Coming of Age in Summit
Last Friday was All Saint's Day. By what I have always considered a
subtle cosmic
joke, it was also my birthday. Now birthdays were never accorded much
attention
in my family of origin. There were no big parties; no elaborate gifts;
no large
gatherings. On the appropriate day, my aunt would bake her famous
chocolate fudge cake, swirl
chocolate-mocha icing over it, stick in a few candles and everyone would
sing a chorus
of "Happy Birthday" before the cake was divided and parceled out as the
desert for
the evening meal.
When I married, I was somewhat amused by the fact that birthday's
assumed much more
importance in Beverly's family--indeed there seemed to be an unofficial
competition
to see whose birthday celebration could be extended over the longest
period of time.
With the arrival of our children, we seemed to settle down into a
hybrid of these two
cultures. Usually, the birthday was a family matter, but it did tend to
extend over
time and the gift giving became reciprocal, as the birthday child
received gifts
from family members and gave gifts to family members in return.
In more recent years, as the children have grown and scattered, I have
found myself
reverting to my original practice. Birthdays have come and gone, with
only modest
observance, and often I have found myself having to do the
math--subtracting 1936
from the current year--in order to remember my age. This year has been
different. I was
first aware that this was going to be a significant milestone, the other
week when
we were having dinner at the local Chinese restaurant. As the meal was
coming to
an end, I cracked open my fortune cookie. It was empty--no cute
quotation, no advice, no
prediction about my future. It was as if someone in the fortune cookie
company knew
I was about to be sixty.
Sixty! Think about it! Now, I know that for a few of you, that marks
me as still
a child; for others of you that age is so distant that you can scarcely
conceive
it. For me it is a wonderful and fearsome reality.
Being sixty means confronting some very clear truths. It is a solid,
inescapable,
immutable fact that more of my life now lies behind me than stretches
ahead of me.
It may be true, as I tell myself from time to time, that life is not
lived in the
past or in the future, that it is lived only in the present and that I
have precisely as
much time I have ever had to live--this moment. But the truth is that a
sense of
mortality crowds close upon me from time to time as my body, with its
minor aches
and pains and its more stolid, less graceful movements reminds me, and
as my mind tells me on
those occaions when I am left searching for names and words and ideas
which I know,
but cannot call up with the old ease and facility. The scars and
injuries of time's
passing have left their marks on me as clearly as the scars on a tree
which has been
stripped of its leaves by an autumn wind. And I discover myself, from
time to time,
making little adjustments and modest allowances for the accumulating
losses which
are an inevitable consequence of living through six decades.
Being sixty also means having vivid memories of a world others can
glimpse only through
old photographs, and grainy films and scratchy recordings, and the
stories told by
the elders. I was born a child of the great depression and spent my
formative years
in a world engaged in the bloodiest war in human history. I can
remember the bombing
of Pearl Harbor; in my mind I can still hear the rich voice of Franklin
Roosevelt
and the unmistakable cadences of Winston Churchill. I remember the
dropping of the
atomic bombs and the mixture of horror, relief and fascination which
that culminating
event generated.
I was born into a world which was being shaped into one vast community
by the magic
of radio. I still remember evenings, after dinner, when my aunt sat
with her mending
and my uncle with his paper, my cousin with his toys, and I on my
stomach on the
floor, my school books and home-work papers scattered around me,
listening as I worked
to the radio--to the brief dramas, mysteries, love-stories, comedies and
news bulletins
which insensibly wove our family unit into the fabric of the nation.
And I was present when television began to reshape the family and the
nation and the
world. Few of us knew then how powerful a force was represented by that
little circular
screen with its flickering, snowy images. We did not know what we were
doing when we took home that first television set, with its coin-meter
on the side, into which
we dropped quarters in order to be able to watch--quarters which would
be collected
to make the monthly payments for the device. We paid corporations and
businesses
to come into our home to convince us to consume their products--and we
still pay for that
privilege.
I watched the transformation of this nation from isolated and distinct
communities
and cultures into a vast homogeneous commercial establishment. When I
left home
for college, the road west from Maryland to Ohio was still a two-lane
road which
snaked up and through the mountains, wandering from Maryland into
Pennsylvania, down into West
Virginia and across the Ohio River. Trucks lumbered up that road and if
you happened
to be caught behind one, you turtled along for miles, for there was no
safe way to
pass on the upgrade and it was impossible to pass as the truck hurtled
down the other
side.
By the time my formal schooling was over, the nation was crisscrossed by
a network
of multi-lane highways carrying goods and people from place to place at
incredible
speeds, destroying all the barriers of time and space which had
insulated unique
cultures and communities and allowed them to flourish. In their place
stood the great consumer
culture we now know, a culture which entertains no limits, which is
never satisfied,
which dreams of endless growth, and which, while promising the good
life, consumes
more and more of our lives as we struggle for the resources to sustain
it.
