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Growing Old Ungracefully
March 7, 2010
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The title of this sermon is growing old ungracefully and you may think that it is intended only for the senior citizens among you – but it is not. It is intended for all of us – and what is more, I want you to know that I have chosen this topic for the same reason I choose topics for all my sermons: it interests me. I want to explore and understand what it means to grow older.
Sadly, I think there are negative attitudes about growing older. My daughter Kathryn, or rather step-daughter, reminds me from time to that I am really, really old as if I were somehow mentally or emotionally challenged. I remind her that I believe that what is important in a person’s life is not their age, but their spirit. I look to a person who lives fully, with joy and love in their lives. I told her as I often do – too much from her point of view – that when I worked with gang members as a teacher, I often felt that I had a spirit that was alive, whereas they seemed to be dead inside, full of hate, bitterness, anger. I noted that where they seemed world weary and old before they their years, I experienced myself with still a child within, that wonders, that is curious, that looks at life as an adventure. But Kathryn is not alone in this negative attitude about growing old, sadly. And I am concerned that we are creating a world where there is a polarization and segregation between the young and the old. We are encouraged to segregate according to age since most of us here probably did not go to a one-room school house, which I think is a good way to learn, but rather we were segregated according to classmates close to our own age. And so we have a division between those we call “young” and those we call “old.” By the way, when I say “young” or “old”, I am putting quotation marks around those words, but I will not be saying “quote” and “unquote” or “end of quote”. I invite you to simply hear the quotation marks in the tone of my voice. It is really a question of values here. Do we value truth? Love? Generosity? The individual? Do we have compassion for our fellow human beings? Do we celebrate our differences? Or do we only value the winners of our society? The strong, the wealthy, the young? And in the process of naming the “winners” have we relegated everyone else into categories of “second-rate” or “unacceptable.” It is only natural for people to think in terms of “us” and “them” and the “us” is more important than the “them”. We can take pride in the “we” and separate ourselves from the “they”. That kind of naming can therefore distance ourselves from others, and thus we fail to understand and appreciate each other. It is as if once a person is called “old” they become some kind of strange creature, not really one of “us” or those of us here who think of themselves as “young”. “Old” is a relative term and a subjective term, but still people speak about the “old” as if they are different which helps to distance them from the young. This kind of thinking denies the beauty and wonder of every individual human being. Each of us is like a flower, beautiful and unique, that offers the world something wonderful. Just look around you today. Just look at the people here. See how interesting every person is. We may not like everyone. That may be humanly impossible to do, but it would take not much effort to see the uniqueness of each person and to learn from them and thus we grow as human beings. Now, you may say that a younger person cannot understand the experience of being older. And it is true that the young generally have not had the experiences of associated with age, such as loss of physical agility, loss of earning power, loss of family and friends through death. But I can say that young people suffer too, they suffer losses, aches, and pains, confusion. And because we share similar, but not the same, experiences, we can empathize with each other. It is possible. The power of empathy comes from our imaginations and the creative use of our experiences. I think of my grandmother, Ella, for example, my mother’s mother. When I was a boy, and my parents were going through a hard time, Ella, was the one person who not only love me, but understood me and encouraged me. Imagine for a moment, she was around 70 and I was a young teenager. She grew up on a farm. I was growing up in a suburb. We were as different as a fully grown giraffe and a wolf cub. And yet I felt she understood me best because she wanted to and used her power of imagination to help her to understand me. Think about this notion of age being a relative concept. Compared to some of those redwoods in California which have lived thousands of years, we are mere babes in the woods. And compared to a certain kind of moth that lives for one day, we are almost immortal. Therefore, we readily see that the relativity of age, but the problem is that we think in absolute terms, as if one day a young person wakes up and she is “old.” Truly, our concept concerning age should change with time as we grow older, hopefully in wisdom and experience. Concepts concerning age differ among different cultures. I love to tell Kathryn often about how old age is treated in China, again to her consternation. In China, old age is revered. So, if a younger person greets an older person, the younger person will bow indicating not only respect for the older person but also acknowledging the wisdom and experience of the older person. In China, it is considered an insult to guess a person’s age as too young. Just the opposite from our ways. If you guess a person’s age too young, they might think that you think of them as being foolish and impulsive, as self-centered and uncaring. But if you were to guess a person’s age as older, then they would be pleased because they would imagine that they are manifesting wisdom and calm that comes with experience. We can think of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet which I saw with Gary Metzler recently. Here is a play in which two young people act impulsively and self-centeredly so that they take their own lives in fits of overblown emotion and self-importance. They don’t take the time to think, to consider their actions, to investigate which could have saved them. They imagined that their lives are so narrow that there are no other people in their lives, no other experiences other than their own romance. I cannot imagine a wise older person acting like that. An older person could be stronger than that, would take the time to think things through and would live on. An older person has the knowledge of life behind her. She knows that when things get bad there is a better day ahead. The mere fact that