Young At Heart: Meaningful Aging
By Charles Rush
January 25, 2009
Lk. 2: 25-32
[ Audio
(mp3, 9.4Mb) ]
w Lord, you may let thy servant depart in peace.” Few of us get to see a moment of such fulfillment and clarity. But if you live your life right and history blesses you, it does occasionally happen. If you watched the inauguration, that is what was happening to Rev. Joseph Lowery giving the benediction. He started with the voting rights drive back in 1957, no money, no support, no celebrity- just years of work out of the spotlight.
Then, almost
beyond your imagination, you are saying a prayer over a young man that could be
your grandson. He said he prayed with his eyes open because he was looking
towards the Lincoln Memorial, wondering if M.L. King would appear. Just before
he stood up to pray, I wouldn't be surprised in the least if he repeated our
scripture this morning to himself. It is funny how your life blows by so fast
and some days you just know that you have finished your scene in the great
drama of our collective history.
But for all of
us, aging is a good deal more ambiguous than fulfillment alone. A lot of it on
a daily basis revolves around dealing with loss, the loss of ability, the loss
of health, the loss of memory. It is not a time of life for the faint of heart.
I got a call
the other day from my grandson Charlie. He had secretarial help. Charlie is
only one. The occasion of his call was his announcement of the appearance of
another tooth. Charlie is all male. He can barely walk but he is already
primarily concerned about control of the clicker and the cell phone. He
generally wakes up and ambles to the TV and his mother's purse to retrieve both
before breakfast which he carries around most of the morning. He loves to talk
on the phone, even though he can't talk yet. He just keeps punching the buttons
until I come on.
He is going on
and on, all excited about the upbeat tempo of his young growth. I'm on the
other end, just had a molar pulled. Charlie's tooth is growing in, my teeth are
wearing out. I notice more guys now in that predicament. You see them ‘practice
swinging' on the tennis court, a move that they used to be able to make pretty
well that just doesn't seem to be there anymore.
It is
depressing, not just for the athletic prowess that is flagging. My email box is
stuffed with ads, and all the TV shows that I watch have the same
advertisements- solutions to erectile dysfunction. Tell me I'm not in the
target audience. Joe, say it ain't so?
Last summer, I
finally passed over yet another family marker. My father was very ill, gravely
ill, and we got to that point that every family goes through when you call the
senior generation and find yourself somehow involved in a medical discussion
with intimate bathroom details that, spare me, you'd
rather not know about, certainly not in this graphic detail. It happens. It is
part of the great cycle of life, one that I still just as soon skip if at all
possible.
But, everyone
over 65 finds themselves in conversation with one of their friends, talking
about their health… And you are thinking to yourself, “I'm officially old when…
health itself becomes the first and easiest thing to get a conversation
started.” And so much of your happiness, certainly on the other side of 70,
revolves around health. It is no longer how old you are in years,
it is how healthy you are.
I don't know
what exactly God wants us to learn through this process of dissolution but it
is a physical and spiritual inevitability. Sic Transit Gloria. It is a fact.
How fleeting is our time of power and sensuality. We have them for only an all
too brief season.
Right now, a
whole lot of men that we all know are feeling this. Anyone over 45 that has
moved up through the ranks on Wall Street is looking over their shoulder. You
are too expensive, too vulnerable to replacement, and too old to re-invent
yourself in the environment where you are most comfortable.
Marcus Aurelius
wrote about this very phenomenon and he was lucky to ride his career out, way
past its due. After many, many years as a successful general, he was made
Emperor of the Roman empire. He lived through all of
the political pomp or the Roman empire, the lavish,
excessive wine, women, and decadent food that made up the Roman way. The parties, the power dinners, all of it. He was surrounded
by it most of his adult career, and he was exposed to a lot more of it than
most of us will ever come close to.
He would write
about it. He left a journal behind. He wrote in the morning, some personal time
that he carved out for himself to reflect, to remember what was important- what
would last, what would not. And that was the theme that he came back to over
and over again. Sic Transit Gloria. It comes and goes very fast. To the end, he
never entirely lost that perspective of a foot soldier.
All these beautiful material dwellings that I have. Soon
enough they will go to someone else. This handsome physique, soon it will fade.
My ability to pick up the phone and command- all the
responsibility. None of it lasts. You, however, will.
