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Never Forsaken
Reverend Darcey Laine
October 5, 2003
Palo Alto, CA
When I was younger, I had very few role models for growing old. Most of my grandparents died before I was old enough to remember them, and Grandma lived half a continent away. One year, when I was in Junior High School, I volunteered 75 hours at a local nursing home as part of my Girl Scout experience. People were living in this home because they were near death, because they had some level of dementia, or because they could not care for themselves. The people I spent my afternoons with in the day room each week were experiencing some of the most awesome challenges a human is asked to face. Aging, in my mind, became equated with illness, with decay, with despair. I myself took on a feeling of despair about aging, and did not know where to turn to process these frightening feelings. The rampant ageism in our American Culture did not offer hope for the future. Instead, I learned from the images I saw on television and in the movies, that youth should be worshiped and age should be feared, or at least hidden from the public eye.
By the time I turned 30, and noticed those first lines around my eyes, and the new tenderness in my joints, I had plenty of friends in their 70s and 80s. For several years I had participated in a dream group where I was the youngest member by at least 40 years. Working in congregational life, I have served alongside scores of men and women in their 70s and 80s who create meaningful worship, shape long range vision, and run this and other congregations at all levels. Now I have spent enough time with elders who are powerful, wise, and warm to round out those nursing home images from decades before.
My work with this congregation has helped me realize how far we have to go, as a church and as a society: in witnessing the truth of our elders, in companioning their spiritual journeys. I am beginning to understand the important role of our religious community in advocating for just and compassionate relationships between elders and their families, between elders and the political and cultural realities of this time and place.
Our reading this morning from the Islamic tradition made me wonder what we as Unitarian Universalists can offer as an ethical or moral perspective on caring for our elders. Islam is a tradition grounded in law. Their laws affirm care, respect, and kindness for parents as they age. This care is not paternalistic however, as the law warns Muslims not to infantalize their elders, but to support them with the respect they are due. Contemporary western culture, on the other hand, often seems to give the message: children have no responsibility to their parents, and parents have no right to expect care from their children. Parents should worry about becoming a burden to their children, and children should not go out of their way to support parents as they age. The right of the child to a full and independent life is seen to be more important than the parents’ right to be assured of care and affectoion in their senior years. I bring this topic to the center of our worship time today in hopes that we can find some middle ground.
Gone are the days when the youngest daughter in a family would refrain from marrying or having children so she could stay at home and care for her family. Our UU principles uphold the right of the individual to create a life of meaning for his or her self. We question hard and fast rules. We flinch at the idea of "God's commands" in any part of life, especially under the guise of morality.
So what is the UU position on the role of elders in our communities? Certainly, since we affirm the worth and dignity of every person, it should go without saying that this principle applies to people with 4 score years of life behind them as to those with only 40 years lived. We also affirm justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. What would that look like in our relationship with our elders?
On the simplest level, we begin by affirming each individual’s right to have basic physical concerns met. We need to make sure that whenever a person begins to experience some of the losses often associate with age, that we as a community are there to provide a steady hand. Our laws and social safety net must provide medical care, safe housing, and assistance with food and personal care if that is needed. The difficult question is: who should provide this basic human care? In a perfect world, a family cares for its elder as the Qur’an suggests.
When I was a very small child my grandfather lived in our home. While he was healthy and well he built cabinets and other amazing things for us. After he was diagnosed with cancer, and could no longer walk down the 2 flights of stairs to the kitchen, my parents brought meals to his room, and navigated complicated care that I as a preschooler could not begin to understand. When Pop Pop died, he died in bed in his family’s home.
My husband’s family also provides an illustration of family care. My mother-in-law lives in a house next door to her father. She drops by Booboo’s house easily during the day, and Booboo comes over to feed chicken to the cat in the evening. Uncle Buddy, Cousin Andrea, and others in the family drop by for his famous soup on Sundays. He is literally at the heart of the family during his elder years.
But sometimes families are separated by thousands of miles, or the care someone needs is beyond the skill or capacity of her children. The Qur’an was written in an era before our contemporary understanding of child abuse. These rules were written at a time when Gay and Lesbian children did not come out to their parents and so risk being cut off from their parents by this truth telling. Any contemporary Unitarian Universalist ethic should account for all the myriad differences of unique families. Even so, we must somehow retain the clarity of the Islamic vision- that children have a responsibility to their parents. All of us as a community and as individuals should hold ourselves to a high standard of compassionate and just relationships with one another as we age.
