April 10, 2005 II Corinthians 4:7-18
ON TURNING 39 FOR THE 16th TIME
The poet T.S. Eliot once wrote that “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain."
Personally, I’ve always enjoyed April. I’ve identified more with the writer of the Old Testament Song of Songs, who wrote, “Arise my love, my fair one, and come away. For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth and the time of singing has come.” April is the month for cherry blossoms and tulips, of being outdoors in the longer and warmer daylight hours; the month of our wedding anniversary, and the return of baseball.
Then again, maybe Eliot was not entirely wrong, for April also brings cruel reminders of human tragedy – the anniversaries of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln, the sinking of the Titanic. It even has a day in the UCC calendar to remember the Armenian genocide. And then there’s tax day, April 15th! And now April will be remembered as the month in which was pope was buried and a prince was married!
Finally, near the end of the month comes the day which for me has been both a day for celebration and cruelty, the 15th anniversary of my 39th birthday, the day I stopped counting. I guess having a birthday is better than not having one, and while I’m certainly not a senior citizen yet, I'm definitely in the middle of middle age -- middle age being defined as that time of life when your hair turns from gray to black; or begins to grow back; or when your spouse tells you to pull in your stomach and your already have; or when you're not inclined to exercise anything but caution; when you can do as much as you always have but would rather not; when your back goes out more than you do; when you whisper to a friend, "I'm having an affair" and they respond, "Oh? Who's catering?" or when you get cable-TV just for the Weather Channel.
It’s the time when you get cards that say something like "You're 50? But you look so natural and lifelike!" Those really made me feel my age. But maybe I'm supposed to feel my age! It was Maggie Kuhn, founder of the senior citizen activist group the Gray Panthers, who asserted, "We deny that aging is a toilsome treadmill grinding to a tragic halt as the years pile up. We affirm aging as a life-spanning process of growth and development running from birth to death." And we're all aging, we're all in this human pilgrimage together. We share the same hopes and fears, have the same dreams and needs whatever chronological age we happen to be. The child wishing acceptance, the adolescent struggling to find an identity, the young adult desiring security, the mid-lifer seeking a purpose, the older person needing to be needed and appreciated -- we're all in the same boat. Some may be better able to row, some more adept at charting the course, some more suited to the galley, but we are in the same boat, as part of the human family. And who among us could not identify at least at times with the Psalmist who laments, "O God from my youth you have taught me...so even unto old age and gray hairs, do not forsake me....Do not cast me off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength is spent." We don't want to be abandoned or forgotten. There is something deep within the human person which seeks to be alive and in the mainstream of life. We want to live until we die, to keep growing as we age, live as God intended we should.
And yet, in our culture we seem to fear aging. We worship at the Fountain of Youth, with aging something to be avoided at all costs. Why are so many people hesitant to reveal their age? And why did Jack Benny strike such a responsive chord each time he celebrated his thirty-ninth birthday, which he did annually for nearly forty years? Recently I read about a company which offers senior citizens a 10% discount on their products. They've had to change their policy because too many people were offended when the price break was offered them -- they made too many enemies and lost too many sales. You can still get the discount, but you have to ask for it yourself!
The only exception to this, I have observed, seems to be that when people pass eighty, their attitude changes, and they are often pleased and proud to tell how old they are. They come to terms with their mortality, and experience a new sense of freedom to be themselves and enjoy the days they are given. And perhaps there are some things we could learn from them, who tell us that aging really has more to do with attitudes than with arteries. Someone once said, age is largely a matter of mind over matter: If you don't mind, it doesn't matter!
So here are some stories from my files. There was a woman in a nursing home who was given a party to celebrate her hundredth birthday. Her mind was keenly alert and she was enjoying all the excitement of the party. A reporter from the local newspaper came to interview her, and asked, "Do you have any children?" She smiled and replied without hesitation, "Not yet!"
Another woman had a similar attitude: her son was trying to encourage his elderly mother to enjoy the money she had accumulated through years of frugal living. "Mother," he said, "You have enough money to last you until you're a hundred!" "And then what'll I do?" she replied.
You see, the state of one's attitudes is far more important than the state of one's arteries, or chronological age in determining the quality of life. The right kind of inner attitude and faith can transcend illness, and aging, and time itself. And the most dramatic evidence comes from those who are able to see the humor in their own aging. A few more stories:
In his extreme old age, John Quincy Adams was slowly walking down a street in Boston. An old friend accosted him and shaking his trembling hand asked, "And how is John Quincy Adams today?"
