Retirement is of course an issue for social policy, but it is also an issue as people try to make sense of their lives; and to that extent, it must be a theological issue as well. Unlike Buddhism, in which the later period of life (when productive labour and the care of a family are left behind) is recognised as a distinct spiritual stage, Christianity has given little attention to what it means to live withdrawn from the assumed common pattern, one based upon work. Though voluntary retirement is a feature of relatively affluent societies where enough resources can be accumulated to make it possible, the spiritual meaning of stepping back from the central area of economic engagement is one that arises, in different forms, in many cultures, and which deserves some theological consideration.
1 The concept of retirement
A first point to notice is that retirement, unlike birth or death, is not a natural life-stage but a social construct, and for most people a relatively recent one. Understood as unforced withdrawal from paid labour, retirement has, historically, been available to few. Before the introduction of state pensions in 1911, the mass of the population in the
Retirement, then, is no kind of absolute or right, but a possibility that flows from a particular level of social and economic development. How socially determined it is can be seen from international comparisons. In 2005, HSBC conducted a survey of 21,329 individuals in 20 countries, asking questions about how they perceived retirement and what provision they were able to make for it. Whilst most respondents in all the countries surveyed associated retirement with greater leisure and the opportunity for various kinds of personal fulfilment, by no means all presented the same pattern of expectation. According to the report, “the British view later life as a time of self-sufficiency, independence, and personal responsibility, counting on neither government nor family to care for them,” whereas Canadians “view their later years as a time of reinvention, ambition, and close relationships with friends and family.” Against those relatively affluent expectations, Mexicans see retirement “as a time for continued work and hard-earned financial stability.” What constitutes retirement is also very different in different countries. In
2 The economic problem
The rise to prominence of retirement as a public policy concern has been well summarised by Sarah Harper of the Oxford University Institute of Ageing. In essence, the current problem—if it is to been seen as a problem—arises from the conjunction of increased life-expectancy and increased consumer expectation:
Throughout the industrialized Western world there has been significant growth in the number of men retiring from economic activity at increasingly earlier ages. In the
Being in a position to withdraw from the work-force has become a desirable consumer good in itself, and for those in certain employment sectors a central aim of their working life is to arrive at that point as early as possible. Even for those who cannot aim to retire at fifty, there is considerable resistance to government attempts to delay the date of retirement.
People now expect an affluent standard of life in retirement, and they expect it earlier. But that means—given that they will probably die later than their parents—that they expect it for longer. And that costs money. The question for public policy is where that money is to come from, and the current tendency is to see more of it as coming from private saving. Given a declining workforce, the accustomed pattern whereby those in work sustain the retired will become less and less sustainable. Those looking to retirement will need, one way or another, to do much more to sustain themselves. The only alternative is to reverse the tendencies of recent years and go back to the pre-affluent state of affairs in which the date of withdrawal from paid work approached much more closely to the date of death.
3 Life issues
Often the question of retirement is reduced to the ‘pensions crisis’; and though this is a key economic issue, there are other issues around retirement that demand serious consideration, not least by the churches. Broadly, these might be described as ‘life issues’, and they have to do with what people do with their retirement and with the meaning that they find in their lives at this stage. These issues lead directly into theological questions, which I shall address in the final part of this essay.
For retired people there is, first of all and very directly, an issue of identity. In a society where identity is largely defined by function, retired people are suddenly in the position of not being able to define themselves as they did in their working lives. Once the work identity is prefaced by the word ‘retired’—a retired teacher, policeman, bus driver—it begins to fade, to become insubstantial. There is, of course, a paradox about this functional kind of identity. If ‘identity’ means ‘knowing who I am in distinction from others’, then to claim an identity by ‘identifying’ with a work-group is moving in the wrong direction. When, in retirement, we no longer ‘identify’ with and through others in that way, we give ourselves a better chance of having a real identity of our own. [3]
But it may not at first seem like that. The retired person has, rather suddenly, to face up to the issue of where their identity will come from now. And since identity is closely bound up with activity, this is likely to turn into the question ‘what do I do now?’ Should it be paid ‘work’, or unpaid ‘volunteering’? Should they extend and build on past experience, or try something new? Should they seek to be useful to others, or simply enjoy themselves? And since their activity, of whatever kind, is not now going to appear on a CV, what is the point of doing it at all? [4]
Work-activity tends to be understood as purposive activity: you do A in order that B. But what is the purpose of retirement activity? For some—scholars, preachers, politicians—the same purposes can be carried forward, if in a different form or at a different level. But for a bus driver or a policeman this is not possible, and new purposes have to be found. Sometimes these can be developed out of the leisure activity of earlier life: to learn to speak French properly, to spend more time painting. Sometimes they may be new: to learn flamenco, to join the board of a charity. But the rationale for the activity is almost certain to be other than that of activity in earlier life: one is no longer earning a living or developing a career.
