by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given February 11, 2001

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

OPENING WORDS

Come in on this winter day, young and old alike,

to worship together,

to sing and speak together,

and see our story in a universal story.

Come, now and let us worship here together.

A couple of months ago, USA Today ran a cover story that talked about fashion designer Diane Gilman and how she uses a needle to inject herself twice a day with bioengineered human growth hormone. She is one of a number of celebrities, including Oliver Stone and Nick Nolte, and an estimated 250,000 other Americans, who do this every day.

The hormone has most commonly been used by athletes trying to enhance their performance, but these days it is used by people wanting to look more like 35 than 60. "It’s a miracle," Gilman says. "People who have known me and haven’t seen me in five years will stop in their tracks. They’ll say, ‘What’s happening to you? We’re aging, and you’re going in the other direction.’"

The injections cost about $1,000 per month, but that doesn’t stop a lot of people. And the reason is pretty clear: They don’t want to grow old.

The search for the fountain of youth or its equivalent has been going on for as long as people have had time to worry about getting older. When it comes to facing the last years of life, a lot of us simply don’t want to do that—and we’ll go to great lengths to avoid it.

One study on human growth hormone reports that people do feel less pain and do in fact feel younger. But I have to wonder if the body isn’t doing this on its own, what is happening to the body when these hormones are being injected. We’ll likely learn more as this goes on.

Currently, the oldest person living is thought to be about 120 years old, maybe 130. Americans born at the beginning of the 21^st century are expected to live almost 30 years longer than those born at the beginning of the 20^th century. In 1997, a newborn baby girl could expect to live 79 years and a boy 74 years, compared to 51 years for a girl and 48 years for a boy in 1900. It should also be noted that race plays a factor. The average white baby is expected to live six years longer than the average African-American baby.

What will happen in the future, of course, is anyone’s guess. There are some who expect that before too long people in this country could live to be 200 or 300 years old. That certainly gives me pause.

Not only do I think about all the resources that person would use, but I also try to imagine what it might look like for a 100-year-old person to be living in the body of a 30-year-old. At age 30, we are still coming into our identity and are worried a lot about what other people think of us. We’re concerned about how our body looks and how others think it looks. By the time we’re 100, chances are we’re not going to be as focused on the opinion of others. With the wisdom of 100 years of living, it may be a little confusing to be in a body so young. Time, I expect, will tell.

It is probably important to point out that of the information I’ve read on the subject of aging, nobody is saying that eventually we’re going to be able to live forever. That, I expect, could happen—the possibility is always out there. But for now we know that eventually, the body is going to go.

And yes, we’re all, eventually, going to die.

That is the reality, and it is probably the awareness of that reality and the subsequent fears that lead us, as a culture, to run away from aging. When we look at the images we see in advertisements, hardly anyone is over the age of 60, and in fact, very few people are over 35. Being old is certainly not chic in most circles. It is something to be avoided.

And so it is probably no surprise that when aging is spoken of, it is often referred to as the problem of aging. It is something to get through, and avoid as long as you can. Too often the story is framed as old geezers taking all they can away from the next generations. The story is not always so simple.

A Chinese story tells of a man who is too weak to work in the garden or help with the household chores. He just sits on the porch, gazing out across the fields, while his son tills the soil and pulls up weeds. One day, the son looks up at the old man and thinks, "What good is he now that he’s so old? All he does is eat up the food! I have a wife and children to think about. It’s time for him to be done with life!"

So the son makes a large wooden box, places it on a wheelbarrow, rolls it up to the porch, and says to the old man, "Father, get in." The father lies down in the box and the son puts the cover on, then wheels his father toward the cliff. At the edge of the cliff, the son hears a knock from inside the box. "Yes, father?" the son asks. The father replies, "Why don’t you just throw me off the cliff and save the box? Your children are going to need it one day."

And so we are going to get older. The question is what we do with that. A lot of how we see aging is a matter of perspective. Chances are that for most of us, old means being about 20 or 30 years older than we are at present. Amazing how perspective changes over time.

I remember my first grade teacher, Mrs. Hosking. When my class came along, she had probably been teaching for at least 20 years. And I remember as a child how old she seemed to me. I remember how thin she was and how wrinkly her skin seemed to be. And yet now, many years later, when I go back to my hometown, there she is, and she looks about the same as I remember her looking in first grade. I’m always kind of surprised that she is still alive.

The years pass by and we don’t always realize how quickly we are moving through those years. A couple weeks ago, when I received the invitation to my 20^th high school reunion this summer, I found myself just looking at it and thinking how in the world is it that I’m about to have my 20^th high school reunion. And I realize that it won’t be all that long before the 30^th and 40^th and probably the 50^th reunions are coming along as well.

