Sermon: Growing Old with Grace

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Growing Old with Grace

By Charles Rush

April 11, 2010

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 to say nothing at all.” And with that he sat down… What a truly frightening eulogy.

The psychoanalyst Erich Erikson 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 a 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 her. 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 Japenese 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 they wanted to invest in that for the future so that others might have the benefit of the same grace they experienced.

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 encumberances, 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 who 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 Erikson 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.