Reflections
A Sermon for Prairie Crossing Unitarian
Universalist Congregation
Sunday, October 1, 2006
Chuck Menges
Sermon:
When I was asked if I would take a summer service at NSUC, I said yes and that I'd do the last one of the summer at the end of August. Then when I was asked for a topic, my immediate response was Transitions and then Transitions into the Wisdom Years. This was the transitional marking of the end of a season and start of the next. One foot in summer and one foot into fall - a looking forward to new opportunity and energy after the slower days of summer...when I was young, the starting of school, then as an adult the new gearing up of the work life with everyone back from vacation; a new sharpening of the spirit and crispness after the heavy lidded heat and haze.
And today, I find an even stronger transition on with the full brownness of summer gardens and the rattling of dry cornstalks in the fields being replaced by overhead canopies of color and the huge V's of geese moving through that lifts the eyes and the spirit skyward.
Leaves are falling on the path where I walk and a few days ago a whole flock of geese was sitting quietly in the center of the small cemetery I pass. Migrating monarch butterflies have appeared and gone from the prairie near my house. The sun in the morning, when it now rises from unwanted morning darkness, is at a different angle. Newly planted chrysanthemums are now in bloom.
One must also recognize that today Jews, even many of those who are Unitarians, celebrate the highest of holy days of their faith, Yom Kippur. A day of atonement for sins committed, for purification of the soul, for fasting, for being closer to God and for renewal of spirit. An annual transformation, if you will.
When I was young, before Nike and Rebok, at the end of summer, women began to put away their white shoes and men, before baseball caps, began to put away their straw hats. Short sleeves have now given way to long ones and jackets have come out of closets…an ending and a beginning, a forward looking time. So the topic seems to fit this special time of year. The music and readings have been chosen to highlight transitions of all kinds.
Then there are the personal transition points in each of our lives and each of you have been progressively experiencing them; becoming an adult, finding love, marriage, birth, death, being in the military, changing jobs or homes or even countries...just to name a scant few. One of mine was bumping into Unitarian Universalism when my wife and I were taken by an old friend to her Unitarian Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2000. More than 50 years after having quietly rejected creeds and dogma I found a place where I would be accepted for my beliefs and for the first time, have the freedom to talk openly about them.
These kinds of things are all transitions to the wisdom years.
Sometimes transitions take place without us and we miss them altogether. Calvin said...that's not John Calvin but the Calvin of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbs, put it this way:
"Know what's weird? Day by day, nothing
seems to change, but pretty soon… everything's different."
I was in the military in the 60's and my wife and I lived in England from September 1964 to September 1967, some the most tumultuous years of social change in America in the last half-century. We came home to a country profoundly changed and it continues to today.
I have seen the news reels but my connection is distant and uncomprehending and that transition is not a part of my life.
Arriving up here today has also been a transition for me. As an attorney, my talking to juries at considerable length was about the facts, my client's position and yes I admit to more than a little theater.
But I never had to reveal my self or be myself - that was not my job. But since I retired, the transition of finding out of who I really am and then learning to reveal that person to the rest of the world has, so far, brought me to this place...and this day…something that I would not have been able to do just a few years ago.
Now lets talk more directly about the subject of this reflection...The Transition into the so-called Wisdom Years. I say "so called" because the more I worked with this topic, the more I discovered my preconceived ideas and definitions didn't always work.
First I will tell you about what I mean by The Wisdom Years.
Then I will explore with you the journey, the transitions, to reach that state of so called wisdom.
Finally...the arrival at that station and its joy and even some limitations that may go along with it.
What are they - these Wisdom Years? They do not begin at a given age or when a time line has been crossed. There isn't a "wisdom switch" that gets turned on like a link in a computer program that suddenly opens up new possibilities. Nor is the person who seems to have arrived there necessarily all seeing or all knowing...neither a sage or an oracle.
When you were little you said; "Boy, my dad knows everything. I can't wait until I am grown up and I will know everything!" At times, I think I am still waiting to "grow up" because I don't know and probably never will be able to know everything about life. But when the wisdom years do arrive...you will at the least find yourself knowing more about life than you ever expected to when you were young.
Wisdom is certainly not the result of just how much information you may have gathered either. Author and historian David McCullough summed it up this way:
"Information isn't wisdom. Information isn't learning. If information were learning, you could be educated by memorizing the world almanac. If you did that, you wouldn't be educated. You'd just be weird!"
