Chalice Lighting
#502, from Singing The Living Tradition, the Unitarian Universalist hymnal:
Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season.
It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year.
It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow.
Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime.
(W.E.B. Du Bois)
Prayer and Meditation
Baba Ram Dass, the author of Be Here Now, which was very influential on my early years of healing, wrote an essay entitled "How To Keep Your Perspective Along The Path". He wrote "Doing sadhana [spiritual practice] can be as much a trap as any other melodrama. It is useful to have some perspective upon the path in order to keep yourself from getting too caught up in the stage in which you are working." While there are 11 helpful pointers that he lists, for the sake of brevity I will emphasize three of them:
- At first you will think of your sadhana as a limited part of your life. In time, you will come to realize that everything you do is part of your sadhana.
- The initial euphoria that comes through the first awakening into even a little consciousness, except in a very few cases, will pass away... leaving a sense of loss, or feeling of falling-out of grace, or despair. The Dark Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross, deals with that state.
- Early in the journey you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is HERE and you will arrive NOW... so you stop asking.
Let us mediate on these words as we engage in a time of silence.
1st supplemental reading
From Getting Over Getting Older: An Intimate Journey by Letty Cottin Pogrebin:
Because it is so full of paradoxes and prone to distraction, nostalgia is best defined by what it is not: It is not homesickness, although it can derive from similar feelings of yearning. It is not a substitute for fulfillment, but rather an experience recalled for itself, and it is not pathological unless we overidealize the past or repress truthful memories. Rather than "a longing for something far away or long ago" (as one dictionary defines it), nostalgia is an acknowledgement of what that long ago something once meant to us, an exercise in appreciation, and an energizing, nourishing reconnection with who we were then.
Yet, some people fight it. "I'm always looking for antidotes to my in-born nostalgia," writes Daphne Merkin about being plagued by a string of losses of objects and people -- an erring, a scarf, a friend -- and annoyed that she misses them. Though moved by her account, I take a different view, having realized long ago that my losses are as much a part of me as anything I possess. All of us are the sum of our losses and our gains, but nostalgia lessens the losses by reminding us that nothing is all gone as long as it is remembered.
Many intellectuals assume that all nostalgia is mired in the swamps of middlebrow mushiness, or that being impervious to the past is a badge of sophistication. They put down personal nostalgia in the same breath as they disdain the latest theme park, suggesting that drawing pleasure from one's private memories is as morally corrupt as the mass marketing of a distorted American past. Underlying many of the nostalgia put-downs is the implication that we reminisce when memories are all that we have. In fact, what most of us do is use the past as a cache of clues to the times that made us what we are.
Surely there is nothing silly about cleaving to the mood and manners of another decade if we find strength or comfort there, or if drawing upon those memories helps to keep us whole.
2nd supplemental reading
From The End of Innocence: Facing Life Without Illusions by Sheldon Kopp:
In the face of repeated experiences of overwhelming helplessness and bewilderment, the child must find a way to make sense of a confused and confusing world. There may be little option but to escape into the reassuring world of personal fantasies made up of variations on the disconcertingly discredited family fairy tales.
The raw sense of total vulnerability must be shielded. To survive emotionally, there may be little else such a child can do at the time. But out of such a configuration, the child gradually develops a neurotic way of life that continues into adulthood. Pseudo-innocence requires wearing the blinders of denial. By making powerlessness into a seeming virtue, such a person acts as though God watches over the weak and the naïve. Preoccupation with the past involves pretending that, if childhood is never outgrown, one will always be watched over.
Residual weakness, helplessness, and dependence prevent people from ever feeling grown up. They remain embedded in nostalgic longing. It is not a matter of retaining childlike spontaneity, but rather of holding onto the childish insistence that someone else must take care of one so frail.
For others of us the dream of righteous vengeance maintains the image of heroic virtue as we await the time when we will be able to conquer all evil, to be recognized and appreciated at last. But it matters little whether the expectation of living happily ever after is sought through needless self-sorry suffering or hazardously reckless romantic adventures. Feigned humility and pretended bravado bring the same results. The real dangers of life are obscured, the opportunities for growth overlooked, and the rewards of taking care of oneself missed.
