Growing Old with Grace
By Charles Rush
February 20, 2000
Luke 2: 22-40
e scriptures this morning give us a very hopeful image to look
forward to, that we might grow old and bestow our blessing upon the
next generation, to live to see the beginning of something truly
positive that will carry on beyond us.
And we know that is not a given with age. We do not automatically
become gracious and full of blessing as we get older but when we do it
is a beautiful thing. When I was in seminary, I pastured a church in
rural Kentucky. Shortly after I began to pastor there someone in the
congregation died. I did the funeral. The time came for the eulogy, I
didn't pretend to say a few good words as I had only seen the man
around our little town a few times and hardly knew him other than to
say hello. I threw the mike open to the floor and asked those gathered
if they would like to share a few warm reminiscences of the deceased.
There was a long silence that followed. But these were country people,
shy and not given to speeches. So I waited. I waited some more. The
silence began to be very uncomfortable but I wasn't sure what to do.
After an interminable wait, the brother of the deceased stood, with his
hat in his hand. He looked back at me and said,
"Sometimes the best thing you can say about a person is
The psychoanalyst Erich Eriksson says that one of the critical
spiritual issues we face every year after 50 is the quest for integrity
and that this quest is worked out in the midst of an increasing sense
of loss.
The quest for integrity is a quest for a unified purpose and
meaning for our lives. It is a difficult challenge.
In the first place, our sense of responsibility is wider in scope
than ever before in our lives. When we are young, our world-view is
remarkably myopic. We have a hard time seeing beyond the scope of our
own interests, beyond the things that we can control. The vast
majority of young people are only concerned about their immediate
circle of friends, a manageable number of people usually. They may
think about the wider world and have opinions about city politics or
world issues, but as a rule they are not invested in them to the degree
that the woes of the world impact their personal disposition.
The older that we get, our scope of investment has increased
considerably, and so our sense of responsibility and vulnerability.
Most of the time, we have developed families and they have grown to
become independent themselves. Somewhere about the time that they
begin to start the next generation, or when they should start the next
generation, they hand us an in-depth critique of everything that we
have done to damage them emotionally and psychologically. They will
never repeat that in the next generation.
My oldest son recently reminded me of a time when he shot his first
squirrel. He had been begging me and begging me to shoot something
when he was about 12. His mother, of course, was horrified at the
request. We had squirrels that were invading our 200-year-old attic in
Princeton. Finally, one day when his mother was away, I told him he
could open fire, which he did. He brought this up recently. He said,
"Man, I felt horrible about killing that squirrel."
I said, "yeah".
He said, "You shouldn't have let me do that. I will never let
my children shoot a squirrel." Damned if you do, damned if you
don't. My father - Minister, Murderer.
It is a funny thing that all of those issues become very important
spiritually, emotionally. We can only be as happy, to a certain
extent, as our children. We have to know that we have done a good job
with the next generation. Conversely, if we think that maybe we
haven't, these concerns become nagging worries that cause us and
endless amount of anxiety. Of course, it is never all that clear
either, where our responsibility ought to end and our children's and
grandchildren's ought to begin. We spend a lot of time during these
years fretting that we should have done things differently, that we
could have done them better, hoping/yearning that some immediate
situation will turn out all right, that our kids will transcend the
complexes we passed on to them unwittingly.
It is a worry when your son-in-law is breaking your daughter's
heart. It is a worry when one of your grandchildren suffers from
depression; your one child that just can't quite seem to get themselves
established so that they have a truly independent life. The one son
that has the same explosive temper that you had when you were young.
The child that doesn't seem to have the confidence to stand up for
themselves and appears to be destined for the underachiever track. The
grandchild with a disease that is incurable at the present moment. You
can have so many other blessings in your life, achieve all kinds of
success, but at the end of the day, most of your emotional and
spiritual energy will return to these places and these issues because
until they are settled, you can't really be settled either.
We have lived long enough that we are beginning to take stock of
our careers. Has this been a good investment of our time and talents?
Have we managed our careers the way that we wanted to? Are we in the
place we figured we would be when we started out right out of college?
Have we been significant in what we have been doing in our jobs? Have
we been able to provide enough for our families? Were we maybe too
narrowly focused all these years on the meaning of success? Did we
sell ourselves short?
If we are lucky, and a whole bunch of us in this room, are lucky,
we can think about the legacy that we want to leave through our work.
And not just our work in the narrow sense of our job, but also our
volunteer work that we have been invested in. There is a lot more
opportunity in the next phase of life to let our volunteer work assume
more of a primary role in our lives because we have the time to devote
to it. And the question that integrity starts to pose for us is what
will we invest ourselves in that will out live us. What legacy will we
leave for the next generation?
The property managers at the church have indulged me in two little
legacies around here. If you look back in the memorial garden or out
on the corner of New England Avenue and Springfield Avenue this spring,
you will see two very small Japanese maples. One is the traditional
red; the one on the corner is an unusual yellow maple. They will never
get very big but they will be beautiful. I planted both of them so
that I could come back to this church when I am a very old man and see
them in their fullness, still young and full of bloom. People will
say, "Lousy minister but he planted some pretty trees."
One of these days, believe it or not, we are going to actually have
some stained glass windows in the church up here, a group of people
decided to leave a legacy. Joan Jones is dedicating a window in the
gallery that we have been in the process of designing, a beautiful
legacy. And that is what this building is about next door. We're
giving a gift to the next generation, hopefully a beautiful gift in the
expansion of that building. Hopefully, we will be able to get it to
blend with this building so that the two of them make a grand statement
in our little corner of the town. We have been blessed to receive this
beautiful legacy. None of us designed it, paid for it, had much of
anything to do with it. A former generation gave it to us as an
expression of their love; it was their investment in something that
would outlive them. And they did it because it was here in this church
that they experienced the community and support that helped them to
forge together a modicum of integrity in their lives and
We are lucky because we live in an era that is prosperous enough to
be able to think about a legacy in these terms. We are lucky enough to
be able to invest ourselves in our volunteer work, in something that
will outlive us. We have been prosperous enough that we can invest in
several different ways.