In many ways, my life has been lived on the periphery, in the crack
between worlds--between
what was and what is to be. Born into a world of depression, reared in
a world in
which duty and honor and steadfastness were the virtues needed to win a
terrible
war, raised in a family defined by poverty and lack of education and
limited vision
or hope, never more than one or two paychecks from disaster and yet
incredibly generous
and caring, I was invited by the times and by my own inchoate yearnings
into a world of limitless possibilities and richness beyond measure. I
have straddled cultures
and communities and have combined a persistent restlessness of spirit
with a curious
commitment to a core of defining values.
In the '50s--that decade of complacency and conformity to which so many
people seem
to want to return--I registered as a conscientious objector and Beverly
and I were
actively protesting the testing of atomic bombs, the building of
missiles and the
militaristic policies of our government. And as the seasons turned and
the years passed
by, we found ourselves actively involved in the struggle for an end to
racial segregation;
in efforts to extend the promise of the Great Society to the poorest
among us--to migrant workers and to people trapped in the ghettos of our
great cities; in efforts
to end the terrible war in Vietnam.
Once more I found myself encountering the kinds of people with whom I
had grown up,
when I was invited by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union to explain
to its rank
and file members why that war was wrong and why it was unfair that so
many of their
sons were dying in a pointless struggle. In time, we found ourselves
making the same
point to federal agents, who came to confront us over our decision to
withhold taxes
to protest the war. We were fortunate to have found a career in the
Unitarian Universalist ministry, among people who--even when they did
not agree with us--valued integrity
and freedom above obedience and conformity.
As I look back on those times, I am amazed at the deep, unexamined,
often unvoiced
faith which was the foundation of my life in those days. I still
remember standing
over the beds of my sleeping children, in our first house, in Park
Forest, Illinois.
I was preparing to go to one more march or demonstration. I stood
watching them sleeping
musing on the terrible world into which these children had been born and
thinking,
when this terrible time is over, they will inherit a new world--a world
in which
racism and poverty and war need not threaten young lives. I believed
that the world could
be changed and that we would change it. And I believed that with all my
heart, despite
the fact that all the years my children were growing up, nuclear
missiles were pointed at their beds and the world was never more than
thirty minutes from destruction.
And then, an ironic fate led me to serve a congregation which included
many people
who were career military people, working in the Pentagon and for the
Defense Department,
and other agencies of the federal government. I knew them as kind,
generous people, who cared for their children, who worked hard for their
communities and for their
church, and some of who went to work every Monday morning to plot the
destruction
of the globe. That was a circle I could never square. I learned to
love them and
to hate the work they did. They learned to accept me despite my vocal
critique of the system
in which they were involved, and they taught me how very difficult it
is, in this
world, to be untouched by defilements--after all, I and my family were
supported
by the salaries they earned at jobs I thought ought not be done.
And all the time I feared for the fate of the earth, I grew to love this
world with
a passion beyond words. Raised in a third-floor apartment in the
poorest section
of town, where anything thing green was considered a lawn and a red
geranium on the
window sill was a flower garden, raised with little contact with or
knowledge of the natural
world, I was taught by parishioners in half a dozen congregations to
unblock the
spiritual springs and to find refreshment and renewal in the world of
nature. The
scriptures of the world's great religions sounded cold and distant and
passionless in my
ear, but the sight of willows turning yellow-green in early spring or
maples gone
red in early autumn, clouds massing on a summer afternoon and dropping
rain on a
waiting earth, the swirl of snow against a street-light on a winter
night--these had the power
to stir my soul as no prayer or psalm or sutra ever could. I learned to
watch the
birds and the small mammals, the insects and the earthworms and to see
in them a
beauty and fitness, a wisdom which infuses all of earth. I learned that
the earth herself
is our mother, a living creature whose tides and winds and rocks and
sands are all
part of the process of life which contains me and includes me and lives
in me and
through me. Struggling to bring to birth within the human community the
dreams which motivated
me, I learned to rest in the knowledge that I and all my hopes and
struggles are
but a part of a vastly larger, profoundly sacred process. With the
pasing of years,
I learned that I was not required to be right; that I was not required
to win; but
I was required to play my part, to serve that which seemed to me to true
and right
with all my heart and soul and for the rest, to trust the process--the
sacred process
which brought me into being, which sustains me in being and which lives
through me.
To be sixty is to be increasingly aware that the outcome of all our
doing is essentially
unknowable, that even should we glimpse the land of promise, it is
unlikely we shall
ever cross over into it. To be sixty is to know that the reward of our
efforts is to be found in the doing, not in the result. To be sixty is
to know that what we
have been building all those years is a soul and that there is no other
lasting reward.
