A THEOLOGY FOR THE LATTER HALF

by the Rev. Charles A. Gaines D.D.

A sermon delivered by Charles A. Gaines on February 11, 2007 in the West Valley Unitarian Universalist Church of Glendale, AZ

Here's something you may not know about St. Valentine's Day that occurs this Wednesday. Valentine was a third century bishop who served a congregation in Rome. The emperor at the time was Claudius II who, the story goes, was having trouble getting men to serve in his army during a time of war. Married men did not join the army because they did not want to leave their wives and families. So Claudius passed a law that did not permit any more marriages. His plan was to enlist all unmarried men needed to fight the war. Valentine did not support the new law and he kept performing marriage ceremonies secretly until he was caught and thrown in jail. He was told that he would eventually be put to death. While in jail Valentine fell in love with the jailer's daughter and would send her love notes. On the day Valentine was beheaded, February 14th, the story goes, he sent her a note signed, "Love from your Valentine."

I don't know about you, but I've noticed that I am getting older. I am now over seventy years old. It is a period defined as "young old", but it is very old from my grandson's perspective as he asks, "when are you going to die?" It's also old from the perspective of having outlived in years both my mother and my father - why I've seen over 11,000 more sunrises than my mother ever did.

But it's not as old as some here today. Still, only a few could be in my parents generation. And they might think that some things I say here sound quite child-like. It's all quite relative.

Thirty-one years ago when I turned forty, I could easily say that I felt younger than I do now. I ran every morning, over a 1,000 miles a year. Twenty-one years ago, when I turned fifty, I could say that I felt younger. I no longer smoked cigarettes and I could work fifty hours a week in ministry, with little effect. Eleven years ago when I was 60, I seem to remember doing twice as much as I do now. Nowadays, I do not have the energy and stamina I had ten or even six years ago, when I last worked full-time. Working here at West Valley last fall convinced me that I simply don't have the energy it takes to keep up with the demands of ministry.

Reality has happened. The signs of growing old are there. Not being able to burn the candle at both ends by staying up late at night and getting up early in the morning. Having to take twice as long to lose a pound of weight, which is now gained in half the time. Having only half the hair I used to; having to use reading glasses, which are never in the room I am at the time I need them; not hearing very well - with "what" becoming the common word in my vocabulary; losing things I should know are somewhere. Remembering less - or is it forgetting more? - names, especially a dreadful state of affairs for a minister.

I could go on with my personal list, but you get my point. There is a stage in life when we are no longer young enough to forget that we are housed in bodies that need to be taken care of, yet we're not so old that we can't put in an brief appearance of keeping up with those younger than we are, if only in the twinkling of an eye.

Definitions of this state of being older abound. On the one hand, being older means middle age - counting up to forty or fifty. Nothing very precise, but you're not young any longer - sorry! The older we get, the less precise is the stage we're in or approaching or the one we left. Take the stages that Eric Erikson describes in his classic "Childhood and Society." He lists eight stages: infancy, early childhood, the play stage, school age, adolescence, young adulthood, adulthood and later adulthood. Erikson is very specific when he describes what happens in the first six stages that occur before middle age. Those six stages cover about forty years. But he gets rather vague as he speaks about the last two stages: adulthood and later adulthood. It's as if nothing new happens during our last forty or more years to warrant more than a passing reference. Everything happens when we are young. We all know that! Doesn't television convince us of that "truth", as well as how our children are more aware of life's realities than we were at their age. Moreover, there has been a change, as people live longer and the number of older people in our society increases. Life begins at retirement for many, who once were too tired or ill to think that way.

Several years ago Daniel Levinson, author of "Seasons of a Man's Life" reported on a group of Harvard College graduates. His group included only men, and that is too bad. But when his study began, Harvard was a male-only college. Levinson was more specific about the middle years than Erikson was. He even distinguished between those in their early forties from those in their later forties and fifties.

Levinson describes a major difference between being younger and in the last half - the late 40s crowd and being older - in the 50s crowd, when you can sign up for AARP - has to do with how you question life. The younger last half people struggle with the question, "Why?" They wonder if they matter, if they can accept their disappointments, and if there are any new goals that will excite them as much as the old ones did. By the early to mid-fifties, Levinson says the overriding theme is to finalize or conclude what has been decided in the previous stage. The mental and emotional adjustments have been made. What is now required is to live and act out those behavior changes that result from the decisions. Having seen that decade go by, I can testify to that and more, since some of those behavior changes even become less relevant.

Levinson and Erikson can only describe trends. None of us is so predictable. There is really no stage which occurs like clockwork in everyone's life. You probably know some people who are still asking "why" even though they are now eighty years old. They seem in limbo. "Uproar" is a game, but at that age, it seems ludicrous.