For many of us, the investment of our volunteer work will be much
more meaningful and important because we live in a strange,
transitional season at the corporate level. I was talking to someone
last week that had worked for their firm for 21 years. That is a
substantial career in this environment. They got an offer from another
company and took it. Because of tele-commuting, her boss actually
worked in Dallas. She asked for a meeting to talk about retirement.
He couldn't fit it in. They did it over the phone. Took a few
minutes, details done. That was it. Next. Gone are the days of the
dinner from your colleagues, the photo with the watch. I am quite sure
that we will eventually have a return of humanity on this front because
this present mode of doing things is unsustainable. But, it is not
likely that your office is going to provide you with much opportunity
for misty reflection on what you have accomplished. Not for the vast
majority of us in the next few years.
Finally, we are searching for integrity that can do justice to the
frustrations, the disappointments, and the real tragedies that exist
all around us. You have to be a certain age before some of these
questions begin to settle into your bones. You can even be surrounded
by a great deal of tragedy and disappointment and learn to manage it
professionally because it is not your tragedy, as doctors and nurses
know so well.
I had a friend of mine who had a great marriage. His wife was the
sun and the moon. They had beautiful children. Went on interesting
tours around the world, kept each other learning new things about the
world- new hobbies. They just seemed to bring out the best in each
other and you just wanted to be around them like maybe some of that
good energy just might rub off on you, which it did by the way. She
contracted an incurable disease and over a period of months, grew
weaker and weaker, and finally died.
He was a private man with his emotions and I cannot know what he
went through. I remember talking to him many months after her death.
I asked him how things were going. He was quiet for a long time and he
said "I continue to exist but there are times when I wonder if I
will ever really live again."
Death is intrinsically sad but the death of profound love is
profoundly sad. You have to live a certain amount of time; you have to
deeply invest yourself before you can develop that kind of profound
love. Profound friendships are the same way. They are the roots that
give us the courage to branch out and grow in ways we could not have
imagined we would have. Losing them produces profound grief, the grief
that rocks you to your bones, that lays you out so tired you can't get
up, don't want to get up.
Integrity in the latter part of our lives requires that we develop
meaning that can take in loss, can take in frustration, can take in
real disappointment when other people have hurt us and things have not
turned out the way that we planned. Integrity requires a meaning that
can take in real tragedy and cope with it. Platitudes that we were
given as children will no longer do.
The stupid, well meaning advice of our friends will no longer do.
In the story of Job that Professor Mobley preached on last week, Job
has three friends that come to visit him in the middle of his tragedy.
They all give their well-intentioned advice on how he should handle his
tragedy, how Job should try to find the silver lining in the cloud, and
that everything has a purpose, and on and on. They are great speeches
because they are so filled with the same things people still say
today. At the end of the story, when God appears on the scene to
clarify the situation, God never really does clarify the situation, but
at least God does one thing. God says to Job's friends, you meant
well, but your platitudes won't do.
Pulpit platitudes won't do. Nice bible stories won't do. Even
other people's wisdom won't do. Integrity requires that we begin to
develop meaning
for ourselves
.
No question that wise people will draw on tradition. It is a good idea
to avail yourself of the some sources like scripture, great theologians
and thinkers from the past. But the point is that you have to have a
meaning
for you
.
You can no longer simply mouth the answers that some one else gave
you. You can no longer copy for the test. This is the real fullness
of living, and for better, for worse, you have to answer this one in
your own dialect, with your broken grammar, and your halting speech.
Aristotle once said that this period of life should be given over
to the contemplation of things eternal. He said that we should be
given leave of all that we have done up to this point. He was thinking
of the age of 50 in his mind. At 50, he said we should be able to drop
all our responsibilities to the community- all committees (you think we
have a lot, you wouldn't believe Ancient Greece). He was assuming that
all of your kids are grown at 50 and you should no longer have to
support the next generation. (What a great concept that is right
there!). You should even be free from your spouse.
His point is that we should be rid of all encumbrances, all
responsibilities that keep our focus on the mundane. We should be
given over for time to think about things eternal. I don't know about
you but if I had all that free time, I believe that I would fall
asleep.
We may amend the particulars but he is right about the direction.
The quest for integrity in this phase requires us to develop a
transcendent and coherent meaning for our lives. And very few of us
are able to do that before a certain age because we haven't lived
profoundly enough to have the quest for meaning posed for us from our
bones. He is right that it is fundamentally a spiritual quest. Rather
naturally, we start to recover some basic disciplines- like prayer,
meditation. We become reflective. We reassess how we spend our time
and whom we spend it with. And if we are lucky, we can be rid of a
great number of the responsibilities we have had to attend to and the
responsibilities that we are involved in, we are involved in because
this is how we are choosing to invest ourselves. And that is very
different.
Eric Eriksson says that if we accomplish integrity in our lives, we
become generative. What a great word... Generative... My
mother-in-law has a wonderful garden all around her home. She is a
great birder and has created habitat so that all kinds of birds come
around her home. She knows just what hummingbirds like, just which
bird will be attracted to these berries. She lives in North Carolina
and in the morning she is up doing her routine, watering all these
plants- coffee in one hand, watering can in another. She does a little
weeding, a little pruning, she mists the indoor plants, fertilizes over
there. Binoculars up, there is a good sighting. She just walks around
healing things.
That is not a bad spiritual goal either. If we are lucky, maybe we
too, can develop integrity and just walk around healing things all
around us.
Amen.
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