An older child may lean that what was first believed does not always turn out to be true. Still sometimes thing work out in a way that partially validates these early expectations. In growing up, such a child can retain a realistic measure of hope and trust. Modified by outside-the-family experiences of adolescence and early adulthood, the original innocent attitude can be developed into a more complex world-view without the person being stuck with a sense of having been tricked and misled.
Sermon
"On Aging: A Personal Perspective", by Donald B. Jeffries, Credentialed Minister, Men's Wellness Ministry, First Unitarian Church of St. Louis
Several weeks ago, John Knoll asked me to consider giving a sermon for the Summer Series. I had been planning to write an article for the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute Blog on 'aging', so I decided to accept his request, modify my ideas and give this sermon on that subject.
There are four parts to this sermon this morning which express four different 'themes' about the aging process. They are only loosely connected to one another, in the sense that they are all about how aging has affected my own perspective on life.
- The first portion is about my personal perception of aging, based on how my own life has unfolded.
- In the second portion are various observations about how our perception of the meaning of aging is dependent on the chronological point that we occupy on the path of life.
- The third portion will address some of the ways in which aging is affecting the leadership development and continuity in our congregation.
- And then I will conclude with some further personal perspectives on what it might mean to 'live a life with purpose' for the remaining years of my life on this planet.
Part 1: Personal Perception of Aging
Next month, I turn 65 years of age.
In a cultural sense, that age represents a significant 'turning point' in our lives, in that we become eligible for Medicare. Since we can start accepting Social Security at 62, some of us, including myself, started those payments earlier this year. Given the profound increase in the cost of medical services in America over the past couple of decades, and the minimal reimbursement provided by the insurance companies under the so-called Affordable Care Act, having access to Medicare, which pays a minimum of 80% of medical costs, is a great advantage. In fact, given the problems that arise for many Baby Boomers who have insufficient retirement savings, many of us have looked forward to becoming 65, so that we would have access to Medicare.
Ever since I was 25 years of age, I have looked forward to growing older. I was never a great fan of 'youth' -- my own childhood and young adulthood had largely been obliterated by coming from a dysfunctionally violent and sexually abusive family-of-origin -- and so I wanted to find a way to actually enjoy adulthood by escaping from the profound depression that that brutal upbringing had bestowed upon my emotional life. I had, additionally, by my mid-20s, decided conclusively that I had no desire, whatsoever, to have children, primarily because I did not want a continuation of the kind of painful childhood I had experienced. And I was fearful that, given the terrifying modeling of my own parents, there was the potential that I would replicate that behavior with any progeny that I co-produced.
On top of that, I had no significant desire to be married, again due to coming from a family where marriage had been seen as a 'rock around one's neck'. And, since I had no desire for marriage or a family of my own, by 25 I started, in a very focused way, to date women who were 5 to 15 years my senior, in the hope that they were less likely to either want or be able to have children, due to their relatively advanced age.
Added to that perception was the concurrent painful experience I had with women my own age: that being that 90% of them were -- in a quite rational strategy that is amply supported by American culture -- looking for a partner who made a greater income than they did, and many of whom were seeking, as well, partners who will willing to assist in producing and supporting a family. I personally had a very difficult time finding decent employment in the boom/bust economy of New Mexico, where I lived from the ages of 17-48, and too many of the women I dated, even before they had taken the time to get to know me, were already stating quite openly that they wanted to have a family. Between the two demands, economic and familial, I found myself quite lacking in the eyes of women of my own age cohort.
Hence, since my focus was on older women, I wanted to 'appear' to be older, so they would 'take me seriously'.
I'm not at all sure I succeeded, in that my emotional maturity had been profoundly stunted by the overt brutality that I experienced at the hands of my father during my teenage years, and the sexual abuse that I was subjected to by both of my parents, but it was, nonetheless, my desire. At the very least, though, many of the older women whom I dated seemed to enjoy their cougar status, by having a younger man in their lives, because I had specific energetic qualities that men their own age had begun to lose.
