It is hard to speak about anything else than September 11, 2001. This attack on our people has dominated the headlines and penetrated our consciousness. Americans will perhaps never be able to live their lives in quite the same way. If your experience has been like mine, it is very hard to return to anything approximating "normal." The enormity of the wanton violence perpetrated makes everything else seem inconsequential.
Yet we must get on with our lives or the terrorists will have won. It is one way of defying those who would attack our us. It is necessary therapy for us to return to the mundane work of the world.
Right now it seems that "normal" will be forever elusive. But we thought that when John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were assassinated. We grieved, steeled our resolve and went on. We will do the same here. Let's face it, the world at its best is in an abnormal state. The times are never quite "normal." We cannot live as if nothing had happened, but we must continue to live our lives as if they mattered. They do.
This Sunday between Judaism's Days of Awe - Rosh Hashanah - the Jewish New Year - and Yom Kippur - the Day of Atonement - is an occasion for deep reflection about the meaning of our days. They are about looking to the past, evaluating oneself and entering into the future with the benefit of that knowledge. It is said that God opens three books: a thin book for all the truly good people; another thin book for all the truly evil people; and a very thick book for the rest of us. It is a time for personal stock-taking and spiritual renewal. In view of what we have experienced these have been Days of Awe. We are changed people in a changed world.
We need a change of pace. I think of a cartoon which depicts Adam and Eve walking and talking in the Garden of Eden. Adam says to her, "My dear, we live in an age of transition." We don't have her response. I will attempt my own.
Our lives are full of transitions. Life never stands still even if we sometimes wish it would. I think of my birth in the Great Depression; growing up during the Second World War; moving through adolescence in the quiet fifties; coming of age as a citizen during the tumultuous sixties; struggling with personal growth and social responsibility in the seventies; acknowledging middle age in the eighties; and moving toward retirement in the nineties.
We tend to think of the time of our lives as the most decisive and dramatic in human history. And so I think Charles Dickens had it right: "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times."[1]
Woven through the history of humanity with all its momentous events - including the tragedy of September 11, 2001 - are personal biographies. The disaster we have witnessed is terrible, not so much because of the destruction of airplanes and buildings, but because it has cut off the personal biographies of thousands of people and changed other lives forever. Our own lives may seem trivial in the context of historic events, but they are the one thing over which we have a degree of control. And whatever history swirls about us, our lives continue. We press on, and it is terribly important that we do so. Otherwise we become obsessed with what has happened, depressed at our helplessness and simply shut our own lives down.
And so a Jewish High Holy Day sermon on transitions - focusing in particular on aging - retirement - what it means to me, to you, and to this congregation. As you know, I'll retire as your Parish Minister June 30, 2002. Next month I begin collecting Social Security and Medicare is not far behind. I'm worrying about the stock market. So much for the "outer weather" of this particular rite of passage; what of the inner meanings of this transition?
Ever since I became your minister in 1970 I have shared my thoughts and feelings as I have crossed the 10 year markers. On September 19, 1976, I preached On Turning Forty: Living Well Is the Best Revenge. On September 21, 1986, the topic was Fifty Is Nifty? Things I've Learned after It Was Too Late. On September 15, 1996, I declared I was "Too Old to Rock and Roll, Too Young To Die" - Rumination of a Soon-To-Be Sexagenarian. Now I break precedent and reflect on a 5-year marker because it figures heavily in my decision to retire. We, you and I, parish minister and congregation, live in a time of transition in our relationship.
I am in good company as I prepare to retire. Cal Ripkin is retiring this year after a Hall of Fame career as infielder for the Baltimore Orioles. He has been making his farewell tour of league ballparks where he will play for the last time. It's a grand baseball tradition in which fans transcend team loyalty and applaud a great competitor. Now, despite back and other problems associated with an aging body (I think he's around 40), he's having a pretty good year.
The parallel is not perfect, but close enough. I, too, will retire. I haven't exactly had a Hall of Fame career, but I have enjoyed my 40 years of ministry - nearly 32 here. And each event in the church year will be the last time for me as your Parish Minister - my version of a "farewell tour."
I promise not to dwell on my retirement during this year, but it is necessary background for me and for us. And I do hope to have a good year - and trust you will too.
My purpose in sharing these transitions of aging - the rites of passage - has not been sheer self-indulgence. Ministers are sometimes characterized as "canaries in the coal mines of life." We try to go into the deep and dangerous places and report what we find. A number of you have already been there, and I've been trying to learn from you. Many of the rest of you will sooner or later come to this particular place. What is it like?