I have to say that in my opinion the transition to the wisdom years most often seems to begin anytime after the age of 50 and it is - for the most part- imperceptible. The transition begins when you have had enough life experiences, like those I just mentioned, so that you can look back on them and begin to reflect on them in such a way that begins to put all those experiences into perspective. Experiences do not bring wisdom...it is the reflecting upon them that does. This reflecting will eventually bring about a change of focus and improved clarity of vision enabling you to move forward beyond the past and even the present to a different kind of life…and to a recognition of a change in your perception of what is reality. Achieving that new perception of reality is key, in my mind, to the successful discovery of ones own wisdom.
What we think of as reality in our young adulthood seems to motivate many people far into the early 50's and beyond...that is, a perception of the reality of what will make us happy, satisfied, successful and "set for the rest of our lives" whenever that is. Until that perception of reality changes, the wisdom years will be greatly delayed.
Defining Wisdom, in the end, is somewhat elusive. Author Frank Whitmore wrote;
"The biggest difficulty with mankind today is that our knowledge has increased so much faster than our wisdom."
Somehow, in this information age...in this political age...society often treats information as equal to wisdom and thus in all walks of life, decisions are being based on knowledge to the exclusion of wisdom.
My efforts at a definition for the wisdom years include a flowering of virtues after a long winter...wisdom = hope, humility, patience, honesty.
The best definition of Wisdom that spoke to me was by writer Vernon Howard.
"Real wisdom consists of recommending the truth to yourself at every opportunity."
What does it mean to be wise? It certainly is not knowing more than anyone else. Perhaps you will be able to tell me what it means when I am finished. I know that I am privileged to be in a covenant group in which most of the members are older than I am. Do they have wisdom? You bet they do even though they would be reluctant to admit that they were wise. They would probably just say that they have just lived their lives....nothing special. But that is the point...living life is the ticket to the wisdom that blesses their years.
Who is a wise person? Perhaps it is someone who has knowledge of life's mysteries who can communicate them to you at a time when you are receptive and open to receiving them.
That was my experience with one of my favorite speakers at NSUC, Rev. Glenda Walker who is retired. I had been retired for 6 months after a long and active practice of law. Everything was fine. I was doing what pleased me and my wife. A life of continuous stress stretching from law school at age 21 to retirement at 65 was behind us...yet I had a nagging unease with no name.
That summer Rev. Walker described that time in between being who I had been...a lawyer with a certain status and a life of friends and acquaintances associated with that life and that person...and that time to come when I was to become who I was to be for the rest of my life…with a redefined status and new friends and acquaintances and interests. That time in between, the transition from one life to another, she called "The Muddle in the Middle". That wise woman and the wisdom that she was able to give to me because I was ready to receive it carried me through that period of nostalgia for the "who I had been" and forward into trying to pull together "who I was going to be", a process that continues to this day.
I don't know what wisdom is but...borrowing from a different and legal context...I think I can recognize it when I see it.
Another view was pointed out by Gary James in a recent Minister's Muse when he pointed out that a Buddhist writer would have us embrace the notion that wisdom comes when we are able to embrace chaos and uncertainty. In other words, the acceptance that things are always in transition.
Lets look at the journey to the wisdom years.
A wise poet and writer by the name of May Sarton had this to say:
"My feeling about growing older is that every age has its particular value and beauty - in fact I can hardly wait to be 60 when ripeness is all. What worries me is that people seem not to realize this and, as you say, wish to remain young, which is just a waste of the next experience, equally valuable. But of course one's powers grow and grow if one has anything inside."
Sociologist Lars Tornstam in his article "Transcendence in Later Life" describes this as a change in the definition of realty that occurs as one develops through experience and maturation. For example an adult child may perceive the reality to be that their parent has become withdrawn from activities or friends and they become worried about their parent's health. The parent, on the other hand, perceives the reality to be that the importance of much of life's activities and social interactions are of less value and shunning them is, in fact, a positive act of wisdom and maturity....a sorting out of just those things that do matter and just what those things are that are the source of life's reward and pleasure. Roger Rosenblatt in his somewhat cynical book Rules for Aging, Rule 20 is called" And loneliness is better than Eggs Benedict. He writes:
"Whenever one is beginning to feel isolated from one's fellows, a countervailing impulse usually takes hold that suggest life will be greatly improved if one phones a lot of semi-friends and makes several dates for brunch-or otherwise seeks the company of people without the sight of whom one could live quite happily forever. Once those plans are made (Brunch! At noon! What fun!), one immediately realizes that the proposed event will be a predictable horror, and its' various depressing moments will be experienced even before it has occurred. (Eggs Benedict! I can't remember when I last had Eggs Benedict! ) Much sorrow can be avoided by acknowledging that - as gloomy as being alone makes you feel, it is rollicking heaven compared to being among most other people. (Belgian waffles! Do you really think they come from Belgium? Ha, Ha, Ha.)