The older I became, the greater the age of the women I dated, so that difference in 'energy levels' was maintained. Hence, my focus upon older women further encouraged my own desire to appear and 'act' older. As I aged and grew first gray, then white, hair, I liked that very much.
On top of an often forlorn attempt to manifest a long-term emotionally and sexually stable intimate relationship (which, for all my efforts, I didn't actually attain until I was 56 -- after a lifetime of serial monogamy), I had become a hippie and, in a misguided effort to soothe the emotional pain, sank into extensive substance abuse during my years of attending college, graduate school, and early attempts at professional employment. The overt depression and disorientation that I experienced as an outcome of my terrifyingly dysfunctional childhood produced, in me, periodic bouts of suicidal thoughts, and a desperate struggle to feel a stable 'sense of self'. By the age of 32, I finally had successfully achieved sobriety, but continued to be wracked by intense feelings of disorientation and dissociation.
Hence, just staying alive with a minimal degree of happiness became quite a struggle. At each chronological juncture of decades, I was AMAZED to still be alive. Upon turning 50, after having earned a second graduate degree, this time in social work, from Washington University, I was simply STUNNED that I WAS still alive!
Here I am, now, at 64, turning 65 next month, and it turns out, to my delight, that I'm in amazingly good health for a guy my age (my doctor continually assures me he is equally impressed by my positive health outcomes). Hence, heretofore, 'aging', at least as a physical manifestation, has been generally good to me, or at least it became a positive experience after I had managed to heal from my overt depression and pervasive substance abuse. That's not to say that I don't, like most people as they grow older, have very real health challenges -- in my case, I suffer from continuous burning neuropathy in my legs, multiple chemical sensitivities to a wide range of materials and foods, serious edema from having had two embolisms in my left leg, and the continuing aftereffects of my childhood PTSD -- but it is also to note that I still 'look forward to' aging, in the sense that I enjoy 'getting older and still being alive' within the mutual loving intimacy with my female partner of 8 years.
Part 2: Various perceptions of 'aging' depending on where one is in their life journey
> 'Aging' has different meanings for people living in different time periods:
- For young children, aging is a somewhat amorphous event, in that they may not have lived long enough to feel themselves 'aging': they might see it as 'growing older', but 'age' isn't 'oldness'.
- For people in the early 20s, age might mean becoming mature and having the opportunity to establish their own households, separate from their parents, as well as the opportunity to create some kind of career path.
- For people in their 40s, 'aging' starts to make some degree of 'longevity sense', in that they have now lived long enough to notice some sort of pattern and experience their existence as a 'journey' and/or if they have had children, they notice their own 'aging' in comparison to their offspring.
- For people in their 60s, 'aging' starts to have a very real and perceptive quality, since their bodies are beginning to feel the aches and pains of 'growing older', and some of their friends and colleagues around them begin to get cancer or other diseases and die.
- For people in their 70s and 80s, they notice 'aging' because by now they have outlived many of their contemporaries, their bodies are experiencing major health issues, and if they had children, their children may likely have had children of their own, making the older adults grandmothers or grandfathers.
> Then there is the old observation, from the days when people read the newspaper more often than most do presently, that:
- When people are in their teens, they read the newspaper to find out places to go to experience fun activities with their friends.
- When people are in their 20s, they begin to read about their contemporaries having marriages, starting jobs, establishing careers, and, for some, forming families.
- When people are in their 30s, they are reading the newspaper concentrating on where they fit in the 'pecking order', and how others of their age are moving forward (or stagnating, or becoming unemployed) in their careers, and what kinds of schools are a good fit for their children.
- By their 40s, people read newspapers to check out stories about how families are faring in the economy, how younger adults are forming families or fighting wars, etc.
- By their 50s, people tend to start looking at stories about their contemporaries retiring from careers, and by their 60s, they start reading the obituaries to see who has begun to die 'relatively early'.
- By their 70s and 80s and later, reading the obituaries has become a sort of force of habit, since they are outliving many of the people they grew up with.
