Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Rev. K’s Kwerys

July 11, 2008
Rev. Kurt Kuhwald

In celebration of my turning 65 (July 10), I offer this conundrum of a statement, on which, along with my commentary below, I invite you to chew: Old age is not what you think!

Just writing the words of that statement raises a sense of expectation É as well as incredulity. Expectation comes from the response: “If it’s not what I think it is, then what is it?” And because there is no doubting that old age presents difficulties no one is ever truly prepared to accept gracefully (at least in this U.S. culture), expectation rises by way of some hope, hope that maybe I can find something out about old age that will make my passage into it easier and more welcome. It is certainly somewhat easier when one has the material means to live comfortably, which about half or more of the world’s population does not. But even with the security of means, the body’s journey into its inevitable decline in energy and function … is relentless. So the sense of incredulity at the statement “old age is not what you think” follows from the culturally sanctioned story that no matter what we may try to think (or hope), old age is awful, embarrassing and a great indignity.

Yet like a Zen Koan, the statement about old age pushes us to the edge of what we think we know. And … if you wrestle with it respectfully, it can offer a number of gems of insight. Here are two:

Whatever we think about anything is never the reality … at best it can only offer a model. Models are good, powerful tools, but one of the dangers in model-making is being deluded into thinking the model really states the reality. The reality, after all, is the reality … and nothing can duplicate nor explain it. It is what it is. Old age, too, is what it is … and no story about it, no set of statistics will ever tell us what it is like to live it. And therein is a great lesson of the conscious life (i.e. the spiritual journey): To get the full marrow of life (as Thoreau yearned) means, finally, to let our theories go and simply be.

What the culture tells us about old age is not only not the whole story, it is mostly wrong. It is wrong because it breaks faith with the great natural flow of existence: things are born into existence, they flourish, they weather (age), and they transform (through dissolution/deterioration/ disintegration) becoming a new form, or contributing to the support of many other forms. No thing, nothing, lasts forever! All things are impermanent.

In the next few weeks I’ll explore these ideas at UUCPA (the Elder Journey group on Tuesday, July 8, and in my sermon on July 13.) Let me know if you’d like to talk one-to-one about these ideas. We might discover that our conversation is not what we think.

— Peace out, Rev. Kurt