I was driving from Michigan to Indiana last December; it was cold and very snowy and, to pass the time while I drove, I started planning sermon topics for this summer. The weather and driving conditions being what they were I was coming up with a lot of sermon ideas on serious ideas. I decided some joyful themes were called for and so I determined to speak about aging.
I didn't always think of aging as a topic or a reality of life as joyful. I grew up in an aging family. My mother, thirty-two when I was born, was the only child of one of the younger of my great grandparents' eight children. Grandma and all her siblings were born in the 1880s and 1890s and I attended a fair number of funerals as a kid.
Those great aunts and uncles and their spouses who were living were retired, and while they were out and about in their lives, I mostly saw them at home, sitting in rocking chairs and reading the local news. Some had serious medical problems while others were reasonably healthy. Overall, they fit every stereotype of aging that I knew growing up. My grandmother tatted and cooked and cleaned and asked me every day how my bowels were moving! Grandpa gathered the eggs, milked the cows, drove the tractor and rocked. He did not ask me about my bowels, for which I am eternally grateful. Their lives were quiet. Sunday Lutherans, and outside civic duty other than voting, I thought their lives were what old age was and that it began at age 50, or maybe before.
I am now fifty and I am not old, but I am older. I am middle-aged, and my version of what being middle-aged, and much older, is much different than my childhood and young adult experiences and biases. I had never thought about becoming a middle-aged woman. I experienced my youth and I could imagine old age - not well or accurately - but I imagined it. But middle age was invisible and non-existent to me. But here I am, in the midst of it.
"For Better or For Worse" comic strip is one of my favorites as I think Lynn Johnston really gets it about life. In one strip Elly and John are walking on a brisk, snowy day and Elly says, "I guess we have to accept the fact that our bodies are changing, John. We have to be more careful now." John replies, "I hate the words 'middle-aged'. I don't FEEL middle-aged. I'm exactly the same person I was when I was 30!" "No you're not!" shoots back Elly. "You're more mature, more confident, more experienced-you're better...we're both better." Walking on, John answers. "We are the only products that tend to improve while the packaging deteriorates."
Now that is a mouthful of insight. In a culture that values packaging above nearly everything else, the idea that the product might improve, despite the state of the packaging, is difficult for many Americans to get their minds around. And if I do say so myself, Elly is right in that wonderful comic strip. I do feel like I'm "more mature, more confident, more experienced" - in short, better now than I was at 30. And I would not want to go back. Now is fine. And many of my friends who are twenty and thirty years older than I am at 50, feel much the same. They are, in fact, better in many ways. Dancing in the Fountain of Age is not an oxymoronic sermon title. It is how many of us who are growing older are experiencing the inevitability of our aging.
A piece called "inspiration," written by an unknown author, and copied from the newspaper by one of the participants in my Autumn Wisdom Adult Ed class this past year, states, "Whether 16 or 70, there exists in the heart of every person who loves life the thrill of a new challenge, the insatiable appetite for what is coming next. You are as young as your faith and as old as your doubts. So long as your heart receives from your head messages that reflect beauty, courage, joy and excitement, you are young. When your thinking becomes clouded with pessimism and prevents you from taking risks, then you are old - and may God have mercy on your soul."
That resonates with me. My appetite for risk and new challenge is definitely high. I started my seminary studies at the age of 45, was fifty when I graduated and will not be settled in a congregation until I am nearly 52; but I am not disappointed or thinking I should have started earlier or not at all. I'm actually fourth oldest in my entering class at Meadville/Lombard. The oldest will soon be 58, and she is dancing in the fountain of her own excitement to be entering the fullness of her prison ministry.
And the fountain of age doesn't stop at 50 or 60, either. Sophia Lyon Fahs, great guru of Unitarian religious education beginning in the 1930s, was ordained at about the age of 80, with Sophie giving her own ordination sermon, because who else could give it justice. She didn't live forever; Sophie Fahs died when she was about 103, but while she was living - she LIVED. SHE DANCED. And so may we all.