> There is also the 'perception' of age: people in America often want to 'be older' until they are around 25, at which point they start saying they 'want to be younger'. And when they turn 30, they consider it some sort of stunning upset, like they are already 'over the hill'.
> There have been a number of studies that looked at when 'happiness' reached its highest point in people's lives. We often assume that people are happiest when they are younger and become less so as they age. In contrast, many studies have shown that 'life satisfaction' follows a U-shaped pattern. People are indeed generally happy when they are younger, then happiness falls to its lowest point among those aged 45-54, before increasing again among those in older age groups.
> We have a society which is, hence, profoundly concerned about 'midlife crisis', and it is often assumed that occurs somewhere in the 45-54 age range. But, in fact, 'midlife' all depends on actuarial outcomes for any one individual. If you finally live to be 90 or 100, then 45-54 indeed was your 'midlife'. But if you die at 22, then midlife actually occurred at 10, or if you die at 45, then midlife really occurred, for that person, at 25. In fact, you might die in the midst of your 'midlife crisis', trying to 'act younger', thereby ensuring that while you thought you were going to live into an actuarial 'old age', you in fact expired far younger and your REAL midlife occurred in what most of the populace considers 'youth'.
> As a member of the Baby Boomer generation, I, like many of my contemporaries, have always had this 'sense of youth culture' from the days of our youth continuing into our retirement years. We still think of ourselves as being 'kids' who can still 'conquer the world' and transform culture with progressive ideas. We largely got away with that illusion due simply to there being a large number of us, given how many were born post-WWII. 'Aging' has, therefore, been something we could delude ourselves into believing was only for 'those older than ourselves', that we could 'live forever'. Of course, that IS truly a delusion, and we, as a generation, are finally coming to terms with our aging processes and the health-related issues associated with growing older.
Part 3: The effects of aging on leadership continuity in our congregation
'Aging' has a particular meaning for this congregation, in that, like many religious institutions throughout the nation, we have a large preponderance of WWII-era children and Baby Boomers who are growing older, but who are not being replaced, in equal numbers, by as many younger members, especially younger members with families.
For this congregation it particularly shows up in the leadership of the committees. Many of the older, more seasoned members are retiring, moving away, burning-out, becoming infirm, or dying, and are not being replaced in those leadership roles, at a sufficient rate, by younger members, resulting in there being both an increasing number of open committee chair positions and fewer members on each committee. This is, in part, a problem caused by the shrinking size of our congregation: we have 53 committees and only about 260 members.
On the other hand, there ARE definitely some younger members who are 'stepping up to the plate', and this is a positive development. It is important that we develop methods to educate new leaders with the assistance of the more veteran leaders -- in the manner of an apprenticeship program. One of the issues that often crops up in organizations is that the older, somewhat burned-out leaders, ask for younger members to come forward and actively participate, but those leaders fail to provide a system that allows for accessibility to those leadership roles.
It would, for instance, be enormously helpful if we were to develop the Policy Manual that has been in the planning stages for the past 4 years, wherein we can have written instructions and job descriptions, so that when a member joins the Church Council, Policy Board, or a church committee, the institutional wisdom developed by previous holders of the role can be 'passed forward' to the next candidate. By being focused on that manifestation of continuity, we will be in a better position to proactively handle the problems that arise, instead of resorting to the old -- and ineffective -- fallback of having to 'reinvent the wheel' each year.
Part 4: Living the balance of my life 'with purpose'
In conclusion, I want to address the issue about living a life with purpose.
For most of my adult life, I have gone through periods where I had a sense of purpose that motivated my actions as I struggled through my life journey. First it was schooling and student activism, then it was political campaigning -- at this point in my life, I have, since 1978, worked on 68 Democratic Party campaigns.
Then there was work on earning two graduate degrees; involvement with and devotion to Unitarian Universalism since 1987; serving on over 30 community boards of directors; active involvement in community organizing, activism and advocacy; and, since 1990, the men's wellness movement, which set the stage for the formation, in 2003, of my own fledgling nonprofit, the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute. And overall, since 1982, the primary focus of my life has been healing from the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that I have experienced since I was a child.