Retire is from French word retirer - literally to draw back. "Retirement," as Professor Karl Klaus puts it in his touching book Taking Retirement: A Beginner's Diary, "is deeply connected with the act of giving up, giving in, retreating, as it were, from life itself. And that's not what I'm ready for at all...."[2] Nor am I.
His journal took me through the retirement year of a college creative writing professor, founder of the Iowa State Writer's Workshop, and reflected many of my own feelings. For example, he wrote that no one is irreplaceable, but ". . . then again, I'd have to admit that I've sometimes heard a little voice within me saying, 'It'll be different with you. It won't be so easy for them to replace you.'"[3]
Then reality set in and he acknowledged his own finitude - "the image of my footprints in the sand, likely to last no longer than the next incoming tide."[4] That's putting it a bit strongly, but it does help us realize each one of us is a transitory creature, like it or not.
Klaus had a hard time letting go of what he had been doing for two-thirds of his life, wondering if teaching were more an addiction than a profession. Likewise with preaching. He refused a retirement party because "I don't want to hear someone telling my story before my story is done."[5] ". . . the ceremonies and the remembrances and all the other stuff . . . sometimes make me feel as if I'm at a memorial service rather than a retirement party. . . . I don't want to be buried alive."[6]
Klaus found that "life is so much in transition, torn between the past and the future, that it's difficult to live primarily in the present. . . . "[7] He struggled with separation anxiety and transition trauma and worried that if he couldn't handle this transition "I'll never be able to accept the one that all of us at last are compelled to make."[8] He's talking about death, clearly.
There was the fear of being no longer needed. He confessed to having a ". . . desire to be missed. . . professors probably crave whatever kind of half-life they might have in the memory of their students."[9] Substitute ministers and parishioners and you know a little bit about how I feel. On his last day of teaching he rather expected someone would ask him if he had a last word, but no one did. He had prepared an answer. "Just keep writing."[10]
Klaus found his ego was threatened, and he became more self-centered than he thought possible, until his wife Kate reminded him, "You're writing a Me Alone book, a Me on the Edge of the Shore, and that's not true, not right. I'm here, have been and will be . . . world without end."[11] While he was ruminating about his own struggles, she kept injecting a needed dose of reality. "How many good years do you think we have left?"[12]
Klaus had cause for philosophical reflection. "Now, for the first time, I'm beginning to feel as if living well were all that mattered. Not as the means to an end, but as an end in itself."[13] "But maybe what I really need to do is turn off the work-driven habits of a life-time, the impulses that keep making me feel I should be doing something useful every minute of the day, even when I've committed myself to a long-term study of tranquility."[14]
It's a brilliant book, particularly poignant for me because his thoughts and feelings so closely mirror my own as I stand on the brink of doing something entirely new. On July 1, 2002, I will be out of work for the first time since I started mowing lawns at 12. As Klaus said, it's a "brave new world of AARP."[15] And he reminds us that 65 is the "product of such antithetical multiplicands as the mystical number five and the unlucky number thirteen."[16] Good thing I don't believe in numerology.
I had a dream on September second as I was preparing to launch my last year of ministry among you. It was an image that likened life - or a career - to driving a golf ball - it rises in trajectory rapidly - soars for a time - then begins a fairly rapid descent - retirement - hits the ground and rolls into wonderful places, finally coming to rest under the vast blue sky. I don't recall if it was a hole-in-one. I'm not just sure what that means, but I found it interesting - my sub-conscious at work.
I've received several imaginative birthday cards this year, some of which really shouldn't be repeated in a worship service. One that can pictured an Oriental monk meditating beneath a tree by a quiet pond. Outside it said, "Your birthday reminds us of that great oriental philosopher." Inside it said, "Yung No Mo." Another spoke to the meaning of the occasion. The cover asked, "What's the cosmic significance of this birthday? What conclusions can be drawn? What does it all mean?" I got philosophical goose bumps, but I wasn't quite ready for the inside message: "It means that you've made it through another year." And so I have and perhaps that is the meaning of it all - making it through.
I think it was poet W. H. Auden who said that we always see ourselves frozen at a certain age. For me it is 35, and I can hardly believe I am in reality 30 years older. Then I look at myself in the mirror and pictures of my Installation in 1970. Reality sets in.
And there are those who think I really am as old as I am. Last spring I was asked to consult with Starr King School for the Ministry as they discussed their new religious education curriculum. During one session my friend President Rebecca Parker introduced me as an "elder" of the movement. Elder? I don't feel like an elder. An elder is supposed to know about things, and I still know a precious little about them - I'm still trying to figure it out.