Time and the unpredictable twists of fate have brought me, at last, to
Summit, New
Jersey. When I think about my journey, I am amazed to find myself
here. A child
of poverty, the product of a narrow and unsophisticated world, I find
myself ensconced
in one of the wealthiest communities on the face of the globe, a
community of incredible
sophistication and breadth of experience, and depth of education. An
outspoken and
unrepentant liberal, I am a citizen of a community which, by almost any
standard,
is profoundly and proudly conservative. A druid at heart, finding my
source of spiritual
renewal in the natural world, I live in the midst of a great
megalopolis. It is
only normal, I suppose, that from time to time I find myself feeling
just a little
out of place, wondering, as I walk through the town, whether someone is
going to stop me
and ask to see my green card. And yet, there is a sense that here is
where I need
to be, a witness to all those other people whose lives are woven into
mine and whose
voices still sound in my heart. With the coming of age, I discover that
still my life bridges
two worlds and I have been graced with a comfortable existence in the
spaces between.
Having entered the community of the elders, there are some things I have
learned that
may be of some importance to you as you make your own spiritual journey
through time.
At sixty, I have discovered that I am surrounded by a great cloud of
witnesses.
When I was a very young child, I was often worried by the fact that I
could not remember
the faces of those I loved. I remember lying in bed at night trying to
bring their
images into my mind and in desperation calling out to them, just to hear
their voices tell me that they were there and it was all right. Now
with the passage of time,
I discover that while my mind is not always as agile as it once was and
while names
and dates and facts play hide and seek, the faces are there. I close my
eyes and
I see them: my Aunt Martha, my Uncle Jim; the seventh-grade teacher who
taught me so much
about courage and integrity; the man who owned the grocery store in
which I worked;
the college professor who saw in me a potential I did not know was
there; my in-laws;
the elementary school teacher in the first congregation I served; the
denominational
official who nagged me into seminary; the lawyer who chaired the board
of the church
in Park Forest; the list goes on and on. I close my eyes and I see the
faces of
those who lives have been woven into my sixty years of living. And do
you know what--every
one of those faces is smiling. To be sixty is to know in a visceral way
that the
life you are living is part of a great stream of living and to begin to
understand
how much you owe to all those who have blessed you on your way, and to
feel their continued
blessing on your life. To be sixty is to understand that you live not
for yourself
alone, but for all those whose lives have been caught up in yours.
At sixty, I have also discovered that youth is only partly a matter of a
supple body
and an agile mind. It is also, and most importantly, a matter of the
spirit. In
one of his hymns, Samuel Longfellow wrote:
O Life that maketh all things new,
The blooming earth, the thoughts within,
Our pilgrim feet, wet with thy dew
In gladness hither turn again.
From hand to hand the greeting flows,
From eye to eye the signals run,
From heart to heart the bright hope glows,
The seekers of the light are one.
One in the freedom of the truth,
One in the joy of paths untrod,
One in the soul's perennial youth,
One in the larger thought of God.
The freer step, the fuller breath,
The wide horizon's grander view,
The sense of life that knows no death,
The life that maketh all things new.
Now, at sixty, I think I begin to understand this hymn which I have sung
for years--especially
that line about "the soul's perennial youth." I grow older with each
passing day.
Every now and then, I am aware of doing things for the last time. And
yet there is in me a deepening sense that this coming of age is itself
an adventure, an
opening up of paths untrod, an opportunity to understand myself and my
world and
myself in the world in new ways. I am overwhelmed by constant
encounters with new
dimensions of the sacred, new and larger thoughts of God. I feel my
age, but deep inside I
do not feel old. I feel blessed and comforted and renewed.
And I know in my bones that this is not a denial or a refusal to
confront my mortality.
I know that in time I shall die and that every passing moment brings
that inevitability
closer. I know, because I have watched, that the process of dying is
not always pleasant and in our culture often consists of a progression
of small, cascading
losses. But I also know that this, too, is an inevitable, and essential
part of
the journey and that I am not alone as I walk that path. I am
surrounded by people
who have loved me and I am watched over by all those smiling faces who
have made this journey
before me. In a strange and curious way, they make it possible for me
to embrace
death as part of the sacred process by which life is sustained on this
planet. I
intend to live fully every moment that is given me to live, to embrace
every opportunity
to grapple with the challenges life and the world offers; I will rejoice
in my comrades
on the way, and I will witness to the fact that the coming of age
represents the
great spiritual journey. At sixty, I am convinced that the only real
tragedy in aging
is to fail to embrace the journey and to make it a conscious, joyful
adventure.
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word
on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
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