a person grows older does not make her meek or weak, quite the contrary, it can make her stronger and more able to withstand the heartaches and pressures of life. Now, I have talked about growing older; now I want to focus on the other part of my message, which is the idea of growing older ungracefully. Words are funny things. They are plastic and changeable. For example, the word “sensitive” as in, he is a sensitive man. I have one image of a sensitive person as one who is warm and caring like my grandmother, but then there is another meaning of sensitive, as one who recoils at hearing criticism, like say Adolph Hitler, who could not stand being told that what he was doing was wrong. So there you have it: two people, my grandmother and Adolph Hitler, as similar as Heidi and Attila the Hun, and yet, we could say that each in their own way, were sensitive people. I think of the problem of the meaning of words, when I hear the phrase growing old gracefully. Grace as a Christian term implies that one is saved from the condition of sin, that it comes from God without much effort on our parts save that we believe in the right religion. Therefore, it sounds to me like a passive idea, as if growing old gracefully were akin to the idea of being saved from sin. It makes me think that when one has grown gracefully, one is passive, having given up their power of choice in their lives, as if what is important is to eliminate life’s difficulties and challenges as one grows older. I wish to challenge that notion today. While I was in seminary, I was eating in the dining room of one the theological schools, Pacific School of Religion, chatting away with my friends, when a woman sat down next to me who was, how should I say, older than me. We engaged in a long discussion about almost everything important. She was at PSR as a guest speaker on the issues of aging, poverty, social justice and young people. She was full of life, with good humor, intelligence with a twinkle in her eye. At the time, she would have been around 75 years old, but to me she was as vibrant and attractive as any woman I met. And so we decided to go out on a date, later that night we went to a restaurant. Her name was Maggie Kuhn. She is best known as the founder of the Grey Panthers an organization that advocated nursing home reform and fought ageism. Maggie claimed that “old people and women constitute America’s biggest untapped and undervalued human energy resource.” She also dedicated her life to fighting for human rights, social and economic justice, global peace, integration, and an understanding of mental health issues. In the 1930s and 1940s, Kuhn taught at the YWCA, where she educated women about unionizing, women’s issues, and social issues. She caused controversy by starting a human sexuality class in which she discussed such topics as the mechanics of sex, birth control, sexual pleasure, pregnancy, and the difficulties of remaining single in a culture where marriage is the norm. During the 1950s and 1960s, Kuhn worked for the Presbyterian Church, where she hoped to give emphasis to the social dimension of the Gospel. While tradition confined most seminarians to fieldwork within churches, Kuhn declared that none of her students would pass unless they went out and found poverty within the local community. The Gray Panthers’ motto was “Age and Youth In Action,” and many of its members were high school and college students. Kuhn believed that teens should be taken more seriously and given more responsibility by society. Maggie and I had a great time on our date. She told me that she never married because she did not want to be confined to that kind of life of a wife. She always wanted to be an activist. She told me that she had been asked three times for her hand in marriage, the last time from a distinguished neurosurgeon, but she knew she would not be happy with him. Her radical politics would not work in that relationship. I find it fascinating that later in her life she had a relationship with a man many decades younger than she, and they stayed in that relationship until her death when she was 89. Maggie Kuhn grew old ungracefully. But then she lived with purpose in her life. and there is something beautiful about that, something you might call graceful. One of the problems in creating this sermon is that there are so many people like Maggie whose stories I would have liked to share with you, whose had that spirit of life, of joy and love well into their later years. I think of the minister and anti-war activist, Abraham Muste; musician-cellist, Pablo Casals; doctor, musician and Unitarian theologian, Albert Schweitzer; Unitarian Universalist folk singer, Pete Seeger; the character Zorba the Greek based on a real person in the life of the author Niklos Kazantzakis; and even Frank Sinatra recording songs in his eighties. Two of my heroes were Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, who in August of 1964, when both were in their 80s, were the only two out of 535 members of the House and Senate who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that ushered our nation into that immoral and intractable war in Vietnam. Thus, I have a hard time saying that all these people had grown old ungracefully, because growing old gracefully can mean showing elegance and beauty. And I think that these people had elegance and beauty in their lives, because they had lived a life of purpose and creativity. They were the voices that spoke about what was good in life. Therefore, we have come full circle. I titled this talk “Growing Old Ungracefully” and said that grace could be seen as a demeaning concept in relation to growing old, that society erroneously believes that people lose effectiveness, vitality and worth as they grow older, that with this definition, it would be better to grow old ungracefully. But then I suddenly switched, which is easy to do with words, and said that grace could be a good word to use in the sense of beauty, creativity and purpose in life.
Perhaps this is confusing to you, perhaps not, but it’s really not important that you understand it all. As the poet once said, “Life is not a puzzled to be solved, but rather a mystery to be lived” and I would add with a sense of purpose. When we live with a sense of purpose, then we live each day as it happens, not fretting about the future or regretting or longing for the past. We can plan for the future and use the past for our learning and growth. As that ancient Sanskrit saying puts it: “Today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.” Therefore, I say to you, grow old, not gracefully or even ungracefully, but rather live each day fully, so as to make your life a one of spirit, creativity, purpose and love. |
| Sermon Copyright © 2010 Harold W. Beu |
