GEORGE LINGS takes autumn as his metaphor for active retirement, to distinguish that stage from the winter of dependency that follows. Autumn is a season of fruitfulness and of falling leaves, and he wants to recognise both the gifts that retirement brings, and the losses.
The strength of his book is its focus on attitudes, not tips or suggestions, and especially on the attitudes of gratitude, of trust, and of adventure. And retirement tests how, throughout our life, we have learned to grow by letting go.
He writes a good deal about his own experience, turning also to scripture, and to those authors who have helped him — particularly Paul Tournier, writing 50 years ago now.
He also draws on interviews with 16 retired people, admitting that his sample is “white British, middle class, middle income, existing Christians”. No surprise, then, that this fortunate group now enjoy “being a stopgap head teacher; a non-executive director; handling the closure of a college; becoming a fiction writer”. Lings himself, a retired priest, feels privileged to own a “spacious” house, but knows the pain of decluttering: “I had been trying to sell the flame red MG Midget we had owned since 1975 . . . latterly it was just not being used, because we have two other capable cars.”
He is conversational and personal, and clearly a wise and experienced Christian companion. The problem is his lack of control over everything that he wants to say, whether strictly to the point or not, and in a style that is far from crisp.
He is right to consider medical concerns, but we do not need two pages of his current symptoms. Hobbies are important, but not a meticulous four-page description of his model railway layout.
He emphasises trust in God, but an introduction to four different theological stances towards the problem of evil seems to belong elsewhere. Exile may be a helpful theme in considering the displacements of retirement, but his protracted exposition of exile in the Old Testament outstays its welcome.
There is heavy emphasis on the family, though no consideration of the adjustments in the marriage relationship that retirement calls for. He concedes that he does not “address the specific issues faced by the single person”, who might bridle to read, “I know of single people who have been informally adopted by a nuclear family.” He notes that some interviewees are facing big questions about changes to their faith, but this is not explored, whether as problem or widening horizon.
“When we simplify”, he says of downsizing, “we find out what it is we treasure.” If Living the Autumn of Life could be downsized and decluttered a bit, its value would be seen to much greater effect.
The Revd Philip Welsh is a retired priest in the diocese of London.
Living the Autumn of Life: Walking through retirement beginnings and endings
George Lings
BRF £12.99
(978-1-80039-281-6)
Church Times Bookshop £11.69
