Tama, the electronic cat

In his apostolic letter Dies Domini, the Holy Father states that Sunday is a day of solidarity, a day for fully sharing our love with others, and suggests that we invite to your table someone who is alone, visit the sick, take food to some needy family... The Holy Father’s message was clearly aimed at everyone, young and old.

It is, however, a trend of our times to associate loneliness with old age, considering it more fearsome than death as the Roman satirist Juvenal (60-130 AD) wrote. Certainly, things could be no different in a society such as ours which is characterised by hedonistic consumerism and practical materialism which worships physical youth and all its trappings, alienating and rejecting all those who are old or infirm and cannot live according to these standards.

The day after the Pope’s invitation, an ironic gesture of fate, an initiative proposed by the Minister of Health in Japan was made public: an electronic cat to keep old people company. Tama as this cuddly toy cat is known, speaks, purrs and recognises its owner’s voice, responding only to him or her. In spring, these mechanical cats were distributed free of charge to all old people in Japan in order to combat depression and solitude.

There are many fallacies concerning ageing, and many issues continue to be misunderstood, such as the general assumption that senior citizens are always dependent on others and completely incapable of looking after themselves. This may be true in the case of those who are infirm in mind or body, but it is certainly not always so. Like the rest of us many old people need friendship and love more than anything else, because love gives a meaning to who we are, how we think and what we do. Technology, even in its most sophisticated form, as with the ‘masterpiece’ of an electronic cat, will never be able to communicate feelings, human values, goodness, benevolence, empathy or attention.

I have been living in the friary for more than twenty years now and not a day goes by without me feeling the need to thank God for my elderly brothers and sisters. Old age is when we reach full maturity, when our hearts and minds can express the spiritual youth which is born from wisdom and from a life of experience, but also from the courage to consider the last part of our lives as a sort of ‘noviciate’ in preparation for our entry into paradise, and to live it in a creative and optimistic manner, full of vitality and hope. The joy of my elderly fellow friars has a singular, special quality and tone. As their physical strength diminishes, along with their manual dexterity and the amount of work they are capable of doing, there is significant improvement in the quality of their spiritual life and their life of prayer, their relationship with God and also in their relationship with their fellow friars and other people. How true the famous saying of Henri-Dominique Lacordaire (1802-1862) is: As we get older, earthly truth fades, spiritual truth is accentuated. Old age, which withers the body, rejuvenates the soul, provided it is not already corrupt or unaware of itself. As a model of how one should face the ‘third age’ of life, I like to think of Old Simeon and the prophetess, Anna, as they are described in the Gospel of Saint Luke, very advanced in age. They knew how to preserve their hidden desires which prevented them from becoming slaves to their old age and helped them to overcome the sadness of memories of times past, concentrating rather on thoughts of the wonderful things which were set to happen to them.