Perhaps it's the gray hair. The sweatshirt I gave Joyce on her 65th birthday probably should be mine, since I am much grayer than she is: "A little gray hair is a small price to pay for this much wisdom."
Of course I want the world to stop and take notice, to acknowledge my retirement, but it won't; it will go on with barely a hiccup, if that. It's important for me to realize that the world - the church - the community - will go on without me. While that may be hard for my ego to accept, it is, after all, what I have been working for. I have tried to help maintain this church as Rochester's Alert Conscience and Hospitable Roof.
Retirement for Unitarian Universalist ministers is a little different than for most. Because of our denominational polity, after June 30 I will need to keep some space between me and this congregation to remind you that I am no longer your Parish Minister. This is basic fairness to my successor.
We will remain in Western New York - we have deep roots and family connections here. We - you and I - will have to re-define our relationship - a difficult task. In fact the relationship between retiring ministers and congregations is being explored by a denominational ministerial group called The Dearly Departed. They suggest creation of a covenant between retired minister, continuing minister (Helena), incoming minister and congregation. Stay tuned over the next few months as that process unfolds.
After all, we clergy are ever and always merely interims - stewards of a religious reality that transcends our individual beings. We are really on loan to our congregations. My task is to pass on a healthy congregation to the next minister in line. In a movement like ours, where creed and dogma and prescribed ritual are absent, there is the danger of the cult of personality - that people will identify minister with religious faith. But a church is far more than the personality of its ministers.
This transition, as any transition, is a rich opportunity for growth. This congregation will undergo a self-assessment to help determine who you are and where you want to go. I will need to re-examine my life as Joyce and I determine how we are going to spend the next third of our lives. You will learn there are other ministers than Dick Gilbert and other ways of doing ministry than you have observed in me. I will learn there is life beyond the First Unitarian Church of Rochester.
Personally, I resonate to the sarcasm of Karl Klaus as he reflected on retirement: "God forbid that anyone should have time for contemplation."[17] Mine has been an active ministry, a busy ministry, and there has never been enough time to think - to reflect. That is what I hope to do - and then record my reflections. I still want to write the "great American theology," tentatively titled The Good Life Is Messy: Learning to Cope with Ambiguity and Loving It. Hopefully, there will be opportunities to teach - perhaps in one of our Unitarian Universalist seminaries. Joyce - and I - have a yen to travel, and we hope to combine that love of the journey with work among our liberal religious congregations overseas. Interim ministry - the very kind of ministry you will soon be experiencing - is another possibility. And Joyce will want to be positioned so she can carry on her volunteer career and have a place where she can sing. Beyond that, who knows - we're just beginning to invent our future. We live in a time of transition.
I don't view retirement as portrayed by the cover of a Kiplinger's magazine on retirement planning. It shows two bare male legs sticking up in the water, swim flippers attached. That's not me. Nor do I want consciousness to be that annoying time between naps.
My ministerial mantra has been: to be is to be for others. Ministry is a service profession; it is a giving profession. However, there are times when, in concentrating on being for others, I have sometimes forgotten to be - which means I have less to give. During these Days of Awe, it is worthwhile for each of us to reflect on maintaining that elusive balance.
I hope in retirement to have a little more time for myself - to get to plays and concerts and sporting events that seem always to be scheduled against church or community meetings. I intend to maintain, even increase, my effort in social justice work, but in retirement I hope to have more time for just plain fun - to get out from under my Puritan conscience and work ethic once in a while.
I wanted to preach this sermon early in the fall - as a kind of backdrop to the year. I do not want to be preoccupied with my retirement, nor do I want you to be absorbed by it. I certainly don't want to be a lame duck. I hope my retirement will be signified by a sweatshirt given to one minister on his birthday: "Ministers do it with grace." I hope so.
My feelings on transition during these difficult Days of Awe are well articulated by poet May Sarton in "Gestalt At Sixty."
". . . I am not ready to die,
But I am learning to trust death
As I have trusted life.
I am moving toward a new freedom
Born of detachment
And a sweeter grace -
Learning to let go.
I am not ready to die.
But as I approach sixty
I turn my face toward the sea.
I shall go where the tides replace time,
Where my world will open to a far horizon
Over the floating, never-still flux and change.
I shall go with the changes,
I shall look far out over golden-grasses
And blue waters. . . .
There are no farewells."
Well, there are farewells of another kind; we will have time for them come spring. This is not the time. There is too much to do. Let's get on with it.
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