by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given February 25, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Some years ago—I was about 30 years old—I was sitting having a conversation with a friend. I can’t remember what we were talking about but my friend made passing reference to my bald spot. I was surprised at this statement and this surprise registered on my face. After a pause, I asked, “What bald spot?” My friend all of a sudden realized that she had stepped into something. At that point in my life I was not aware that I had a bald spot. I didn’t have the opportunity to look at the back of my head as often as my friend. I will never forget that look on my friend’s face.

The awareness that we are all aging comes to us in subtle and not-so-subtle ways most every day. It may come in the form of surprise—like in that moment when you are asked if you want the senior discount. Maybe such questions come sooner than you expect they should. It may come with the awareness that we can’t do something the way we used to or the way some little ache or pain just seems to take a lot longer to heal up. It may come in seeing someone who is younger than you grow up and that awareness that if they are older, you must be older too.

Getting older, we know, is part of life. It really is true that our own sense of old is probably somebody who is 15 or 20 years older than we are. But we also know that there are all kinds of reasons to deny its progression. After all, on some level it reminds us that the aging process, at some point, comes to an end. And that reality, called death, is something that we want to put off for as long as possible.

And then there are the messages we get from our culture. Youth is certainly valued over getting older. When was the last time you heard that a television show was aimed at the 50-plus demographic? The message we receive is that our focus should be in staving off aging as long as possible. When the Academy Awards are on tonight the images will focus on looking as youthful as possible on that famous red carpet. In this week’s New Yorker magazine there’s a cartoon showing a woman at the podium accepting an award. There she is clutching her statuette. She has a kind of blank look on her face. The tag line reads: “If it weren’t for Botox, right now I’d be so sharing your enthusiasm.”[1]

The tricky thing is that sometimes all those things that keep aging at bay may also keep us from being in the world in the way we should be. This month’s magazine of the AARP talks about how women can care for their skin as they age. How the problems of aging can be addressed. With the right crèmes and moisturizers we can look a whole lot younger.

It is important to care for our skin and to eat well and to do all kinds of things to keep ourselves in good shape. But there is also a downside. If aging is a battle to be fought day after day eventually we’re going to lose that battle. And living in denial is not going to get us anywhere.

A Chinese story tells of a man who is too weak to work in the garden or help with the household chores. He just sits on the porch, gazing out across the fields, while his son tills the soil and pulls up weeds. One day, the son looks up at the old man and thinks, “What good is he now that he’s so old? All he does is eat up the food! I have a wife and children to think about. It’s time for him to be done with life!”

So the son makes a large wooden box, places it on a wheelbarrow, rolls it up to the porch, and says to the old man, “Father, get in.” The father lies down in the box and the son puts the cover on, then wheels his father toward the cliff. At the edge of the cliff, the son hears a knock from inside the box. “Yes, father?” the son asks. The father replies, “Why don’t you just throw me off the cliff and save the box? Your children are going to need it one day.”

So denial is not the answer. But how are we to move through life from one day to the next—from one year to the next?

The writer Ram Dass asks us to see ourselves always as part of life’s continuity, which is in contrast to most of the messages we receive. “Whether we’re currently young or old, we will continue to view aging as something apart from the mainstream of culture, and the old as somehow other. In a nontraditional culture such as ours, dominated by technology, we value information far more than wisdom. But there is a difference between the two. Information involves the acquisition, organization and dissemination of facts; a storing-up of physical data. But wisdom involves another equally crucial function: the emptying and quieting of the mind, the application of the heart, and the alchemy of reason and feeling. In the wisdom mode we’re not processing information, analytically or sequentially. We’re standing back and viewing the whole, discerning what matters and what does not, weighing the meaning and depth of things. This quality of wisdom is rare in our culture.”

Part of that awareness is the awareness that aging does bring limitations. And it is important to not deny that. This might be the part that writer May Sarton was talking about when she said: “Nobody told me you had to be so courageous to be old.”

She wrote in her book At Eighty Two: A Journal: “This extraordinary weather goes on. I have not been able to talk into this machine much lately because I have been in so much pain, again with that feeling of desperation. I do not know what to do with myself. But yesterday and today things were a little better.

“The thing with pain is that you must go ahead and do what you want to do even when it hurts. That’s how I managed to garden yesterday. Of course the satisfaction then outweighs the pain. Today I’m planning to put in three miserable looking iris that I ordered.”

Sarton in her writing does not try to dress it up and act as if the pain is not there. What she does is to simply be with the pain and also with the things that bring her joy. And from this comes a sense of reality, that she is living life in a kind of balance. It is not all good and not all bad, but simply what is.

Too often we think that if we avoid the pain we can make it go away, but it may be that in taking that approach we actually make it worse. It is important to see ourselves, no matter our age, as always growing and changing—not to always have and do more, but to be present with where we are in life. Part of our task is to be open to understanding what that means for us at any given time.

