Becoming a Sage

Reverend Kurt Kuhwald
July 13, 2008
Palo Alto, CA

Reading from Fall Down Get Up by Naomi Newman

Writing this sermon has been a hoot. I mean, who would have thought that an excerpt from a play in a small press publication by a 60ish female Jewish San Francisco Bay Area playwright that focused on coming out to her sister because of choosing a partner of the same sex … would have showed up on my desktop saying, “Use me!” … when I, ever the earnest sermon researcher, was trying to find materials to talk about becoming an elder … specifically a Sage? Who woulda thunk? A Sage, you may know, is an elder wise man with strong personal presence. The female equivalent is a Crone, a term elder wise women have reclaimed from a misguided, misogynist culture — you may remember the Five Crones, the recorder ensemble who played here back in June — wise indeed, and consummately focused they were.

The reading from the play by Naomi Newman ends with its own consummate and revelatory focus: “I’m old enough to know that even if I can’t control the voices in my head, I don’t have to listen to them. It’s one of the perks of getting old.” That turn of the story revealing elder power, coupled with the fact that this congregation knows something about the difficulties of loving across cultural boundaries because it affirms same sex relationships, unions and marriages … these two things, the turn of the story that reveals certain powerful gifts of growing old and the fact that by your courageous welcoming to people across the full spectrum of sexual orientation and gender identity, you would be able to get the joyful wonder and the pathos of the story … these two things grabbed me by the collar of my Rabbi identity and wouldn’t let me go … until I made them a direct part of this service on aging.

And why not raise, in my sermon, the issue of making courageous choices in old age — though sixty is hardly old nowadays? Why not challenge the culture with a double-edged sword that cuts both ways, against ageism and against heterosexism? It’s what living a committedly conscious life requires isn’t it, shaking the tree of egocentric certainty so that not only the boughs sway, but the roots dislodge.

So … Here I am … wanting to talk to you about my experience of turning 65. Here I am, finally admitting that I am rubbing bellies with the archetype of the elder Sage. Really! But I think the reason that this light-heartedness has inserted itself right at the beginning of this sermon is because Old Age is such a massive, painful, absolutely unavoidable and culturally targeted life experience — unless as a good one, as the saying goes, one happens to die young. (You’ve heard it: “The good die young.”) For isn’t it true, no matter how well off, how protected, how privileged, how entitled we have been in our lives … we are all going to fall under the hammer of the culture’s well-honed dismissal (dismissal that rises from another “d” word, “disgust”). We are all subject to the cultural dismissal of our worth and in fact of our very existence as elders.

Jack Nicholson, who appropriately played The Joker in one of the Batman films, got it correct culturally. He said, “The older you get the stronger the wind is — and it’s always in your face.”

The Sage and Crone, however, know differently — they know the truth of a different reality. First, they know that when Jack spoke those acerbic words he was playing the Joker — for the Joker is after all a caricature of the human. Second, the Crone and Sage, whose sagacity flows on an ample naturalness, a river of awareness well mineralized by its full-bodied friction with the stone-laden river bed of experience, the Crone and Sage know there is a different story about aging. It is a story that the indigenous peoples lived, a story that is grounded in truly living in the world — not in the head, where most of us moderns spend our time, but in the big, real, gritty world in which we live and move and have our being.

What I can say to you today, by way of focusing on the potentiality for sagacity and croneliness in our elder years, is to repeat the words that inspired my newsletter column for the current issue: “Old age is not what you think!” There is an exclamation point at the end of that statement: Old age is not what you think!

Outside of the very important fact that nothing we think can fully nor accurately describe anything in the real world — thoughts themselves, of course, are real phenomena, they just can’t ever capture the full reality of what they describe in the world — and that includes the experience of being old — outside of that fact, what we first don’t know about old age is its existential power.

We don’t know the truth of the existential power of old age. For the simple fact is that no other experience in life brings us to face our mortality with the same sweet indignity, nor the same blessed awareness of the inevitability of life’s deep processes, processes that act like a mordant substance, that is a healthily corrosive substance that etches away the superficiality of our very immature psyches. We don’t know about the existential power of old age because before we reach that blessed time of life we are … simply put … enthralled for years with the dream of immortality. That is why it is my supposition that the exasperated imperative, “Oh get real!” was first spoken by a seventy year old … to someone quite younger.

Youth, of course, has its own experience of oppression that is painful and thoroughly and inextricably a part of today’s culture, but that is fodder for another sermon entire. Now we need to dig deeper into the wonderfully uncivilized gifts of becoming old. I say uncivilized because what old age brings is the true opportunity — arising from the very structure of the universe itself that has created human beings in its image, that is, in the complex, organically vibrant, exquisitely self-organizing, replication of its own powerful, deep processes — what old age brings as a result is the opportunity to challenge empire at its core — for empire, you see, is born on the idea that we can have it all, if we are willing to be violent, wily, aggressive and Machiavellian enough in the service of greed and the lust for power. The Sage and the Crone, the Greek Chorus of the rabid urbanity of the modern world, know that unless a community, a culture, treats elders as the healthy and dangerous edge they truly are for the human journey, it will die of thirst and hunger — thirst and hunger for meaning, for relevance, and for the vital waters of life unsullied by lies about and fear of living authentically, living in full and rich relationship — which is the natural place for the human heart to thrive.

Old age is not what you think! Old age is not what you think, because, quoting Carl Gustav Jung, “A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species to which [she or] he belongs.” Jung knew something; Jung knew something for his statement back in the forties foreshadowed how this society has systematically buried the truth of longevity with its elevation of airbrushed models of archetypal youth, a model of youth that is a complete fiction — and from which young people suffer just as much as older people because it is a standard that intentionally creates anxiety, self-doubt, and even self-loathing, as well as dis-ease for the sake of driving consumerism … and therefore profit.

