1 Aging as a Spiritual Journey. If we are lucky, every one of us ages. If we are wise, we age well, balancing in the process physical ripening and then decline with spiritual deepening and then ascent. Using insights from reading and from life, Rev. Sally will offer some thoughts on aging well, and on the particular gifts that age can bestow on individuals and on society. Sermon: Ten days ago, on a Friday afternoon. I was hurrying, because I was on the way to an appointment and I didn t want to be late. Grabbing dinner to eat in the car. Walking across the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant walking in because I was too impatient to wait in line at the drive-through. Thinking about what I was going to order, looking at a patron sitting inside the restaurant. I never saw the curb until I tripped over it. As though in slow motion I hit the sidewalk. I felt my cheek and my chin just slide across the concrete. Skinned up all my knees. Sprained my thumb. That slowed me down. Shook me up. As grateful and as lucky as I feel to have no broken bones, to be healing fast and clean I also felt foolish, vulnerable, scared, at risk of falling again. Lots of people fall. Children fall down all the time. My father, who is 98 years old, falls two or three times a year (and so far, every time, he picks himself up hardly hurt at all and goes on about his business). But this was my first fall, or at least my first face-plant. It made me feel old.
2 Now, a month ago and more, in preparation for this sermon, I started reading this good book about aging [Aging as a Spiritual Journey] by Eugene C. Bianchi, who is a professor of Religion Emeritus at Emory University. By last Friday, I was pretty well steeped in professor Bianchi s view of aging as an evolutionary journey from youth through middle age to elderhood, with life-tasks and interests and challenges and potentials particular to each different stage of the journey. A season for everything, and a time for every matter under heaven. A sermon was beginning to shape itself in my head, focused on the idea that if we are lucky enough to live long enough, and if we are wise, then at some point in our lives we make a middle-age turning from the outward-oriented doing and getting of youth to a more inwardlyoriented wisdom that builds on life-experience and takes a longer view. That fall brought the sermon down to earth. Literally. The ideas that had been taking shape abstractly in my head the farthest part of my being from the solid earth took on a different meaning after my head hit the ground. A theoretical reflection on the changes in perspective that come with living became much more real and much more embodied as I iced my hand and struggled awkwardly to write and open jar lids and turn the car key with my left hand. As I found myself slowing down, feeling the energy drain of a body that is healing, paying attention not just to where I am going, but also to where I am. What s under my feet, and right in front of them.
3 All our life is a spiritual journey, whether or not we look at it that way; whether or not we are able to see it that way. Each day brings challenges and possibilities. Just moving through the day is a journey, and we end in a different place than we began, as a different person than we were. And I am here to tell you because this is not the first time I have learned it that sometimes we move heedless through the days, rushing to the next thing without even noticing what is here, now. And sooner or later life calls us back, gets our attention in ways subtle and beautiful or sudden and jarring; returns our focus to the journey that we are traveling; to what is under our feet, and right in front of them. And I am here to tell you because I know the truth of this in my very bones that deep inside each ever-changing and ever-evolving one of us is a core of truth that connects us to all truth; not just to all life but to all existence. So Eugene Bianchi, drawing on insights from theology and social science and the life-experience of wise elders, describes youth as a time of outward focus; of energy and strength and agility; of quick thinking and creativity; of achievement and acquisition for personal advancement and material gain (and maybe financial independence, or at least stability). In youth are new ideas, new techniques and technology; new advances in human knowledge and culture. And he describes old age as a time of inward focus, when we are diminished physically and perhaps mentally; when our circle of activities
4 and of friends and loved ones shrinks and we are thrown back upon our own resources; when illness and loneliness and the youth-focus of our culture (at least in America) hurl[s] the elderly to the periphery of life. [Aging as a Spiritual Journey (2011 reprint edition), p. 177]. And then he calls for an awareness, and a self-awareness, that leads us in midlife to shift our focus. To temper the striving for worldly success with a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the breadth and complexity of human experience and human potential. To move beyond knowledge, which is about information, to wisdom, which is about perspective, and discernment, and judgment in the best sense of that word. To see one s elder self as a resource; a reservoir of wisdom in the world; a mentor not just to younger individuals but to the local or to the whole human community, transmitting the fruit of a life fully lived. Bridging past and future to the enrichment of all. And this is a spiritual journey because it takes us into the religious dimension; it asks us, in Eugene Bianchi s words, to confront the boundaries of life and death, to grapple with hope and despair, to puzzle over decisions of good, evil, and mixtures of both. It means walking to the edges of the mystery at the heart of existence. Such encounters open a person to transcendent experiences, to the numinous [that is, the spiritual, or the divine], with its wonder, blessings, and terror. [Aging as a Spiritual Journey (2011 reprint edition), p. 177].