I share with
you, exhibit A, from a delightful film entitled “Forever Young”. Only at Christ
Church can you see a woman singing “Should I stay or should I go” by the
British punk group Crash. And it is sung by a stripper. Parents, don't be
alarmed, she isn't stripping during this version but a stripper nevertheless. Roll the film Tom.
1
Still looking
pretty good at 92 don't you think? And you have to love the spirit. More on that in a minute.
But first, the bad news on spiritual development along the
life-cycle. Sic Transit Gloria. In her day, she might have been the hottest
package in all of South London during the 30's for all I know, but you couldn't
pick out the chemist from the disco queen in this crowd. Such is cruel
indifference of our physical decline.
And
spiritually, it raises an important question for each of us personally. Who are
you anyway? Almost every day, you look at that visage in the mirror. It keeps
changing and so do you but your essential self doesn't change in the same way
or at the same rate as your physical self.
Who would you
be if you awoke to find yourself covered with some ailment so that your fine
and sexy self was suddenly fundamentally… blah, uninteresting? What would that
do to your sense of self?
What if you
awoke to find yourself so attractive that people could not take their eyes off
of you when you walked in the room? What would you be like then?
Who are you? We
go through all these stages in our lives: we are students, girlfriends,
athletes, yuppies, parents, community leaders, providers, grandparents, role
models, survivors of life-threatening disease (or disasters), widows, sufferers
of debilitating limitations from accidents.
Every season
has a new set of expectations that people project on to you. Every role people
project onto you the virtues that they want you to have for that season and
that role… You can play these roles in your sleep. You play them well. In a
certain sense, they are you. But… you know they are not you entirely either?
You are outside that box and you know it!
Who are you?
Spiritually speaking, that is a large part of the quest in the last third of
your life. It is not a quest for information. This is a quest of coming to
terms with yourself. Who are you? What are you put on
this earth for? What is your life about?
Jesus taught us
that we are, fundamentally, children of God. You hear that differently in the
different phases of life: it is one thing for children- optimistic and
inclusive; another for adults- a beacon of reorientation in the midst of so
many different hats to wear. And another, in old age, when
your identities from earlier phases substantively fade, and the question
becomes an internal exploration, when you are not propped up by these earlier
identities.
Much of this
work is internal and we put it off as long as we can. Internal work is not
easy. You can't cheat for that exam and most of us are inept to barely able to
perform in this area. It is lonely and that is one of the reasons that it is
not easy. Most of us spend an incredible amount of time and energy hiding us
from ourselves. We don't want to be alone with just ourselves. It is boring. It
makes us anxious.
We don't want
to go near that space subconsciously. It has the warning signals near the
entrance. Ultimately, we are afraid of it because subconsciously we know that
losing all of our attachments to the world around us, to the people around us,
is what will happen just before we die. We don't want to go near that boundary.
But the life cycle just keeps pushing us in that direction.
I have real
difficulty being alone, so now I build it into my year, in some crazy way that
is safe for me to try. I make a way to be alone for a couple days and I walk
most of the day and I end up at some very scenic place with either crashing
surf or dead silence. And I stay in that place. You don't think but thoughts
bubble to the surface from your subconscious. You just stay in the moment. A
couple times I've had that experience of aloneness that is almost overwhelming.
And for me, an important part of the experience is sad, very sad.
It is the
exploration of who you are- really, essentially. Lots of people have traveled
this path before us and they have told us about the value of meditation for
processing this internal work. There is this huge literature in every major
spiritual tradition on the subject. All of us have discovered that it is not
possible to avoid this quest all together. Indeed, once you embrace it, you
start to change yourself and it is not so threatening. That is the hard work.
And that is the direction that the life cycle bends towards left to itself,
more solitude…
Of course, the
last chapter and a half is not all gloomy, nor should it be. You have to love
this 92 year old singing Crash. How refreshing. How creative. The documentary
is wonderful because it illustrates two of the facets that develop meaningful
fulfillment in the last chapter of the life-cycle.
Here, I defer
to the expert in the field, the late psychoanalyst, Erik Erickson. Erickson
suggested that on the pscychoanalytical level, hardly
any different than the spiritual level, the fundamental issue for people that
are fortunate to live beyond 75 is that that of generativity.