There are other definitions of this later to mid-life period. Eda LaShane calls it the opportunity to reassess the claims we have made...and to give them up. She writes: "I deeply believe that for those of us who are middle aged - anywhere from forty-five to sixty-five, the most profound growing still lies ahead..."

I believe it.

Robert Raines approaches it another way. He says, "By middle age, we have lived long enough to see both horizons." I remember the Unitarian Universalist troubadour, Ric Maston, who once sang his song about growing older:

I turned forty a while ago
and came dribbling out of the locker room
ready to start the second half,
glancing at the scoreboard,
I saw that we are behind 7 to 84
and it came to me then
we ain't gonna win
and considering the score
I'm beginning to be damn glad
this particular game ain't gonna go on forever.
But don't take this to mean
I'm ready for the showers
Take it to mean I'm probably gonna
play one helluva a second half.
I told this to some kids in the court
next to mine and they laughed
But I don't think they understood how could they
playing in the first quarter only one point behind.

William Bridges, in his book "Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes," offers three aspects to the later age which are somewhat different from earlier stages. The first is the fact that our decisions are more often the response to what's happening to us rather than the result of what we initiate on our own. The comings-and-goings of our children and grandchildren sometimes cause us to postpone, adapt, or forget doing things that we may want to do. The increasing age of our own parents may force us to make arrangements in our life style and situation that we may not choose for ourselves if we were completely free. By sixty, a lot of that is over, and we can begin to live for ourselves, although some seventy-year-old children are still overseeing their parent's care. I also pity the grandmothers of small children, whose parents have left them as de-facto parents. "It has to be done," they will tell you. But it seems over-done to me.

According to the Hindu religious teachings, there are four stages of life, and the last stage begins the end of the householder stage. Only after the children completely leave home, or when you are a grandparent, are you free to become, as the Hindus say, a "forest dweller," someone who seeks her or his own fulfillment outside the social context. Huston Smith, the historian of religions, describes this by saying:

The time has come for the individual to begin his true adult education, to discover who he is and what life is all about. What is the secret of the "I" with which he has been on such intimate terms all these years yet which remains a stranger?... What lurks behind the world's facade, animating it, ordering it - and to what end?

Of course, today, many of our children keep coming back. They can't afford a home of their own, postpone marriage, pro-long independence - not for our sakes, mind you. I have always admired people my age who love to have their children living with them. Mine come for a visit, with their partners and chilren, bringing with them habits from ages ago, so we cook, pick up, clean, and with loving relief kiss them all goodbye; then go about repairing everything that broke and feel physically exhausted from the whole experience.

Or some have a parent move in with them. Its all part of a balancing act we play between the two adjacent generations. It's a time for responding to what others do to us rather than initiating results of our own.

A second aspect of life in our later stage is the transition from producing for to learning about oneself. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, describes it in this way:

Social usefulness is no longer an aim for him, although he does not question its desirability. Full aware as he is of the social unimportance of his creative activity, he looks upon it as a way of working out his own development.

William Bridges compares this happening to Homer's classic "Odyssey". Odysseus, the Greek hero in the Trojan War - a older man with a wife and nearly grown son back on the island of Ithaca, sets sail for home after being away at war for many years. The voyage, which should have taken about three weeks, lasts ten years. On one level, Homer's story is a recounting of what happens to Odysseus during that journey. But on a deeper level, Odysseus' voyage is an inward journey during which he is completely transformed by his experiences. In incident after incident, Odysseus discovers that he has crossed some mysterious line in his life. Everything he once worked for and succeeded at now seems to work against him.

One example is his attempt to sail safely between Scylla and Charybodis, the monster and the whirlpool. Before he set out, the sorceress, Circa explained to him that he could navigate the narrows only if he did not resist the dangers there. But Odysseus, remembering his old self, announces that he will never turn away from danger. "You fool!" Circa replies, "Do the works of war concern you still, and toil? Will you not yield to the immortal gods?"

Despite Circe's good intentions and warning, Odysseus ignores her. He puts on his famous armor, takes his two long spears, and goes up on the deck of his ship. There, standing at the prow, Homer pictures him as a little man on a fragile ship, among mighty waves, playing a role of hero when the time for heroism has passed.

It is interesting that through Homer's "Odyssey" Odysseus gains his insights from women. Literally, he is going home to his wife. But figuratively, he is also coming to terms with his feminine counterpart. It's a Jung describes middle age:

We might compare masculinity and femininity...to a particular store of substances of which, in the first half, unequal use is made. A man consumes his larger supply of masculine substance and has left over the smaller amount of feminine substance, which he must now put to use. It is the other way round with a woman; she allows her unused supply of masculinity to become active.