In 2002, I resigned from a professional position as the Statewide Program Director for the Missouri Partnership on Smoking or Health, and to my surprise and frustration, found myself in an economic quandary that resulted in my being perennially redundant thereafter. (I really love that British term 'redundant', meaning unemployed, because it means that there are too many job applicants, who have now become 'redundant' in the economy!) While I've been able to cobble together an adequate life due to a small inheritance, I haven't been able to acquire any professional employment since 2004, and therefore consider myself to have become inadvertently retired at that point in my life.
Then, last year, shortly before I was planning to travel back to New Mexico to visit friends and family, and attend the annual New Mexico Men's Wellness Conference, I found out that Shoshona Blankman, my very beloved former female therapist and friend, had died of cancer the previous spring. That simply sent me for a loop and I was thrown into an emotional state of profound grief. She had been my mental health therapist in Albuquerque for 15 of the most difficult years of my healing, and then had readily offered to continue being my 'cheerleader' when I had moved to St. Louis in 1998. I had had the expectation that we would be great friends for many, many years to come, into the advanced age of both of us.
Between her death and increasing allergies to multiple chemical sensitivities [MCS], my 'sense of purpose' has, for the past year, been thrown off balance in a significant way, and other than an overwhelming focus on healing from the fear generated by the MCS, I have often felt like I've largely run out of energy and willingness to continue the struggle for social justice and other political//advocacy issues that had motivated my life for 43 years.
The other thing that happened as a result of Shoshona's death was that the mortality of life suddenly came to me full force and in profound contrast. For a very long time, far longer than most of my chronological contemporaries, I had continued to believe that 'someday I was going to manifest a career', in contrast to the larger reality that 'manifesting a career' was rapidly becoming a forlorn potentiality, since I was moving into my late 50s and early 60s.
In other words, AGING in the sense of 'having actually grown older' suddenly caught up to me. And my 'sense of purpose', which has periodically been lost and then found again, is, for now, for the present, a bit off-kilter and 'lost'. That has been both disorienting and distressing, as well as opening the intuitive, meditative spaces in my life for new potentialities of which I've not yet become aware.
I continue to foster the Men's Wellness Ministry that I founded in our congregation last year. I have barely kept my nonprofit alive, over the past 13 years, primarily by the force of my own love for men's wellness -- since I've never found funding for it -- and continue to write periodic articles for the MMWI Blog. And, of late, I have been writing long commentaries, attached to my Facebook posing, about the current presidential race.
Hence, at this point in my own aging process I am once again struggling to contemplate how 'living a life with purpose' will manifest itself for the balance of my life on this planet and on this temporal plane of existence. It is unlikely to 'look like' the expansive world that was available to me when I was younger, and it will not likely, ever again, include professional employment.
Therefore, I conclude my sermon with a bit of existential frustration and angst. Having had a distinct sense, at many points, of what I needed to do next, I am presently 'at loose ends' trying to figure out 'what to do next in my life journey', other than the continuing work on healing from the profound abuse that I experienced as a child and learning how to cope with the severe setbacks to my current health, caused by the MCS, that continue to disrupt my daily existence.
I've always laughed that as we age, our bodies fall apart, but we also gain wisdom about how to cope with those infirmities. Maybe that simply means I've matured and come to full awareness about being an older human being.
Finally, in closing, I will mention that 13th 'helpful pointer' that Ram Dass noted in "How To Keep Your Perspective Along The Path":
What is happening to you is nothing less than death and rebirth. What is dying is the entire way in which you understood "who you are" and "how it all is". What is being reborn is the child of the Spirit for whom all things are new. This process of attending an ego that is dying at the same time as you are going through a birth process is awesome.
Absolutely awesome!
Benediction
From Getting Over Getting Older
Gabriel, the main character in James Joyce's The Dead, realizes that "we're all in the act of becoming the past." Clearly, human beings have a great capacity for self-delusion in the face of this truth. The attempt to banish the past from the present is, to coin a phrase, as waste of time, since today becomes yesterday tomorrow. Each day moves into the past as soon as we've lived it. The future is only a prayer.