More than one person has told me that receiving the enrollment form for the American Association of Retired Persons when they reach 50 comes as a bit of a surprise.

Former President Jimmy Carter tells the story of being out for breakfast and noticing when the bill comes that his portion is a little less than the others at his table. Being an honest man, he calls this to the attention of the waitress. An old farmer, overhearing the conversation says, "Your bill ain’t no mistake Mr. President. Before eight o’clock they give free coffee to senior citizens."

Each chapter in our life is significant. We come to see ourselves in relation to the world in some new way. And the chapters are not necessarily easy. I haven’t met a lot of people who say, "Gosh, I wish I were a teen-ager again." That can be a very difficult time as we come to define ourselves from our parents and others. We learn as we grow and some of that learning can be very difficult, whether we’re ready for the lesson or not.

One of the lessons that come with aging is the awareness that our bodies don’t work the way they used to, and this is not an easy reality to accept. We learn that simple tasks may cause more pain then we are used to, and it can come as a surprise to discover this. And at some point we may be faced with the reality that it may be hard for us to take care of ourselves.

A friend of mine in his early 70s is part of a long-term study on the effects of aging. He regularly goes for check-ups and also regularly answers questions about how he views his life and the process of getting older. A recent questionnaire asked to what extent he had thought about who would take care of him if he were to fall and fracture his hip and not able to care for himself for a few weeks. Would it be family, or friends, or would he need to go to a care facility? No matter what age we are, we may not want to face those questions, but that can also be the reality.

This might be the part that writer May Sarton was talking about when she said: "Nobody told me you had to be so courageous to be old."

She wrote in her book At Eighty Two: A Journal, "This extraordinary weather goes on. I have not been able to talk into this machine much lately because I have been in so much pain, again with that feeling of desperation. I do not know what to do with myself. But yesterday and today things were a little better.

"The thing with pain is that you must go ahead and do what you want to do even when it hurts. That’s how I managed to garden yesterday. Of course the satisfaction then outweighs the pain. Today I’m planning to put in three miserable-looking iris that I ordered."

Sarton in her writing does not try to dress it up and act as if the pain is not there. What she does is to simply be with the pain and also with the things that bring her joy. And from this comes a sense of reality, that she is living life in a kind of balance. It is not all good and not all bad, but simply what is.

Too often we think that if we avoid the pain we can make it go away, but it may be that in taking that approach we actually make it worse.

No matter what chapter of life we’re in, including old age, we continue to grow. We continue to understand the story of our life and how that story connects with some larger story. Part of our task is to be open to understanding what is happening.

With aging also comes a great deal of possibility. Throughout life we are often defined by the roles we have chosen for ourselves or the roles that others have chosen for us. Roles in our families, the role of parenthood, the roles of career and activity.

But as we age we often are more able to let go of those roles and come into ourselves more fully. If they are roles that no longer suit us, we can let them go. Now this is not always easy. There are stories of people who retire from a career and don’t know what to do with themselves. When Andrew Carnegie was asked why he kept working and never retired, he said, "I’ve forgotten how to do anything else." But for others, it is a liberating time, one when they can do things that they have not felt they were free to do before. With the coming of retirement or getting older, there is an opening to try new things.

And with this, we can come to see the story of our life in a different way. We can have more of a hand in creating the story we want to create. And with this comes a marvelous opportunity to come into our wisdom.

The writer Ram Dass says that wisdom involves the emptying and quieting of the mind, the application of the heart, and the alchemy of reason and feeling. In the wisdom mode, we’re standing back and viewing the whole, discerning what matters and what does not, weighing the meaning and depth of things.

In a culture that values technology over wisdom, it is not always easy to claim a new role for ourselves. A person was asked to share her wisdom in an elder circle, and after it was done said: "This is a role I’m totally unfamiliar with, because nobody’s ever asked me to be wise before."

But this coming into wisdom is probably the greatest gift that can come as we age. The professor Morrie Schwartz was interviewed by his former student, Mitch Albom, in the book "Tuesdays with Morrie," as he was dying from Lou Gehrig’s disease.

He says: "All this emphasis on youth—I don’t buy it." "Listen, I know what a misery being young can be, so don’t tell me it’s so great. … And in addition to all the miseries, the young are not wise. They have very little understanding about life. Who wants to live every day when you don’t know what’s going on? When people are manipulating you, telling you to buy this pair of jeans and you’ll be sexy—and you believe them! It’s such nonsense."