Odysseus goes through hell on his way home. His experience compares with the middle age crisis described in mod-psychology. Whatever terms we choose to use, the major transition comes as we learn about ourselves; when the armor we had put on as young idealists becomes too heavy to wear - and we look foolish in it anyway. So we stand there, facing life, able to be wounded at any moment, somewhat stooped by the loads we have carried - by time, itself - aware of our vulnerabilities. And of course, demonstrating a kind of courage we would have misunderstood and thought to be a weak wimp ten, twenty, or thirty years before.

The final aspect of this early-later stage is the evolving sense of grace. Grace is a spiritual word. I like it. Traditionally, grace meant that you are loved by God. You have to do nothing to earn it. If we expand on this definition, we could say there is a time in our later years when we come to terms with ourselves. It is when you conclude that, despite your wounds, flaws, idiosyncrasies and failures, you are a nice person. You are acceptable just as you are. Indeed, of all the people you know, you like to be yourself and not exchange places with anyone else. Oh, you may choose to have friends and socialize, and it is good to see your children and have your grandchildren visit. But when you are alone, that's okay and a very positive experience, too.

I am now ready to share with you my definition of the Theology for the Second Half. I call it, "What the hell theology." You see; it no longer makes a difference. You don't any longer need to be the company president or the department director. "What the hell!" You don't any longer need to keep up with the Smiths or Joneses or whomever. "What the hell!" You don't any longer need to be everything Masters and Johnson, Gail Sheehey, or Dr. Joyce Brothers say you should be. "What the hell!" You don't any longer need to be someone else who you never quite felt comfortable about being anyway. Do what you want - stay up late or get up early - it makes no difference except to yourself. When we were younger, many of us wanted to be like other people we admired. Then we got older and we wondered what other people thought of us. Then we began wondering what we thought of ourselves, never mind the others. Now, still older, we don't really give much attention to what we think even of ourselves. It's "What the Hell" theology, fine-tuned to a graceful complement.

I suppose that when this happens, your children and friends begin to see you as a bit odd. "What the hell!" You are, aren't' you? Admit it and get on with it, don't resent it with the armor of former times as Odysseus tried to do, standing on the prow of your ship, looking foolish. No, be oddly different in the specific way that divine spark shines within you. Oddly unique in that special person you are known as, just as when you were a child and your parents gave you a special name that you still carry after so many years.

I think we can all understand what Jenny Joseph was talking about in that wonderful poem "Warning":

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me,
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth,
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other peoples' gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
or only bread and pickles for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beer mats and things in boxes
But now we must have clothes to keep us dry
and pay our rent and not swear in the street
and set a good example for the children
We will have friends to dinner and read the newspapers.
But maybe I ought to practice a little now
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old and start to wear purple.

You see, it's called "What the hell theology." That period when our children leave, only to keep on returning, and life unfolds in memories of those glorious times when the war stories really happened, but we know how foolish we now look, dressed up in that armor, fighting at windmills from the prow of a ship, while the waves wash at our feet, giving us the chill that now never quite goes away, even in summer, as the stop-watches at the races run a second longer before we reach the finish line, and people cheer, not because we won, but because we finished.

It is called "What the hell theology." The period in middle age when time stands between morning and evening. It's afternoon now, and we practice how to say good-bye. Good-bye to small things, such as success, and our dreams, to perfect children and immortal parents: to passion and stored up energy. Its during these practice sessions that we become more comfortable and more friendly with ourselves, better able to say the good-bye to the big leave-taking that lies closer to the heart beat. It is all right to say good-bye. You are I are a part of the process - in the middle of it - the process of living and dying that is life, itself.

Prayer

Lord, Thou knowest better than I know myself that I am growing older, and will some day be old.
Keep me from getting talkative, and particularly from the fatal habit of thinking I must say something on every subject and on every occasion.
Release me from craving to try to staightened out somebody's affairs.
Keep my mind free from the recital of endless details; give me wings to get to the point.
I ask for grace enough to listen to the tales of others' pains.
Help me to endure them with patience.
But seal my lips on my own pains, they are increasing, and my love of rehearsing them is becoming sweeter as the years go by.
Teach me the lesson that occasionally it is possible that I may be mistaken.
Keep me reasonably sweet; I do not want to be a saint - some of so hard to live with - but a sour person is one of the crowning works of the devil.
Make me thoughtful, but not moody; helpful, but not bossy.
With my vast store of wisdom, it seems a pity not to use it all, but Thou knowest, Lord, that I want a few friends at the end.
Amen

Closing Words

I add my breath to your breath
that our days be long on the Earth,
that the days of our people may be long,
that we shall be as one person,
that we may finish our road together.

Pueblo prayer