5 If this is the ecology of the cycle of our human lives and the cycle of our human cultures, then it behooves every one of us, of every age, to see ourselves as travelers on this spiritual pilgrimage, in company with travelers of every other age and stage. To understand that each season of our lives embodies balance and movement through the richness of all of life, and that each one of us carries within us questions or answers, experiences or abilities that contribute to the health and wholeness of us all. Aging as a spiritual journey encompasses all of our lives, and all of our lives together. Each of us is richer for all the others who journey with us, however near or far in space or time, back to the very beginning of life in the universe. Parker Palmer is a Quaker educator and activist, and one of my favorite writers. He explores the idea of the ecology of a life in his little book Let Your Life Speak. He, too, sees our lives as journeys pilgrimages toward our true selves. Toward being, becoming, knowing, living as who we truly are; living in faithfulness to the soul that is divinity within us and living through us. Not subject to the role that society and the expectations of others can and do impose upon us from without. The pilgrimage that Parker Palmer sees has been called a transformative journey to a sacred center, and it is a journey that carries us through hardships. Treacherous terrain, bad weather, taking a fall, getting lost, writes Parker Palmer challenges of that sort, largely beyond our control, can strip the ego of the illusion that it is in charge and make space for the true self to emerge. [Let Your Life Speak, p. 18].
6 All our lives are a journey, I have said. But we can go along for years, unaware, unconscious, inattentive, or distracted. And sometimes, the distraction can be intentional. Well past the season of youth we fill our days with business and busy-ness; as William Wordsworth wrote, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. The impersonal voices of TV and radio fill the silence so we cannot hear ourselves think, much less turn inward. The virtual relationships of social media are an imperfect substitute for the give and take of actual community. We withdraw because we are daunted, fearful of the journey, of the anticipated diminishment of our powers as we age, of the eventual end of the journey in death. And so we sleepwalk through the journey of our lives. Or not. For we may not be in charge, but we do have power. We have the power to choose. Being present to the journey is a choice. Again, Parker Palmer: The world needs people with the patience and the passion to make that pilgrimage not only for their own sake but also as a social and political act. The world still waits for the truth that will set us free my truth, your truth, our truth the truth that was seeded in the earth when each of us arrived here formed in the image of God. Cultivating that truth, I believe, is the authentic vocation of every human being. [Let Your Life Speak, p. 36]. And that vocation that call to live fully and faithfully which comes not from outside of us but from the deepest truth that dwells within, and that is unique to each unique one of us it is a call to wholeness, to an ecology of all life,
7 woven together in a web that holds us all, always, and never fails. [T]he living ecology of life, writes Palmer, makes demands on us even as it sustains our lives. We are here not only to transform the world, but also to be transformed. [Let Your Life Speak, p. 97]. And yes, the journey is daunting. And yes, we are fearful of the hardships and the dangers, of the challenges and the change. But that ecology that we are woven into, body and soul, encompasses more than just individuals; it encompasses communities. And it is possible to create communities religious communities in which we help and support each other along the journey we are all traveling. For we travel alone, but we travel in company. And the spiritual work the religious work is the work of honoring the integrity of each person all the others, yes, and also ourselves. No one of us can tell any other what is ultimately true for the other, though it is the way of this world we live in to want to. To give one another advice. To try to solve their problems, ease their pain, ease our own pain when we see or hear someone else hurting, struggling, getting lost, taking a fall, learning the hard way or not learning at all, because they are not ready. Because they are not you. But each of us can be a witness for others: listening, asking deepening questions, making a space for truth-telling, and for going ever-deeper into the heart of truth. Annie Dillard describes what we find at the center of the spiritual journey: what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate,
8 the ocean or matrix or ether which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned. [from Teaching a Stone to Talk, quoted in Let Your Life Speak, p. 80]. Here, this morning, you have listened to my story of being brought right down to earth, of coming to understand that the spiritual journey that is aging, that is living, is here and now for every one of us. It is not only about how we think about our life, it is about how we live our life. Feet on the ground. Eyes and ears open. Here in this community, we can practice and learn seeing one another really seeing. Listening to one another really listening, without judging, without fixing, without imposing ourselves on someone else. And that is a practice that, once more in Parker Palmer s words, makes demands on us even as it sustains our lives. That not only transforms the world, but also transforms us. Take a moment now, in stillness, in silence, to stop. To pay attention not just to where you are going, but also to where you are, and to the gift that is being just there. The bell will lead us into silence, and music will lead us out. Bell
9 Blessings on your journey. Silence Music