Young At Heart: Meaningful Aging
By Charles Rush
August 4, 2013
Lk. 2: 25-32
[ Audio
(mp3, 6.0Mb) ]
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 granddaughter Lily. Se had
secretarial,Helvetica help. Lily is only one. The occasion of his call was her
announcement of the appearance of another tooth.
Lily is all girl. She can barely walk but she is already primarily concerned
about communicating. She wakes up and ambles to her mother's purse to retrieve her
phone which she carries around most of the morning. Se
loves to talk on the phone, even though she can't talk yet. She just keeps
punching the buttons until I come on.
She is going on
and on, all excited about the upbeat tempo of her young growth. I'm on the
other end, just had a molar pulled. Lily'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.
Occasionally, I
find myself staring in the bathroom mirror, looking at this old guy wondering, 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.
And when we are
young, we are very good at diverting our attention. But if we are lucky enough
to live to middle age, we eventually get a test run with the passing of the
previous generation. I've come to appreciate all of the rituals that we have
around death, not just the funerals, but filing the legal paperwork, settling
the estate, parsing out heirlooms, it is all part of the process of reflecting
on the previous generation, how they blessed you, how they were unable to bless
you, things to hold onto, things to discard.
After my father
died, we had to put my mother in a nursing home for her Alzheimer's, we sold
the house, and it was left to me to have a yard sale and take the rest to the
dump. It was a couple days opening trunks to find photographs of my great
grandmother kissing me with her soft, wrinkled skin, she
96 and me 4. I found a manuscript that my mother wrote about the 70's and her
rebellious children and in the end ‘she runs off with another man'. Interesting
twist and more colorful than I realized, I'm sure.
I was really
astonished at how much stuff we Americans have and I was equally astonished at
how little of it was really personal in our family. I kept an expensive watch
from my grandfather and a couple other things, but the vast majority I gave
away or hauled to the dump. The hour finally came when the last pile was swept
up. I walked around the empty house room to room. I locked the front door and I
stood out on the street for a moment, just reflecting on that generation, for
better and worse.
I stood there
in a moment of existential weight that I could no longer avoid, aided by the
tiredness and the visceral process of sweeping up, who am I now that they are
all gone and who am I supposed to become in the few short years I have?
When I was
younger, I had 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.
That is why 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…
Once you
embrace the inner quest, you start to realize that the last third of your life
is not all gloomy. In some ways it is your most interesting time of life.
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. I noticed how very
natural it is to move in that direction as I reflected on the passing of the
previous generation, I turned in the next moment to reflecting on the rising
generation.
This is the
intrinsic spiritual 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.
And isn't it
wonderful when you see people break 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.
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 people that
I can spiritually mentor? 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 last chapters of our lives, 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 87, 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 “Young At Heart” a group of very clever 80 year olds connect with
the younger generation through a choir that they all belong to. Only this choir
sings young people's music like “I want to be Sedated” by the Ramones and
‘Should I Stay or Should I Go' by Crash. They are a big hit and travel the
world.
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
with one of their clips. 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 moment just 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.' Paul,
roll it
[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ouyC24IFlo ].
