ON “SAGING” WHILE AGING

A Sermon by Robert M. Eddy
delivered 17 October 1999
The Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola

Before beginning my own remarks, I’d like to quote from three sources:
The first is from Gail Sheehy’s 1995 book New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time "The Age of Integrity [65 and beyond] is primarily a stage of spiritual growth. . . . It should be a daily exercise in the third age to mark the moment. The present never ages. Each moment is like a snowflake, unique, unspoiled, unrepeatable, and can be appreciated in its suprisingness. . . . ."
[I]nstead of trying to maximize our control over our environment, a goal that was perfectly appropriate to the earlier Age of Mastery [40 to 65] now we must cultivate greater appreciation and acceptance of that which we can’t control.
Some of the losses of Second Adulthood [age 45 on] are inconsolable losses. To accept them without bitterness usually requires making a greater effort to discern the universal intelligence or spiritual force that is operating behind the changes and losses we now notice daily
[A]s long as we constantly try to relive old hurts, escape old fears, and impose control over the uncontrollable, we will continue to accumulate stress and accelerate the [physical] aging process that chronic stress chemicals produce. The attitude that works is "....learning to accept your life not as a series of random events but as a path of awakening."
Gail Sheehy, New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time, (N.Y. Random House) 1995The second comes from Eugene C. Bianchi’s 1992 book Aging as a Spiritual Journey, which is based on extensive interviews of "senior citizens". "Throughout the chapters on midlife and elderhood we . . . emphasized the double and inter linking themes of [1] the need for a contemplative middle age and [2] an old age turned [outward] toward the service of the world. The dominant culture of our time stands against both of these orientations. It would have middle-aged persons [that is persons between 40 and 60] compete all the harder according to the "success" patterns of youth [.] . . . [O]ur social ethos encourages the elderly in various ways to withdraw from societies’ major issues.
Early preparation for old age is [the] important advice that the [elderly] interviewees give to younger persons . . . Midlife [they tell us, is] the most crucial preparatory time for elderhood."
Eugene C. Bianchi, Aging as a Spiritual Journey (N.Y. Crossroads publishing, 1992, p 225, 226)
The third selection is a bit of humor from cyberspace that came off the Internet Friday morning. Those of you who are baby boomers or older will appreciate the contrast between the 60’s and the 90’s.
Then: Acid rock
Now: Acid reflux.
Then: Watching John Glenn's historic flight with your parents.
Now: Watching John Glenn's historic flight with your Grandkids.
Then: Trying to look like Marlon Brando or Elizabeth Taylor.
Now: Trying not to look like Marlon Brando or Elizabeth Taylor.
Then: Popping pills, smoking joints.
Now: Popping joints.
Then: Getting out to a new, hip, joint.
Now: Getting a new hip joint.
Then: The Grateful Dead.
Now: Dr. Kevorkian.
We laugh, but the truth of the matter is that many who in 1969 proclaimed, never trust anyone over 30, now find themselves in their fifties looking down the road to "geezerhood." And they find that they carry with them the attitudes of the 1960’s regarding aging. Perhaps you are one of those persons.
Last week I was talking with a friend who is 8 years younger than I am. He said, "I don’t like what’s happening to my body." I replied, "I like very much what’s happening to your Spirit." For my friend is on a spiritual quest. He is very consciously, very intentionally, "saging", a word he dislikes for it turns a noun into a verb. But that’s exactly what I intend. I want you to recognize that "to sage" is a verb - at least when it’s not used as the name of a spice - A sage is not a wise person who has all the answers; who is "fully articulated", and has achieved the ultimate level of spiritual development. We should abandon the noun and praise "sagers", those who are on a spiritual quest.
We can’t avoid aging no matter how hard we try. But it’s easy to avoid "saging". It’s easy to reach old age without having ever embarked on the quest for wisdom - the search for spiritual development the attempt to consciously try to improve one’s character.
There has been a great deal written in recent years on this process, some in secular, some in religious terms. Last week we were treated to an excellent presentation by Juli Patton of Caroline Myss’s book Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing. So good was the presentation, in fact, that I went out and bought the book. I’ve scanned it and read about a quarter. The first half I find a little hard to take, for Dr. Myss - it’s a Ph.D. not an M.D. Dr. Myss is a "medical intuitive". She does not claim to be a healer,. She writes:
"Since ... 1983, I have worked whole heatedly as a medical intuitive’ This means that I use my intuitive ability to help people understand the emotional, psychological, and spiritual energy that lies at the root of their illness, [their] dis-ease, or life crisis." My secular humanist mind finds her methods hard to credit, but I long ago learned that because I’m unable to explain a phenomenon doesn’t mean the phenomenon is an illusion or delusion. Think about how "ridiculous" the claim that we are surrounded by radio waves carrying music, news, sermons, pictures - all kinds of information - think how ridiculous that would have seemed to most people 100 years ago. Of course, the fact that I cannot explain a phenomenon doesn’t prove that somebody else's explanation is correct either.
Many people, including many M.D.’s testify to the reality of Carolyn Myss’s diagnostic abilities. Who am I to call them deluded? And who am I to question the theory of "energy flow" she uses to explain the phenomena? The ideas of Chi, and Pranah and Spirit have ancient credentials. and many find the healing practices associated with those ideas more helpful than the allopathic medicine our health plans are willing to subsidize. But whether "scientific" or "alternative" medicine is your preference there is one fact that you cannot avoid: You are aging. Even when you were a child you were aging. There were changes taking place which were altering your body irrevocably. You couldn’t live if your body did not change. Some of us can, in mature life, by changes of diet and exercise and medication, improve the condition of our bodies - for a time. We cannot however, forever delay the onset of old age. We like to use euphemisms, like "chronologically gifted", "mature" "senior citizens" but we all know in our heart of hearts that we are growing - old or are old. I’m very lucky. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that growing old was something to grieve over. In fact, in some respects, it’s something I’ve looked forward to.