The ex-president replied, "Thank you, John Quincy Adams is well, quite well, I thank you. But the house in which he lives at present is becoming quite dilapidated. It is tottering upon its foundations. Time and the seasons have nearly destroyed it. Its roof is pretty well worn out. Its walls are much shattered and it trembles with every wind. The old tenement is becoming almost uninhabitable, and I think John Quincy Adams will have to move out of it soon. But, he, himself is quite well, quite well. Thank you."
As Paul wrote in our scripture lesson: "So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day...For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens."
When Oliver Wendell Holmes was still on the Supreme Court Bench, he and Justice Brandeis took walks every afternoon. On one of those occasions Holmes, then 92 years of age, paused to gaze in frank admiration at a beautiful young woman who passed them by. He even turned to look at her as she continued down the street. Then, turning to Brandeis, he sighed, and said, "Oh! What I wouldn't give to be 70 again!"
To celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary, a couple returned to their honeymoon hotel. After retiring, the wife said, "Darling, do you remember how you used to stroke my hair?" And so, he stroked her hair. She reminded him of the way they cuddled, and so they did. With a sigh, she said, "Won't you nibble my ear again?" And with that, the husband got out of bed and started to leave the room. The wife sat up in bed, upset, and demanded, "Where are you going?" He replied, "Why....to get my teeth, of course!"
It's all a matter of the attitude we choose: growing old, or old and growing, as Psychologist Carl Rogers put it. St. Paul knew the secret of the right kind of attitude when he wrote to the Corinthians. He knew that the age of the outer body was not a good measurement of the inner condition of the soul. He describes the outer nature as winding down, even wasting away, while the inner self is born as a new, or renewed creature. At any age one can find new life through a new attitude. As Emily Dickinson said, "We turn not older with years, but newer every day."
Douglas MacArthur said on his 75th birthday: "Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul... In the central place of every heart, there is a recording chamber; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, and courage, so long are you young. When the wires are all down, and your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and only then, are you grown old." Or, as my mother’s refrigerator magnet says, “You don’t grow old; you get old when you stop growing.”
Death comes when we stop living. A soul begins to perish when it loses all sense of wonder, whether on this side of the grave or beyond. Perhaps that what Jesus had in mind when he told Nicodemus, an old man who came to him under the cloak of darkness, that if he wanted eternal life, he must be born anew. Nicodemus wondered how an old man could return to the womb and start out again. Jesus told him that unless he had a new birth of spirit, he would never know the kingdom of God. Nicodemus, you see, had become rigid, hidebound, stodgy. He needed to open up, take in the world out there in all its freshness, see things through the eyes of a child, as if for the first time, learn some new tricks, embrace a new attitude. And Jesus did not believe that it was too late for him, in spite of his advanced age. Nor is it too late for any of us.
Remember that Jesus said, "Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it." To do that requires not a change of age, but a change of attitude. And this hour, when we gather to worship, is our real "attitude adjustment hour", when we can once again open ourselves to the wonders of God's community, the leading of God's Spirit, and the claim of Christ on our lives and the see the world and ourselves with new eyes..
I wonder if with the right attitude, we might even come to see the aging process itself as a gift from God. UCC Pastor Gordon Dalby has written, "In a world that worships human accomp-lishments, the process of aging remains the great embarrassment that laughs in the face of all our greatest human pretensions.....Because those pretensions of our own power keep us clinging to our disastrously selfish illusions and fantasies; consequently we do not let go and allow God's painful but renewing vision of love for one another to take over our lives. We want a push-button God who rescues us when our human powers fail; a disposable God we can cast off when the danger has passed....
"Yet there is something about aging that exorcises this particular idolatry. There is something about the process of aging that peels away our defenses and exposes us for who we really are underneath. And if aging is not a disease, but a natural part of life, then surely God's hand must be at work in it. God is the great `Fisher' of men and women, and the process of aging is God's way of reeling us in, so to speak, reminding us that we do not belong to ourselves alone and never did."
Mystery writer Agatha Christie's second husband was a famed archeologist, Lord Mallowan. Someone once asked her what it was like being married to an archeologist, and she answered, "It's wonderful! The older I get, the more interested he is in me!"
That's the way all our lives should be: The deeper we get into them, the better they should get. Not just more interesting, but more precious, more full, more fulfilled. We should know with St. Paul that though we "have this treasure in earthen vessels (clay pots, in NRSV), God will not abandon us. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner strength is renewed every day."
As I turn 39 for the 16th time, I take great comfort in that. And I also turn to a children's book, the VELVETEEN RABBIT, in which this stuffed toy animal is trying very hard to become "real", which is the point of all human growth. One day the rabbit asks his friend the Skin Horse, who has been around the nursery for quite some time, about this process -- Does it hurt?
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up, or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the skin horse, "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are real, you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