Sherwin Nuland is a physician and he has a new book called The Art of Aging: A Doctor's Prescription for Well-Being. He writes that we all need to recognize that one day we will die and that in that process we should not only watch our horizons come closer but allow them to do precisely that. He writes: “If we are wise, we draw (our horizons) in until their limits can be seen; we confine them to the possible. And so, the coming closer can be good, if by means of that closeness—that limiting of expectations—we begin to see those vistas more clearly, more realistically, and as more finite than ever before. For aging can be the gift that establishes the boundaries of our lives, which previously knew far fewer confines and brooked far fewer restrictions. Everything within those boundaries becomes thus more precious than it was before: love, learning, family, work, health, and even the lessened time itself. We cherish them more, as the urgency increases to use them well.”[2]

With aging can come wisdom and the ability to use our gifts in new ways. A few weeks ago I heard an interview with Clint Eastwood, who is now well into his 70s. His movie Letters from Iwo Jima is up for an Academy Award tonight. The interviewer asked him about how his views of violence—or how it was portrayed—over the years might have changed. She pointed out that early in his career violence almost seemed to be glorified. It was violence for the sake of violence. But in his films in the last few years seem to question violence a great deal more.

Eastwood said that he saw this shift as a natural maturing of life. “At some point you start to look at things a little differently. Even though I’m at senior status I consider myself a person who is always growing up. You’re always changing or always thinking of things from a different perspective. And you’re looking for stories that think of things from a different perspective.” He used the examples of his current films about World War II and asked what impact war and violence had on the souls of the young men who were impressionable and had to go off and to be involved in such violence.[3] In asking that soul question, the violence is put into a different context.

We are asked, over and over again, to see ourselves in relation to the world around us. We are asked to make meaning of life and to be in relationship to life. Within the boundaries of aging can come a kind of freedom. We have the opportunity to try on a new role or to let go of a role that no longer suits us. For some this is scary; for others it is liberating. We can come to see the later chapters as times when new things are possible, things that were not possible before. With this comes an opportunity to come into our wisdom.

Ram Dass has described the later chapters of life as the “don’t know phase of learning.” It is when we can be uncertain and be okay with that, because we have lived life enough to know that it will be fine if we don’t have the answers. It is when we are not constrained in ways we have been in previous chapters of life and may have some opportunities to experiment about how we want to do things. And with this can come a great freedom. We can feel freer to make mistakes, to follow our hunches. We can experiment or we can simply choose to do nothing at all.

A story. Two elderly ladies had been friends for many decades. Over the years, they had shared all kinds of activities and adventures. Lately, their activities had been limited to meeting a few times a week to play cards. One day, they were playing cards when one looked at the other and said, “Now don’t get mad at me ... I know we’ve been friends for a long time, but I just can’t think of your name! I’ve thought and thought, but I can’t remember it. Please tell me what your name is.” Her friend glared at her…she did this for several minutes. Finally she said, “How soon do you need to know?”

Hopefully, no matter our age, we never lose the ability to laugh—at ourselves or at the circumstances we find ourselves in. Aging well is a matter of growing into our wisdom and discerning how it is we can bring our wisdom into the world. We don’t just get old one day, we grow older day by day and see the past and the future in an ever-changing relationship.

It is a matter of making good use of memory but not allowing ourselves to live only in memory. It is a matter of knowing and understanding the lived experiences we have been a part of and taking them into the understanding we make of the future. And as we have the potential to live longer and longer, cultivating this wisdom will become more and more important. We will be asked to have the wisdom to know what it means to have quality in life and what we want that life to look like.

Clinton Lee Scott was a Universalist minister who lived to be 98 years old. He wrote these words at the age of 83:

I walk upon the beach … my beach!
Mine:
the white granular sand,
the tumbling wind-chased waves,
the unclouded sky,
the wheeling white-robed gulls.
I possess and am possessed by all
I see, and hear, and feel.
Broad-bosomed matrons, pot-bellied men
wading in the water’s edge
or plunging into furrows of the tide,
Children building their fragile castles
on the shore.
Loving couples walking hand in hand
or lying close together on the sand …
All these, and more, are mine,
in some way that is real.
And though they may not know it yet,
I belong to them.[4]

Throughout our lives, we need to be reminded that we are part of all creation. One chapter of life leads to another, and to another and to another. Yes, there are the aches and pains of life. Yes, there is the brokenness that is with us. But all of that is life. Through it all we are held together in a love that is so much greater than ourselves. Through it all we are embraced and hopefully know that we belong.

Prayer

Spirit of life, open us to the wisdom we carry within us, in each day of our lives may we grow and find new meaning for this one wild and precious life we have been given. Call us to live fully all of our days. May we bring the wisdom we have to help and guide the generations that will follow us. Amen.

Benediction

As long as you have breath, may you sing your song, and always find a way to yes. Go in love and go in peace this day. Amen.

Copyright 2007, Thomas Disrud. All rights reserved.