Jack L. Stotts
Aging Well: Theological Reflections on the Call and Retirement
Dr. Jack L. Stotts retired from Austin Theological Seminary in 1996 where he
served as president and professor of Christian ethics for eleven years. He had
served twenty-two years on the faculty and administration of McCormick
Theological Seminary. Published by The Board of Pensions of the Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.), January 1999, p. 25 . This information prepared for Religion
Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.
God's calling is the ultimate context of our lives. This is the dimension of
depth that is the proper source of our identity and community. This is the
ground of our life. From that power we can never be separated. "In life and in
death we belong to God." That is a good word we know in Jesus Christ.
Introduction
God's calling is the ultimate context of our lives. This is the dimension of
depth that is the proper source of our identity and community. This is the
ground of our life. From that power we can never be separated. "In life and in
death we belong to God." That is a good word we know in Jesus Christ.
I. Calling and Call
Calling is the category by which we seek to understand and to elucidate the
dynamic and content of God's calling to us and others.
II. Calling
God's calling comes to us out of the past. It addresses us in the present. It
beckons us into the future.
III. Calls
We respond to God's calling in and though the calls that come to us. These calls
are, at one level, structures of meaning, identity, attachment, contribution,
and satisfaction. We create the particular structures--ecclesiastical,
political, economic, familial, etc.
IV. Retirement: Re-considering One's Call
We are called to redefine ourselves, to listen and to look for how God is
calling us now through all the potential new calls, what we are to do, where we
are to do it, who we are and what are the locations for a call or calls that are
being sounded all around us.
V. Retirement and the Call: What Constitutes a Good Retirement?
To be at leisure does not mean to abandon the values we have espoused
previously. It is to put them in different forms. We continue to ask whether at
retirement we continue to engage in practices that are expressive of the
comprehensive love of God.
Introduction
The occasion for writing this essay was the kind invitation to meet with the
Retirement Planning Consultants and Regional Representatives of the Board of
Pensions at their annual gathering in San Antonio, Texas in December 1997. These
folks provide leadership for the Retirement Planning Seminars sponsored by the
Board of Pensions of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) for Presbyterian
ministers, lay employees and spouses. David C. Rich, Director of Education and
Communications for the Board of Pensions, invited me to share some theological
musings about retirement and engage in discussion about what is our calling when
we don't have a call as retired pastors. My thanks to him for encouraging me to
make these remarks available more widely.
The invitation to write about my theological reflections about retirement was in
many ways a gift to me, for it provoked me to put in order what had previously
been random and fleeting thoughts about the subject. Having retired August 1,
1997, I was and still am a relative newcomer to "retirement land." So some of my
thoughts and proposals may be premature. On the other hand, perhaps as a recent
arrival I can point to some things that others with a longer tenure simply
ignore because they have become familiar and taken for granted. Whatever the
case may be, I appreciated the opportunity to think about some of the issues
related to faith and retirement.
Thinking While Writing
One element of having to discipline my thoughts is that I think by and while
writing. My former colleague at McCormick Seminary, Carl Dudley, when asked what
he thought about some issue or recommendation would often reply, "How do I know
what I think until I've said it?" I invoke a variant of that. It goes like this,
"How do I know what I think about some issue or question until I write it down?"
How I envy those who think on their feet. Not the quick retort for me. I have to
put you on hold until my pen and yellow pad tell me what I think about a subject
or idea. My mind is connected to my writing hand, not to my tongue. That is one
reason I am grateful for this opportunity to write down some theological
reflections about retirement. What follows, then, are probings into
understanding and a positioning of myself in terms of what I think about
retirement, from a theological point of view. I hope you will think along with
me about this important issue.
Retirement, initially in its broadest and secular sense, is that period in our
lives when we are no longer employed and compensated on a full-time basis. That
is not all that one can or should say about retirement. It is a starting point
only, waiting for theological content to flesh out its meanings.
A Magical World
My initial conclusion about retirement is that it is a magical world. Now each
month checks appear magically in our bank account, courtesy of wire transfers.
The economic threat has been tamed, at least for now. In this magical time of
retirement, the burden of "dressing up" for work every day is whisked away. I
can select my own uniform. Now I can ask, "What do I want to do?" rather than,
"What do I have to do for the seminary today?" The boundaries of my little
world, small though it was, have collapsed. The terrain has shifted. I am free
to erect different boundaries, to rearrange the landscape of my life. And that
is just the problem. For in retirement I not only can but must reorder my life.
In that sense the magical world of retirement is also threatening.
A Threatening World
As threat, retirement forces me to examine again such basic questions as, "Who
am I?" and "What am I to do" as a citizen of this magical world? These queries
demand answers, for my self-understanding, my sense of worth, my identity and my
community have been wrapped up with fulfilling what I have believed to be an
appropriate and vital response to God's calling, to serve God by serving the
church, and more precisely to do so in the field of theological education. Now
that call is no more. I have no specific call to order my day and night, at
least no call in the sense of an ecclesiastical call to the Ministry of Word and
Sacrament. Previously my work has been the primary sculptor of my life, giving
shape and form to "fill up my time," giving those hours and days a pattern of
familiarity. Now that is gone. What now will sculpt my days, giving them order
and meaning? Those are the starting points for our theological reflections about
the issues of calling, call, and retirement. What is my calling when there is no
call?
The first two words--calling and call--are elusive and suffer from definition
sprawl. The range of understandings goes from the trivial and common place "give
me a call when you have a chance"--to the profound--"God's calling is to a life
of servanthood"--to the arresting and provocative, as when Dietrich Bonhoeffer
asserts in The Cost of Discipleship, "When Christ calls a person, he bids that
person to come and die."
My first task is to clear away some of the definition clutter, and provide a
pathway through the forest of possible meanings. Lodged in the understanding of
theology as reflection upon how we are to order our lives in response to God's
ordering and reordering of our lives, individually and corporately, these
theological definitions are somewhat arbitrary, though not without being
informed by the tradition. They are not taken down from the shelf of agreed-upon
definitions, but custom-made for our reflections. As theological definitions
they are provisional and tentative, open to correction, but they may provide
some common ground for thinking together.
I. Calling and Call
Calling is the category by which we seek to understand and to elucidate the
dynamic and content of God's calling to us and others. We begin with an
affirmation about God, whom we have known in and through Jesus Christ and by the
power of the Spirit.
Calling
God is the one whose very being includes calling. The creating God calls the
world into being, and all that is in it. God's calling is to Abraham and Sarah,
to David and to Solomon, and to the multitude of generations of the Hebrew
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