Passages
It’s been fifty years since the late Gail Sheehy wrote her best-selling book “Passages” in which she described the average person’s life as a series of discreet chronological segments (i.e., decades, in her reading of the data). Each of these is defined by certain emotional and physiological qualities and, she argued, the “passage” from one stage of life to the next often evokes a crisis in terms of self image and the serious questioning of one’s purpose in life. From Sheehy’s perspective, however, such transitional traumas are often the harbinger of positive transformation, and thus they should be greeted with expectancy rather than panic.
In my own experience, life’s defining passages can’t be quite so neatly placed at ten year intervals. Classic Hinduism describes the journey as one in which the individual moves from the stage of childhood/student, to householder, to elder (a fourth stage – sannyasin – is assigned only to individuals who, as life winds down, devote themselves solely to spiritual pursuits). But in our own world, passages have become something of a muddle. It’s not unusual to meet incredibly sophisticated fourteen year-olds, as well as dependent young adults who seem trapped in the sticky amber of extended childhood. It appears that the stages of the journey can be either accelerated or retarded.
At the First Unitarian Society of Madison one of the highlights of the spring worship schedule was our “Coming of Age” service, featuring a group of early teens who had spent the past year thinking about and discussing the implications of this formative transition. For the service itself, each participant prepared a “faith statement” describing their personal spiritual and moral values to date. These were, quite naturally, of uneven quality. But every year a statement or two would feature so much depth, and was delivered with such polish, as to convince us oldsters of our own inadequacy.
My point is, “passages” really aren’t all that predictable. Each of us grows and changes at our own pace, and according to the circumstances in which we find ourselves. My own career as a “working adult” began long before I’d completed my schooling, while my parents were determined to step out of the world of work at age fifty, when many folks are just hitting their stride. And, while calling it quits does leave many retirees bereft and aimless, I left the parish ministry with a profound sense of both relief and completion. It was time to move on, and even the unanticipated and forced loss of my community and my professional legacy hasn’t dampened the pleasure I take in retirement.
Of course, I’m really only semi-retired, as attested by my schedule these past few months. Since May I have fulfilled three speaking commitments, conducted two memorial services for former parishioners, prepared the eulogy for a third, and made the final revisions for my new book – “Humanism: In Command or in Crisis?” – which is scheduled to go to press within weeks. But none of this has really interfered with a lifestyle no longer dictated by pressing weekly deadlines; one in which I’m able to attend to the needs of my failing mother (who soon turns 100) and enjoy an extended celebration of Trina’s and my 50th wedding anniversary.
For parish ministers, the ritual marking of the major passages in people’s lives is a critical component of the work we do and these, too, don’t occur at regular intervals. Over the course of nearly fifty years I conducted over seven-hundred weddings for straight and gay persons, who ranged in age from nineteen to eighty-one. Similarly, I presided at memorial services (over three-hundred and fifty) for both centenarians like my mother and, at the other end of the spectrum, stillborn infants. But whatever the stage of life, the importance of these “rites of passage” for the individuals involved was always abundantly clear to me. Accordingly, I tried to bring my full attention and my best pastoral self to bear on these events. While for me a nuptial or funeral might represent just one among many hundreds already under my belt, for the intimates themselves that hour could well be one of the holiest they will ever experience. That’s a truth I have tried hard never to forget.
As I move ever farther away from my own passage into elderhood (even here, gerontologists now divide our demographic into the “young old” the “middle old” and the “old old”) and immerse myself in the ongoing task of offloading items from a declining parent’s cluttered household, I do think about what this late-life stage is really all about. Turning to one of my favorite wisdom bearer’s for insight, I happened upon these lines, which I offer as an afterword:
Most older folks I know fret over unloading material goods they’ve collected over the years…. But the junk I really need to jettison in my old age is psychological junk – such as longtime convictions about what gives my life meaning that no longer serve me well…. I no longer ask, “What do I want to let go of, and what do I want to hang on to?” I ask instead, “What do I want to let go of, and what do I want to give myself to?” (Parker Palmer, “On the Brink of Everything”)