On a more serious note Tornstam refers to this as a transcendent change in the definition of reality. It occurs through just normal, everyday living as a part of a natural process moving toward maturity and wisdom with that transcendence increasing with the act of living and - yes - aging.
The process of transition can be speeded up considerably when there is a crisis or a traumatizing event that forces one to focus on reality. Others move through the transition with slow grace by simply living their lives and being aware of the events around them. Others will have no wisdom years at all because their ties to the past or their view of reality never lets their train leave the station. They never find the key to unlock their own wisdom. A comment attributed to an unknown sage is that:
"Age doesn't always bring wisdom -
Sometimes age comes alone."
However, the transition is also not possible without your having passed through many of the transitional times of your life or even just living a certain amount of a normal life.
The journey...the actual process of transition to the wisdom years...is a jerky ride, the speed is not constant, it is scary at times and filled with hopes and promises gained and lost, a casting aside and reaching out for new relationships and experiences. It is a testing and retesting of what is perceived to be reality at any given time. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi in his book From Aging to Saging points out that all of what I am talking about, the journey of transition, is truly a stage of growth...not a punishment for just surviving. It is a journey looking to claim, in the end, our own inner wisdom. Confucius wrote:
"By three methods we may learn wisdom;
First, by reflection, which is noblest;
Second by imitation, which is easiest; and
Third by experience, which is the bitterest."
Then there is the arrival at the wisdom years...and some drawbacks.
Ronald Manheimer, in his article "A Philosophical Time of Life," points out that culturally today we are trying to cast off stereotypes regarding aging as obsolete and to recognize our growing maturity, our new views of reality and freedom unrestricted by the social roles of our earlier adulthood. People are beginning to resist the social attitudes that give us senior lifestyles, senior discounts and diets for successful aging and magazine titles like Modern Maturity which Roger Rosenblatt finds offensive. There is resistance to the terms retirement, elderly, senior adult because they are generalizations. The most recent example of this kind of social construction is the identification of the so called baby boomers and now their children the echo boomers. This construct lumps together everyone born in an 18 year period and is understood to be white, middle-class, usually college-educated persons - as representative of everyone in that age group. Then all marketing and entertainment and political efforts are directed at such generic persons. Yet that is a generalization of what is reality about those born in those 18 years, only a small percentage of whom fit that profile.
And so it is that ones transition into the wisdom years is also not generic or subject to generalization. Nor can everyone be expected to arrive at the same time. After his retirement Admiral Bird described it one way:
"A man doesn't begin to attain wisdom until he recognizes that he is no longer indispensable."
But as Tornstam points out, the personal journey/development toward a new view of reality can also result in an expansion of a new acquaintance with oneself and the world around us. The things that are occurring when the transition is in play are described so clearly by Tornstam that I cannot convey them better than he because when I read them, I recognized what I was seeing in those around me as they made the transition to the wisdom years.
First, There are New Cosmic connections...some of these being; changes in the definitions of time and space; a new comprehension of life and death and disappearance of the fear of death; and most important - an acceptance of the mystery dimension in life.
Then a new self dimension; the discovery and confrontation of hidden aspects of oneself, both good and bad; perhaps a decrease of self-centeredness; a taking care of the body, but not being obsessed with it; rediscovery of the child within (the importance of which was emphasized by Rev. Glenda Walker) and a realization that the pieces of life's jigsaw puzzle form a wholeness and that spirituality may be a part of it.
And the Third of Tornstam's transitions are changes in social and individual relationships. This is marked by changes in the meaning and importance of relationships by one becoming more selective and less interested in superficial relationships and an increasing wish for solitude; a new understanding of the difference between self and role; and most interesting to me, a transcendence of the right-wrong duality which I had never thought about before....it means understanding the difficulty in separating right from wrong and withholding from judgments and from giving advice. A client pointed out to Tornstam that she dares to say and do things that she did not dare to earlier for fear of embarrassment. She said, at age 69; "I'm old enough and wise enough to dare to do dumb things." When asked if it had become easier with age to make wise decisions and give good advise, she answered; "Well, it's easier to make both dumb and wise decisions, but there is one thing that I find easier today…that is to refrain from giving good advice...because deciding what is good and what is bad is not as easy as it used to be, particularly where other people are concerned." A very wise woman, don't you think?