Old age is not what you think because it is a stage of life that is far healthier than we have been taught. For, you see, it is not only natural for a system, all systems, all things, in fact, to decline — it is a fundamental functioning fact — which, to me, logically means that it is healthy. Old age is not what you think because … it is an honor to grow old. It is an honor for one’s physical abilities to gradually diminish after a life long journey where our body was used well in service to life, used in full expression of the forces that brought it into existence. Behind the denial of that elegant process of decline — that’s right, I said “elegant process of decline” — behind that denial is the denial of death. Surely on of the gatest follies that humans are prone to cling to. One of the jokes that Philip Hodge contributed to the opening of our Elder Journey group last week, which I had the honor to facilitate, went something like this: “One of the things to be grateful about in old age is that wrinkles don’t hurt.”

From a stance of gratitude, whether about wrinkles or rewards, we’re better able to recognize gifts. One of the great theological gifts of Unitarian Universalism is that it has put love of life at the center of its vision. It’s in the UU seventh principle: the affirmation of the interdependent web of all existence, of which WE ARE a part. That is not only a bald statement of what we believe the facts are, it is a celebrative shout out about our love: we are alive and we are in love with life. We are alive in a matrix of livingness that is so finely and subtly and thoroughly interconnected that we must resort to a vague concept, “Oneness,” to be able to language its depth and richness — even so, limp model maker that it is, language, of course fails to tell the whole truth, once again. I think, however, that is it good to make the attempt. It’s my business, after all. (Yet the actual direct experience of Oneness is lovingly concrete … yet also vast … vast … vast.)

Now here is the relevance of what I’ve just said to ageing: As long as we are alive, there is glory, there is integrity, and there is the potential phenomena that is surely one of the true masterworks of the Universe itself — being a conscious human being. For: in all our animal frailty, all our physical messiness, all our current ecological retardedness — in all of that, our life is a radical expression of the Universe at its creative best — and this is especially true in the conscious experience of being alive and being in love.

Old age is not what you think! Old age is not what you think, because “A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species to which [she or] he belongs.” And one of the meanings is carried in just that phenomenon of loving life. When you get to advanced age folks, you get better at loving. Well, again, to be truthful, you have that opportunity, for ageing, like everything else in life, carries no guarantees. Yet … the possibility, the possibility … is there. Listen to another literary excerpt, this time by William Carlos Williams in his poem to his wife, after 51 years together:

At our age the imagination
across the sorry facts
lifts us
to make roses
stand before thorns.
Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse —
at least, blinded by the light,
young love is.
But we are older,
I to love
and you to be loved,
we have,
no matter how,
by our wills survived
to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our finger tips.
We will it so
and so it is
past all accident.

“We will it so … and so it is … past all accident.” The cogent point is, however, that they could not have willed it past all accident, had they not weathered many and severe accidents over a long time. Do not be misled: The great arc of a human life … in its ending years, gives us power.

If we mine the depths of what age gives, the sweetness and the simplicity of life is more evident, so much more palpable, and so much more available — for those, that is, who have remained conscious. One of the gifts of old age is that it brings us to that point where we are available to fully suck the marrow of life (what young Henry David Thoreau yearned for) — because we know where it is; we will not, of course, ever finally know what is it, but we know where it is to be found. Old age opens us to the marrow of life as no other time in the short-span/long-span of a human life. If we are committed to the examined life, it can be ours — as it can at no other time. For in old age, you see, as far as grasping life and reality in a truly felt and experiential way, so much is working in our favor:

By living long … we get to learn what is important, what is essential, what works and what doesn’t work.
Becoming an elder … means that death becomes our companion, and that is one of the stellar powers of the authentic spiritual/deep ethical life: To deeply sense our mortality. It is one of the surest guides along the razor’s edge that characterizes the way of the authentically maturing adult: on one side of the razor-like path of maturing there is the inflation of ego, on the other irrelevance.
When we are old … the superego/ego/id combination (the Parent, Child and Adult that has bound us so tightly, driven us so unmercifully simply … wears down. There is a liberty in old age that refreshes. Refreshes and affords a sense of empowerment that belies the culture’s projection of weakness and frailty of character.
As elders … the need to prove ourselves is either fulfilled or exhausted. In any case, we have a greater liberty to simply be ourselves — to be ourselves outside the drive we all carry in varying strengths, to prove our worth, usually by what work we do, or how durable our relationships are, and/or how much others need us.
Lots of years on the planet … also allow us to be ourselves in ways that are much gentler. Because the culture teaches us that without the vast mobility of youth, without its seemingly endless energy, life is too narrow — because of that conditioning we can miss the gift of becoming ourselves, selves of softness and care-full self regard. To be a Crone or a Sage requires attention and vigilence.

Does any of this, these things I’ve listed, guarantee that we will know the blessing of becoming a Sage or a Crone? No. No guarantees. What the potential that inherently resides in Old Age does offer us, nevertheless, is ours for the taking … and if we dare to choose it.

Marilyn Zuckerman, writer and publisher born in 1925, not long before she turned seventy wrote a poem called After Sixty. It ends this way:

There are places on this planet
where women past the menopause
put on the tribal robes
smoke pipes of wisdom
— fly

For both men and women … let the tribal robes be the dress of our spiritual/ethical depth: may we be clothed in depth; it is our elder heritage … let the smoke pipes of wisdom be the deep inhalation and exhalation of life going ever on through us … and let flight, let the soaring, be ours as we live the gift of ageing.

All My Relations.
Ashé. Amen. Ameen. Shalom & Blessed Be.
Gracias y Namasté.

Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Becoming a Sage

Reflection: Aging by Rita Hays