So what is aging? Our culture has written of age as a time of regret that earlier we hadn't made more mistakes, hadn't relaxed and limbered up more, hadn't taken more chances and swam in more rivers, eating more ice cream and less beans. That if we "had to do it again [we] would pick more daisies." What does aging mean and how does it affect us? Is it ONLY a time of regrets?
Someone once said that "Everyone is too old for something, but no one is too old for everything." YES - The potential for ever learning more as we age comes through in Ralph Waldo Emerson's words, "The years teach much which the days never know." Michel de Montaigne speaks to us of the significance of meaning in our aging, when he says, "As life grows briefer, I must make it grow deeper." And Jewish theologian Martin Buber reminds us, "To be old is a glorious thing when one has not un-learned what it means to begin. "
At the end of old age comes death and this we all know. In our old age some of us do and will live in pain and difficulty. But this pain and the inevitable death are not alone what our lives are about, no matter our age. Kahlil Gibran writes, repeating the words of Almitra explaining death: "You would know the secret of death/But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?/The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light./If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life/For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one."
Indeed we seek everything we might know "in the heart of life" in its complexities and its struggles. Our own First Unitarian member, Marge Northrup understands both when she writes: "I am an old lady. I'm over eighty!/I'm not to be seen and never heard/But one thing I know and its mighty weight./Is that I'm free -- as free as a bird!/There's arthritis, bursitis, and celiac sprue./About these ills there's not much I can do./But I think and feel and do as I please./I'll be outrageous and hell won't freeze."
In our aging, new possibilities, new challenges, new calls can just as easily open up. Every age is an age to act up and act out. Poet Marilyn Zuckerman wrote in a poem called "After Sixty.": Now there is time to tell the story,/Time to invent the new one--/To chain myself to a fence outside the missile base,/To throw my body before a truck loaded with phallic images,/To write Thou Shalt not Kill on the hull of a Trident submarine,/To pour my own blood on the walls of the Pentagon,/To walk a thousand miles with a begging bowl in my hand./there are places on this planet where women past menopause (AND men)/put on tribal robes, Smoke pipes of wisdom/--fly."
Seventy something year old UU Minister, Nick Cardell was released from prison last summer after serving six months for his own protest at the School of the Americas.
Maggie Kuhn who organized the Gray Panther movement now some thirty years ago, saw through the illusion that age is only giving up and regrets, and abandonment by society. Maggie Kuhn lived her life in strength and energy. More than that, I believe that she understood Marilyn Zukerman's words that in our aging we are called to risk ourselves and put on our tribal robes and smoke pipes of wisdom - smoke those pipes even into the faces of the powerful as needed! Stir up society's distorted ideas of aging and get on with some new visions!
Friday's (July 7, 2000) Democrat and Chronicle indicated that the average age in the U.S. in 1900 was in the early 20s and that in 1999 the average age was in the mid 30's. The baby boom bulge is moving through, and aging and the fountain of age is going to get full. If we don't do some work, NOW, to open up the fountain and get ready for the bulge to come, by providing better opportunities, services and care for our aging population right now, the fountain may be so full in 20 years there will be little room to dance.
Good as we are in recognizing the relationships among joy, justice and healthy spiritual life, this area of thought and action regarding our aging is a place for our unique UU perspective and participation to be called to business because American society still doesn't understand it. A comic strip called Pickles in April showed two men sitting on a park bench. One asks the other if he knows what the best part of getting old might be. The other doesn't know and thinks his friend who first asked the questions might have the answer. But his answer is, "I have no idea. I was hoping you could tell me."
Our First Unitarian Health Care Task Force is one good effort to provide advocacy for the aging; volunteerism with FISH is another. And that we gave significant monetary to support to SEM this year will assist the aged poor in Rochester. Let us continue to keep our eyes open and our hands ready to serve, reflecting and seeing what lies before us, our hands and minds ready to make change and serve all of us, so as we age, all of us can dance and love and live our lives as long as we can.
I loved my grandparents and my great aunts and uncles. They did not show me a vision of growing older that I wish to model but they did show me how to work and to love and hold on to life and family. For that I am grateful. I'll take that and add my own two cents every day that I grow older.
AMEN
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