However, there are a couple of problems when you arrive at the wisdom years. The first is that you have no control over the process so that you may not know when you have actually arrived as the transitions continue.
The second, and more important, is a tendency to believe too much in your own wisdom. Sort of like putting on new clothes but nobody seems to notice. You can even try to tell everyone that you have new clothes, but they don't really care. Clearly, this is an urge to impart your wisdom to others which all writers on this subject point out is a grievous error! Wisdom is not telling others how to live their lives. This lesson I learned the hard way.
Several years ago a group of attorneys and I left our large law firm to form a new, smaller, one. These were men with whom I had worked for many years and whom I thought I knew well. I was 55 and then next youngest was 45 and the youngest of the 8 was 31. I had practiced law for 30 some years at that point and I, mistakenly, believed that I owned wisdom that they did not have and that my wisdom would help move the project and the business along.
I quickly found out that not only did they have no use for my wisdom, they were also incapable of hearing it even if it might have been beneficial to avoid reinventing the wheel and make things easier for all of us. Thus, my wisdom then became my wisdom alone...wisdom to oneself...truths to oneself. Which I have discovered is really what wisdom is all about.
I never could really put my finger on what happened years ago and why I was unable to make myself heard until I saw the Manheimer article in which he said:
..."it seems impossible for someone at an earlier stage of life to learn from older people, since their unique encounters with being are accessible only if one abandons the quest for achievement."
My younger partners were obviously in full battle gear in the quest for achievement, while I was more established...I just didn't know that that was the armor that my "good advice" could not penetrate...and in the end it probably was a good thing for them... and for me.
Thus, the third problem with reaching the wisdom years is the discovery that there is an inability to communicate to those younger whatever gems of wisdom we think we might have...and when we try they are unappreciated, unaccepted and viewed as meddling.
Now think about how wisdom has been communicated from old to young...for centuries...it is by the telling of stories and that is one way to pass your wisdom along and to connect with and be heard by those who are younger than yourself.
You see, the transition to arriving at the wisdom years is a journey of the self...a path of enlightenment, if you will, about life...and a change in your view of reality...a view that is more clear and fulfilling to you... it is not a badge you wear on your chest or advise that you hand out willy-nilly like vitamins to little children because you think it is good for them. It is not about others. Wisdom is only about yourself! Once that is recognized, then you can move into the wider world and grow with passion into the new reality stretching out before you.
Arrival at the Wisdom years is about the acceptance of ones self and life and its abundance, and yes, its mystery and then living that new life to the fullest.
I will close with a poem called "Break the
Mirror" by Japanese poet Nanao Sa ka ki that reflects this morning's theme:
In the morning, After taking a cold shower -
What a mistake - I look in the mirror.
There a funny guy, grey hair, white beard, wrinkled skin -
What a pity - Poor, dirty, old man!
He is not me, absolutely not.
Land and life, fishing in the ocean,
sleeping in the desert with stars.
Building a shelter in mountains,
farming the ancient way,
sitting with coyotes.
Singing against nuclear war
-I'll never grow tired of life.
Now I'm seventeen years old,
very charming young man.
I sit down quietly in lotus position,
meditating, meditating for nothing.
Suddenly a voice comes to me:
"To stay young, to stay young, ….BREAK THE MIRROR.
Hymn we will now sing is This is my song.
I choose this hymn only because it is my favorite and I never thought it had anything to do with the theme. Yet last week I realized that the United States and the whole world is in transition and only songs with words of hope and reaching out make any sense at all.
FURTHER REFLECTION
When I get older losing my hair,
Many years from now.
Will you still be sending me a Valentine -
Birthday greetings - a bottle of wine?
If I'd been out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?
You'll be older too,
And if you say the word,
I could stay with you.
I could be handy, mending a fuse
When your lights have gone.
You can kit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday morning go for a ride.
Doing the garden, digging the weeds,
Who could ask for more.
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm 64.
Benediction:
On this Jewish Day of Atonement,
Yom Kippur, this benediction seemed to me to be most appropriate.
May you be at peace.
May your heart remain open.
May you awaked to the light of your own true nature.
May you be healed.
May you be a source of healing for
all beings.