We are all growing older. But are we growing wiser? How can we tell? Someone in the worship workshop yesterday commented that the problem she has with all the "stages of development" literature she has seen is that they seem to be written by persons with one personality type who are ranking everyone else's personality type on a lower level than their own. We call this "ethnocentrism" when it’s done with cultures. She may be right and it’s a caution we should keep in mind, and yet, and yet, there seems to be agreement across all cultures on what is desirable at various stages of life. A global perspective of the progression of insights and commitments that are natural as one ages.
Myss, in her book, tries to show the parallelism between the Hindu Chakras, the seven Roman Catholic Sacraments and her interpretation of Kaballa, the esoteric Jewish tradition. As a Humanist, I have no problem agreeing that there are such parallelisms. We are, after all, members of one species. We share one genetic heritage. Though we are of many cultures. Though we have diverse ways of explaining. Though we use many metaphors to picture "spiritual development" , what I am calling, "saging" - is a process common to us all.
If "spiritual development" or "saging" bothers you, some other terms are "enlightenment", "faith development" , "individuation" "growing in the Spirit". "realizing one’s human potential" Among 19th century Unitarians it was called, "self development" or "Salvation by Character". Saging is called by many names but it is universal and I believe as natural to humans as making milk is to a cow.
So we are all aging, are we saging?. Most of us have entered what Gail Sheeney called, "The second Adulthood" a stage of development she discovered in the twenty years between publishing her book "Passages" in 1974 and "New Passages" in 1994. As she herself passed from the first to the second adulthood. She considered second adulthood the time between 45 and 65.
Now that I’ve passed 65, I should, according to Sheehy, be looking back on that bridge labeled "Passage to the Age of Integrity." But I have a problem. In every age of my life I have sought integrity. I believe a bridge to "the age of integrity" is available at every stage of life. I see nothing in the religious literature of the world that puts a fence around wisdom and says, "You’re not old enough. Come back in thirty years." It may be more difficult to become a wise early in life but some do achieve it. I have known some very wise teenagers and some very foolish octogenarians.
Nevertheless, when we reach the stage in life where the illusions of childhood and youth and early adulthood no longer protect us we are better equipped to seek integrity - "wisdom" in the traditional language. Furthermore, that which in the past seemed a luxury now becomes an imperative. Why? Because if I fail to become wise during my last years, then, when the infirmities of aging become not only probable but inevitable, I may live those years in confusion or despair.
One who did not fall victim to confusion or despair, though his body became totally infirm, was Morrie Schwartz.
Like many of you I saw at least one of the three interviews that Larry King did with Morrie, but until Monday I had not read Tuesdays with Morrie, the beautiful book his former student, Mitch Albom wrote describing Morrie’s final weeks of life. Once I started reading it on Monday morning I could not put it down. I read it at one sitting. I recommend it to you all, for this dying professor emeritus from Brandize truly learned "the fine art of dying." He had been "saging" all his life, but as Lou Gherig’s disease gradually paralyzed more and more of his body, his spirit seemed to rise to ever greater heights. He passed through all seven of the Chakra’s described in Myss’s book and out of this world like the fading notes of a recessional of monks
In Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom writes:
"It took some getting used to", Morrie admitted, because it was , in a way, complete surrender to the disease. The most personal and basic things had now been taken from him - going to the bathroom, wiping his nose, washing his private parts. With the exception of breathing and swallowing his food, he was dependent on others for nearly everything."
[Morrie said] "it’s like going back to being a child again. Someone to bathe you. Someone to lift you. We all know how to be a child. It’s inside all of us. For me, it’s just remembering how to enjoy it.
"The truth is, when our mothers held us, rocked us, stroked our heads - none of us ever got enough of that. We all yearn in some way to return to those days when we were completely taken care of - unconditional love, unconditional attention. Most of us didn’t get enough."
Mitch responds, "I know I didn’t". and writes,
I looked at Morrie and I suddenly knew why he so enjoyed my leaning over and adjusting his microphone, or fussing with the pillows, or wiping his eyes. Human touch. At seventy-eight, he was giving as an adult and taking as a child." (page 115)
One of my favorite aphorisms is "there’s something to be learned from this." I admire Morrie Schultz because he found something to learn and to share in what most of us would envision as a hell on earth. It has seemed ironic to me that the former Superman, Christopher Reeve, is now a quadriplegic and the greatest mathematical physicist of our age, Stephen Hawking, is, like Morrie, a brilliant mind locked in a body as helpless as a new born child’s. Is the Universe trying to teach us something here? I don’t know.
But this I do know. Life has taught me to find in every problem a new possibility; in every pain a new appreciation. Like many of you I have developed a cataract in one of my eyes. Is there something to be learned from this? There is. The other day I had closed my right eye, the one with the cataract, to read a sign. I looked up at the sky and trees, and suddenly I realized how bright and beautiful everything looked through my good eye. Suddenly, I realized that I had with me the means to appreciate sight any time I wanted. Simply by looking first through the cataract and then through my good left eye. I never really appreciated the gift of sight before I developed that cataract.
I hope I am saging as well as aging. Like my friend I do not like what is happening to my body, it’s inevitable decay. But I am grateful for the new awarenesses that come to me when I accept that aging process. My very aging is helping my saging. May it be so, also, with you.

Closing Words
"Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what peace there may be in silence... Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself."
Max Ehrman, 1872 - 1945