William Shakespeare put eloquent words in the mouth of the banished duke in his play As You Like It: "Sweet are the uses of adversity, which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head: And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything."[1]
There are sermons in stone - and - interestingly enough - on the sports pages of our daily paper. And so as we swing into the National Football League playoffs, this late December item: "All the bad weather last weekend reminded former Buffalo Bills football coach Marv Levy of the 1990 American Football Conference Championship Game in which the Bills defeated the Los Angeles Raiders, 51-3. "The temperature was freezing," Levy said. "The wind was awful. Now, one of my consistent messages to my players was, 'Where else would you rather be?' So in the locker room just before the game, (line-backer) Shane Conlan says to me, 'Where else would I rather be? Don't make me answer that.'"[2]
Where else would you rather be? In some other climate, with some other people, with some other preacher? Don't answer that, please. Or, perhaps as we celebrate our annual Service of the Living Tradition, we think about our place on the wheel of life. Poet W. H. Auden once said that we subjectively think of ourselves as at a certain age - 35 in my case. Then we are brought to reality by objective truth. I am a 64-year-old man. Is there any other age I would rather be?
It is exactly a year since my back surgery, and that event has given me pause: I realize as never before how vulnerable we are as human beings. And I, the once-upon-a-time football player, realize how subject I am to the vicissitudes of the aging process. It is somewhere after 50 that one realizes the universal death sentence does not make exceptions to the rule.
I have had my share of reminders about the inexorability of aging - senior moments are sometimes laughing matters - sometimes not. Helena Chapin, our Education Minister, and I were returning from a St. Lawrence District meeting a few years ago when we stopped at Wendy's to eat. She placed her order and waited. I asked for a cup of hot chocolate. The young waitress, obviously confused, asked me, "Will this be a 'senior drink'?" "What do you mean?" I asked innocently, until the truth dawned on me as Helena howled with laughter. Pennies or pride? I took my discount.
It occurs to me that in failing to admit what is quite naturally occurring in me, I play into the cultural bias against aging and toward youth. As I perused the offerings in my latest Quality Paperback Book Club magazine, for example, I noted one selection which demonstrated that bias: Gary Null's Ultimate Anti-Aging Program, "a practical look at how and why we age; (it) tells us how we can stall the aging process."
"How we can stall the aging process"? Come now, that's a bit of wishful thinking, isn't it? We can seek to maintain our health, our vitality, our intellect, our spirits as we age, but we cannot stop aging. As writer William Maxwell put it, "Getting older. I wouldn't have missed it for anything!"[3] Nor would I. Funny thing, aging is not just what old people do - we all do it all the time. It's just that older people may notice it more.
It's not that I wish to recite Robert Browning's sentimental words: "Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be." I have been to too many nursing homes to close my eyes to some of the harsher realities of aging for many. As Sophia, a 93-year-old woman described in Mary Pipher's book on aging, Another Country, queried: ""Who wouldn't be depressed, living with adults who wear diapers or who discuss cremation at the dinner table?"[4] No, I don't want to romanticize old age, but I do want to place it in its proper perspective. The French writer Alexander Dumas was once asked by an admirer, "How do you grow old so gracefully?" His classic comeback was: "Madame, I give all my time to it."[5]
Time - time is both enemy and friend. It is enemy because there is so little of it. Who told us that life would fly by at such an electrifying speed? Who warned us to pay attention to each and every day because there are so few of them? But time is also our friend, for its very finitude makes it more precious than anything. I'm not sure at what age it hits, but maturity flowers when we realize that time, not money, is the commodity most to be treasured. The Poet Issa places that bit of wisdom at 50. "Fiftieth birthday. From now on, it's all clear profit, every sky."[6]
From the poet's perspective every day is a bonus. That's the way I feel each and every morning on my walk around the neighborhood. Now, I know some of you may think it is foolish to be out there with a wind chill below zero, with snow blowing and drifting and the footing getting more treacherous by the moment. But I love it - love the sharpness of the air, the beauty of the snow on bush and tree, love the way dogs bury their mussels in every passing snowbank that they do not use for other purposes.
Why do I do it? Why do I love it? It makes me feel alive! My heart pounds, my chest heaves, my body sweats, my mind roams far and wide over the day to come - and sometimes the days that are past - and sometimes it just settles me comfortably in the day that is. One day I will look back with nostalgia knowing that I had the presence of soul to spend a part of my mornings walking over the branching streets simply being - one day - I hope far into the future.
I am aging. That is a given. I am trying to age gracefully. That is not a given, but a challenge. I try to keep things in perspective, to celebrate the virtues of growing older.
During the course of his 80th birthday celebrations, W. Somerset Maugham, the great English writer, spoke at a dinner in his honor at the Garrick Club in London. "There are many virtues in growing old," he began, then paused and looked down at the table. The pause grew uncomfortably long. Maugham fumbled with his notes, looked around the room, shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. The guests exchanged embarrassed glances. The writer cleared his throat and continued: 'I'm just trying to think what they are."[7]
I don't know if Maugham suffered a "senior moment" or if he was simply exhibiting a sense of humor about his own finitude. But Maugham had a philosophy about the latter stages of life which he called simply "the summing up" - a life task of the later years. Psychiatrist Erik Erikson wrote that at this stage of life we have a crucial developmental task: as we look over our lives we need to develop a sense of integrity - a feeling that our life has been worthwhile, that we have lived it well, that we have made the most of the short span of time allotted to us. If we do not do this we are in danger of falling into disgust for life and despair at our place in it - the psychological opposite of integrity.