We as Unitarian Universalists believe in Accessibility. We believe that no one should face physical or more subtle blocks to participating fully in this community. If we look around our church, we see some obvious symbols that we live this value. Last year a wheel chair ramp was added behind the pulpit here. We just finished a fundraising program to provide armchairs for members of our congregation who need more support getting into and out of their chairs. Other projects are under way, like the increased accessibility for bathrooms and hallways in the building program which will start later this winter. Though we amplify our worship to insure it can be heard by all, a number of our elders had to step down from committees last year because there is no amplification in meeting rooms. To extend our thinking about accessibility, I wonder- what would a ministry to home-bound members and friends of this congregation look like? Would we send tapes of worship services to those who can’t be with us in person? Would we have teams of volunteers who make regular visits to spread our warmth and sense of belonging outside these walls? I am confident that as we become aware of these issues we will continue to wrestle with them and to find concrete solutions.
But a deeper, more complex question is this. With respect to our 3rd principle -- Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations -- how are we taking care of the particular needs of the human spirit as we become elders? If we accept the challenge of addressing this question, we will have to confront societal and internalized ageism, and will find ourselves on the cutting edge of anti-oppression work. Betty Friedan, contemporary feminist scholar, has quantified what most of us have seen with our own eyes. People who have lived longer than 60 years are strangely missing from television shows, advertisements, even news magazines. Though the demographic represents more than 30% of the population, and is growing rapidly, people over 60 are found in less than 3% of media images.
In popular media as well as academia, age is commonly addressed in 1 of 2 ways. The first is the perceived societal need to delay or deny aging. Creams and chemicals, drugs and surgery are sold to an eager public to mask any signs of aging. Seniors are revered for appearing younger than they are. The second is to focus exclusively on the pathologies of age. Headlines focus on Alzheimer’s statistics, Nursing homes, cataracts, or an impending Social Security crisis. When we do see older people in advertisements, they are almost always selling us medicine of some kind. The image I had as a young girl, of people aging depressed and dependant in a nursing home is a common one in this country. A 1977 survey of politicians who make POLICY DECISIONS ABOUT AGING showed that some politicians thought 50% or more of people over 65 were in nursing homes. Only 1 out of 10 decision makers was aware that the actual statistic was 4.9%. In fact less than 10% of Americans will ever spend any time in a nursing home.(1)
“It takes so much effort to hold on to the illusion of youth, to keep the fear of age at bay, that in doing so we could fail to recognize the new qualities and strengths that might emerge” writes Friedan(2). Age is not a sickness, not a pathology. We are all aging every day. It is an integral part of our humanity. From what I’ve seen of life so far, the learning never stops. Growing never stops. I believe intuitively that a rich and deep life is available in every stage of life, and that our elder years must have their own particular wellspring which cannot be accessed by a child, or a householder like myself. When Betty Friedan found herself drawn to this question in the 1980s as a research fellow at Harvard, she noticed that the mostly young men and women who were studying age were very resistant to the idea of growth during aging, and were much more concerned with a paternalistic kind of care. Even among religious and psychological circles, there was support for thinking about death, but no substantive research being done on continuing maturation and development through the last third of life. In the same way that the self-hood of women had been hidden before the feminist revolution, the growing, thriving part of elders did not even have a language for expression. Now, 10 years after the publication of her book Fountain of Age, a number of people have begun to turn their attention towards the vital life force of elders, to their health instead of their pathology.
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi has spend the past few years beginning to articulate a path to that wellspring. He makes the distinction that not all people over a certain age are Elders. To become an Elder, he says, one must intentionally enter into a process of reflection and contemplation to accomplish these goals:
Harvesting/synthesizing the experiences of a lifetime Preparing for a thoughtful death Being most truly oneself
After this reflection, one enters a position of leadership from which the Elder becomes a sage for the community, sharing his or her perspective and wisdom to shape a more compassionate and just world(3). One is not automatically wise because one has lived for many years. People of any age are capable of shutting themselves off to learning and growth, and to their responsibility for leaving a transforming legacy in this world. But as a UU community, it is hard to imagine a more important responsibility than to encourage one another to spiritual growth during this challenging and crucial time of life.
By re-imagining aging, we liberate both those now old and younger people as they age. Many who face aging with trepidation, who cling to the cult of youth do so because they do not have role models living what it means to harvest a lifetime of wisdom in old age, to meet the very real physical and psychological challenges of aging with a vision of growing through those challenges to a greater depth of meaning and self-hood. It is an act, therefore, not only of personal self-interest to face our fears as we create a new paradigm for the elder years, but also an act of altruism for the generations that follow. My peers and I need those of you who are becoming elders to lead the way into this next stage of life, to embody a future. We in turn offer our respect for your years of experience, of service, and for building the society we now share. In my short life, I have never witnessed a time when the wisdom of every generation was needed more desperately than right now.
The psalmist implores:
"Do not cast me off in the time of old age; do not forsake me when my strength is spent"(4)
Let us covenant together never to forsake the bonds of respect and care that bind one generation to another.
Footnotes
What is your reaction to this sermon? Please send comments to Reverend Darcey Laine
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