision.

Parish life certainly introduces a priest to the radical revisionism necessary in assessing the lives of older people. I meet these people all the time. So-called silver surfers are chatting online, enjoying digital photography and attending fitness classes. They are diet conscious and physically aware.

They are also challenging the presumptuousness and gross immaturity of the younger generations to quite extraordinary lengths – as is the case of the swearing, grandma graphically depicted by Catherine Tate, where resentment for taking liberties of the older generation by the younger, borders on the shocking.

So life expectancy is no longer just about how we live but about the quality and content of our lives. There is still a definite connection between age and wisdom, as frequently celebrated in the Old Testament, where a long life inevitably leads, as the Book of Chronicles suggests, to "a good old age, full of days, riches, and honour". Indeed, the addition of wisdom remains one of the wonders of old age.

But there is a diversifying and changing connection between age and fitness, age and work, age and sex and age and relationships. Getting older can be seen as liberating, increasingly exciting, putting our earlier years comparatively in the shade.

An aging fitter population obviously provides employers, governments, local authorities, certainly the national health service and even the faith communities – with a new set of challenges and opportunities. Provision needs to be made.

For this truly is a golden generation: with wisdom by the bucket load, spiced up with hearty measures of energy, and a quite unparalleled spiritual optimism.