"As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it."

There is no right or wrong way to age. It will vary for each one of us depending upon our circumstances. But we are each called to find the way that works best for us, and to be open to what we still have to figure out. Ram Dass has described this chapter of life as the "don’t know phase of learning." It is when we can be uncertain and be OK with that, because we have lived life enough to know that it will be fine if we don’t have the answers. It is when we are not constrained in ways we have been in previous chapters of life and may have some opportunities to experiment about how we want to do things. And with this can come a great freedom. We can feel freer to make mistakes, to follow our hunches. We can experiment or we can simply choose to do nothing at all.

And if we can do this, we might find ourselves approaching a given situation in a way we might not have approached it before.

An older man is walking down the street one afternoon when he hears a voice saying, "Pssst—could ya help me out?" He looks around and there is nobody there.

He starts to walk on, and again he hears, "Pssst, could ya help me out?" Once again he stops and looks around, and again, there’s nobody to be seen. But this time he looks more carefully, and happens to glance down at the sidewalk, where he sees a huge frog.

Though he’s a little embarrassed to be talking to a frog he asks: "Did you speak to me?"

Much to his surprise, the frog answers: "Yes, indeed, could ya help me out?" The man is intrigued and asks, "Well, what do you want?"

The frog replies, "Well, I’m under a curse. If you would kiss me, I would be freed of the curse, and I would turn into a beautiful woman, who would love you and serve you. I would care for you, warm your bed, and make you so happy!"

The man stands there for a moment, reflecting, and then picks up the frog, puts it in his pocket, and walks on. After a few minutes, the frog says, "Hey! You forgot to kiss me."

And the man says, "You know, at my age, I think it might be more interesting to just carry around a talking frog."

As a person at the ripe old age of 38, I do know that what I know about aging is limited. I have the perspective of someone my age, and that is all the lived experience I’m going to have.

But I have come to learn a thing or two being in this congregation, where there are all generations represented. I remember one day after being here for a couple of years when I had an "a-ha" experience. I realized that growing old was not necessarily a matter of chronological age as much as it was a matter of attitude and perspective on the world. Not all 70-year-olds are the same, just like all 40-year-olds are not the same.

I came to recognize that in my family, there is a tendency at around age 65 or 70 to shift into a much quieter, waiting mode, and withdraw from the world. Where I grew up, I think it is almost expected, and may seem a little ostentatious to do otherwise. But I’ve come to learn that there is not just one way—that there is a way that each one of us comes to discern our path. It comes as we learn the balance of limitations on the body, but also come into the freedom of time and discerning how it is we want to use that time. We come to see life in a broader context and understand a little more fully how life moves forward.

The great Cleveland Indians pitcher Satchel Paige was kept from playing baseball for many years because of discrimination, and when he was finally able to play, he was elderly by major league standards. When his chronological age was in the mid-40s, he was able to strike out players in their 20s. Age did not stop him. When a reporter asked him how he could still pitch at 47, he said, "How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?"

And perhaps that is the point. Aging well is a matter of growing into our wisdom and discerning how it is we can bring our wisdom into the world.

It is a matter of making good use of memory but not allowing ourselves to live only in memory. It is a matter of knowing and understanding the lived experiences we have been a part of and taking them into the understanding we make of the future. And as we have the potential to live longer and longer, cultivating this wisdom will become more and more important. We will be asked to have the wisdom to know what it means to have quality in life and what we want that life to look like.

Aging is not a matter of staying young forever, but staying in touch with the ebb and flow of life and, over time, continuing to grow into the person we are called to become.

The writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh died last week at age 94, and these are her words:

"How can one learn to live through the ebb-times of one’s existence? How can one learn to take the trough of the wave? It is easier to understand here on the beach, where the breathlessly still ebb tides reveal another life below the level which mortals usually reach."

"Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the relationship is valid. And my shells? I can sweep them all into my pocket. They are only there to remind me that the sea recedes and returns eternally."

In whatever chapter of life we find ourselves in, may we find the meaning there is to find in that chapter. May we bring that meaning into the future, and use it in service of the generations that will follow us. Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of life, open us to the wisdom we carry within us, in each day of our lives may we grow and find new meaning for this one wild and precious life we have been given. May we not fear aging, but embrace it and live it is fully as we are able. In this living may we come to new understandings of ourselves in the midst of this world. May we bring the wisdom we have to help and guide the generations that will follow us. Amen.

BENEDICTION

As long as you have breath, may you sing your song, and always find a way to yes. Go in love and go in peace this day. Amen.

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Copyright 2001, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.