We need to plant things that will outlive us. We need to invest ourselves in
something beyond ourselves, something bigger that the next generation will be
able to complete or to carry on.
In order to do
that, we need to connect with the younger generation. This is the intrinsic
power of that Grandparents and Great Grandparents have
who are intimately involved two, three generations down the line. There is a
tremendous spiritual gravitas to this role and it can be so important in stabilizing
the family and providing for emotional and spiritual growth.
What was so
creative about the singing group in this documentary is the way that they broke
out of the box of ‘old age' to relate to the next generation on terms the next
generation could appreciate and want to be involved with.
And, they fell
on the avenue, somewhat accidentally. They started out singing songs from their
generation, things that they liked. It was a fine chorus. Until one night, they
performed a rock song, something like a Jimi Hendrix
piece, and the audience went wild. They tried James Brown, ventured into soul,
then acid rock, then punk- none of the music were they
familiar with. They grew, the audiences loved it to
the point that they started touring internationally. Now their passion found a
vehicle they could use to pass that passion on to the next generation.
Every one
beyond the age of forty-five/ fifty should ask themselves a question every
year, ‘What am I doing to connect to the younger generation?' Who am I
investing in that will be able to take some of the things that I am passionate
about and will be able to grow with them? How good was I at broadening my
network of potential spiritual mentors? Jesus taught us, ‘What
does it profit you if you gain the whole world (or everything that the world
has to offer) and lose your soul (have all of this passion and insight come to
an end with you because you didn't share it positively)?
It is not easy.
But if you are able to stay involved your own sense of personal blessing grows
even as you are blessing the next generation.
The second
piece is simply accessing your passion in community. It is fundamental for all
phases of life. Jesus taught us, “The Kingdom of God is like a wedding feast”
where we are all gathered in celebration. Jesus taught us, “Love one another”.
This is the quest to access the spiritually creative part of ourselves.
When we are in
our careers, this creative quest is hampered by being so busy, by staying tied
to the ‘to do' list. When we are in the very last chapter, this creative quest
is hampered by declining health. Again, spiritually speaking, it is not simple
or easy to cultivate a life of creativity, love, and community. But it keeps us
vital. It keeps us humane, wonderfully touching.
Indeed, there
is something poignant about that last phase that makes all of the simple acts
of kindness and love precious, simply because they are done against the backdrop
of the immediate awareness that we could die, that life is not forever, that we
need to actualize what is in us right now, this day, in this place.
I called my
Mother-in-Law recently, aged 83, asked her how she is doing?
She said, “I'm in that phase of life where I attend too many funerals.” If we
are lucky to live long enough, this will happen to us.
In the
documentary, this is a regular challenge for the chorus. They have to practice
for weeks, go on tour, never really sure who will actually make it or not.
Almost all of the members of the chorus comment on the phenomenon at some
point, each partly reflecting on the inevitable fact that they too will one day
die and so they are able to talk about it in talking about what they would want
the rest of the chorus to do in the event of their own death. The unanimous
sentiment, while stopping to honor the deceased, is that the show must go on.
At points in
many of the songs that they sing, the lyrics sound differently coming out of
the mouths of our most senior elders. This subject is no exception. It is a
reminder of the poignant humanity and compassion that our elders can
communicate to the rest of us and the substantial spiritual authority that they
can have.
I want to close
on one more clip. The group does a warm up concert for their big tour at a
local prison. It was scheduled weeks in advance. Just before the concert, they
get news that one of their soloists for the concert has died the previous
night. The group shares a personal 40 minutes before the
show.
They open like
usual. The prisoners are delighted and dance along. Then they decide to do a
tribute to their friend, their soloist, who died the previous night. And they
pick out a song, very familiar from the 70's. It is a Bob Dylan tune, ‘Forever
Young'.
For us
Christians, it is not simply that we are ‘forever youthful', but we are
‘forever alive in the sense of being ‘forever compassionate', ‘forever humane',
‘forever expressing love.' Tom, roll it.
1
A trailer for the film “Forever Young” can be viewed here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjnfoFg7i7g&feature=related.
The singers are The Young @ Heart Chorus:
www.youngatheartchorus.com.
A news documentary can be viewed here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwvz5G9zAXg.]
© 2009
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved.