What emerges here is a deep question about the shape of a life. Should a life have a shape, taken as a whole? And if so, what should it be? How do different activities contribute, or fail to contribute, to that? Do the purposes of retirement have a more basic, existential, character than those of working life—not to put bread on the table but to ensure that a life, seen as a whole, makes some kind of sense? At that point, what is a pressing and immediate concern for those in retirement—what do I do next?—can be seen to be a theological problem; for to talk about the shape or sense of a life is to look at it from a transcendental perspective, and so to bring God into the argument.
4 The theology of retirement
An aspect of retirement that I have as yet hardly touched on is that retirement, generally, goes with age: retired people are generally old people. And that means that we are talking about endings and about death. Retirement is, if not quite the final stage of life (there is something called ‘care’), certainly life lived in proximity to death. Friends die; illnesses appear. And that intensifies the question about the shape of a life. Where, from a Christian perspective, should we look to be as we approach life’s end? How should what we do in retirement relate to that? How much does ‘doing’ contribute to reaching that point, and how much simply ‘being’?
These are, of course, the largest questions, to which only tentative answers are possible here. But they may lie somewhere in this direction: we should seek to know where we stand in relation to our life as a totality, and to know where that totality stands in relation to God. If that is the beginning of an answer, then certain perspectives open. For example: one prevailing secular model of retirement is at once called into question. This is retirement as merited self-indulgence, an earned self-cosseting before the darkness falls. For some of the retired, life becomes a trail of treats, some major, some minor, pursued on the assumption that nothing more can now be required of them. For the flavour, look at Saga Magazine. The most admired are those who keep running longest in the fun-stakes, who ‘refuse to give in.’
Such an approach to retirement reflects, of course, a conscious or unconscious atheism: life is all there is, so the first duty of each of us is to make the most of it. And of course we should enjoy what life has to offer, the retired no less than others. But only to do that is empty and pointless, and contributes to the hovering purposelessness of many retired lives. Something else needs to be going on at the same time.
Retirement should be the time of the gathering of meaning. It is this that should give it a distinctive quality, a texture different from that of the earlier stages of life. Now, toward the end, one can look back at the form that one’s life has taken and seek to own that form in its totality, freely and perhaps for the first time. [5] When a shape is no longer being imposed by others; when it is possible to trace patterns and directions that have been yours and yours alone, then you should begin to see what identity really means. Not ‘I am a teacher/policeman/barrister’, but I am the one whose life had that shape. For the Christian, that shape reveals itself toward God; in the never-ceasing if often unconscious dialogue that makes up our lives, a shape is revealed.
The task of retirement is to know that shape and by knowing it to know oneself and God better. Some activities will help us to do that, and we should not be too prescriptive. It may be running the local soup-kitchen, or it may be a Jules Verne trip to
WORKS CITED
HSBC report “The Future of Retirement: what people want” (2005); available at http://www.hsbc.com/hsbc/retirement
Sarah Harper, “The Future of Retirement and Early Retirement”, available at http://www.ioes.hi.is/events/conf_20020607/lectures/HarperS/Harper_Iceland.pdf
Feist, J. and Feist, G. J., Theories of Personality (
Stuart-Hamilton,
[1] The HSBC 2005 report “The Future of Retirement: what people want” is available at
[2] Sarah Harper, “The Future of Retirement and Early Retirement”, available at
[3] Erich Fromm touches on this paradox. See Feist, J. and Feist, G. J., Theories of Personality (
[4] Some retired people, particularly those whose working life has been one of service, have an acute problem with feeling that they are now ‘useless.’ Christianity, especially in its Protestant version, may have some responsibility here. Catholicism, with its greater recognition of contemplation, may make it easier for people just to ‘be’. See, for example, Ian Stuart-Hamilton, The Psychology of Ageing, 3rd edn. (
[5] The idea of owning one’s life in its totality finds an echo in Erik H. Erikson’s analysis of the last of the eight stages of development. He sees old age as distinguished by the possibility of ‘integrity’, in the sense of being able to integrate the various conflicting elements of earlier life. See, for example, Feist and Feist, Theories of Personality, pp. 248 and 260-1.
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