I think both these men are right, but why wait until the latter years to look upon one's life to determine if it is worthwhile? As Mary Pipher phrases the questions: "How did my life matter? Was my time well spent? What did I mean to others? What can I look back on with pride? Did I love the right people?"[8] Why are these not always appropriate questions - in the present tense?
It is possible to do too much introspection. As one middle-age woman pointed out to Mary Pipher, "We baby boomers seem obsessed with taking our emotional temperature at every turn."[9] There are those whom poet Robert Bly called "perpetual adolescents" - always seeking gurus to tell them the way.
For the most part, though, there are too few occasions for us to "sum up" our lives. We are too busy "getting and spending" in a culture where the market is god; where, in Emerson's words, "things are in the saddle riding man" (and woman); where we blithely accept one young man making a quarter of a billion dollars playing baseball while other young men live in a culture of poverty; where the pace of life is so swift we are discouraged from reflecting at all. And so it seems it might not be a waste of time to take an hour - even as much as an hour and a quarter - to ask some of the big questions.
No better time to consider the big questions than the new year. It is a time of resolutions - as good a time as any - however out of fashion they may be. I think of the story of a 12-year-old who commented, "Making resolutions is silly," when the subject was broached in his family. "If you want to do something, just do it. What difference does the calendar make?" This timeless truth delivered, he flung himself to the kitchen floor and began doing pushups, huffing and straining as he got past six, but sticking it out through fourteen. Spent and limp, he lay until his breath returned. "Well," he said suddenly at that point, "I'm going to work on pushups till I can do a hundred without stopping. A hundred by next New Year's."[10]
And one of those resolutions might be to begin asking the big questions. "Was my life worthwhile?" is perhaps a premature question. Perhaps it ought to be "Is my life worthwhile?" There is a poem that highlights the poignancy of those questions. It is titled "The Dash;" the author is unknown. The "dash" is that short line between the date of one's birth and one's death on a cemetery monument. What do we do with the dash - that all-too-brief interim between beginnings and endings?
There are occasions when this question is not an abstraction hurled from the pulpit, but comes to one out of the raw stuff of one's own experience. One such experience I call "treasures in trash." As many of you know my mother has moved from her home of 68 years to the nearby town of her birth. For some time now we have been preparing that house for sale. I was helping my mother clean out my late father's workshop, which had become a depository for a miscellany of "stuff."
As we dug through what could only be labeled "trash," I came upon two treasures: two stuffed dogs with which I had grown up. To say they were the worse for wear would be to vastly understate their deteriorated condition. They were weather-beaten, grimy and well-worn with the love of an only child. We stood there a moment, not knowing whether to laugh or cry, and so we did neither. It was a moment of truth about a time that could never be recaptured. Life seems to move in only one direction. Instinctively, we both knew It. But there, for a moment, standing ankle deep in "trash," we had relived wondrous years that once had been. I only hope that when my sons sort through the accumulated "trash" of my life, they too will find a treasure, a stuffed that had been literally loved to death. More recently, I spent an afternoon taking pictures of our old house and grounds. My father's shop has since been torn down - the old weather-beaten barn still stands, a monument to a time gone by when it housed hay and horses.
I photographed the old well which still provides potable drinking water - picturesque with an archaic crank pump atop it.
It was late afternoon and my mother's birdbath amidst one of her many flower beds begged to be photographed.
There were several angles of the house - now sided, but with the solid shape my grandfather and great-grandfather carpenters gave it in 1878.
There was my mother's prize lily.
Looking up the hill I saw the church where I grew up and delivered my first sermon at 14 - and so I took that too - silhouetted as it was against the sky.
It became increasingly hard to focus, since my eyes would from time to time well with tears. Every picture brought back memories that I will cherish long after some other family has made that house their own - though I think somehow that house will always belong to the Gilberts.
I had the pictures developed - they were good - for an amateur photographer. I bought a picture frame with the variously-shaped cut outs under which one inserts the picture. Then began the fun of literally cutting and pasting - trying to find the right picture for the right shape. When it was done, I wrapped it and gave it to my mother for Christmas - with the title - "A Woman and Her Home in the Bristol Hills."
It was probably the finest Christmas present I ever gave - or received - for the joy of putting it together for my mother was unexcelled. Our sons hung the framed picture with another montage of similarly-framed family members on the wall of her new apartment - just above the table where she eats. She will remember and smile.
And I wondered what made that exercise in giving so meaningful for me. Then I remembered a favorite story about the painter Paul Cezanne - and I knew.
For 35 years Cezanne lived in obscurity, producing masterpieces that he gave away to unsuspecting neighbors. So great was his love for his work that he never gave a thought to achieving recognition, nor did he suspect that someday he would be looked upon as the father of modern painting. Cezanne owed his first fame to a Paris dealer who chanced upon his paintings, put some of them together, and presented the world of art with the first Cezanne exhibition. The world was astonished to discover the presence of a master.
The master was just as astonished. Shortly after the exhibition opened, Cezanne, arriving at the gallery leaning on the arm of his son, could not contain his amazement when he saw his paintings on display. Turning to his son he exclaimed, "Look, they have framed them!"
"Look, they have framed them!" Framed them in time and space and meaning. Framed them so that we know life worthwhile to those who savor the moments, and the people and the places that make them meaningful. Life is no mere succession of years, no mere series of events - dots on a long line with beginning and ending. It is not linear. It is a pattern - like light shining through a stained glass window. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Life is memory and anticipation. Life is story - a series of stories woven together to make an epic narrative of a life - your life - and mine. Look to your life - to your stories - to those who people them - and you will notice something. "Look, they have framed them," and that has made all the difference.
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