“Thinking About Accidentally Getting Old” June 18, 2023 Dr. Roger Ray
“How to Grow Old,”
Bertrand Russell
Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietl
y, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
My daughter is living with me this summer, working remotely, while she makes a move from Denver to Chicago for her work. Towing a small UHaul behind my little SUV to get her here proved to be too much for my transmission. Thankfully, we made it here before it went out entirely and had to be rebuilt.
The shop kept my car for a couple of weeks and when I got it back, along with the bill for a few thousand dollars, I discovered that I had been the victim of a very bazaar crime. Someone had taken everything from inside the car. Nothing of great value, but, seriously they got everything, the owner’s manual, insurance cards, an umbrella, an ice scrapper, some copies of books that I wrote which have not been horribly popular to my audience, let alone to petty thieves, but the oddest thing they took was one of the headrests from the backseat.
My daughter felt terrible about my expensive repair, caused by her move, but the theft was just one injustice too much for her. She demanded that the transmission shop owner reimburse me for the loss of my things from the car while it was in his care. I kept trying to assure her that it was no big deal.
I never used the headrest in the back seat anyway and the owner’s manual is available online. But she refused to leave it alone. She was going to get justice if she had to turn into Bruce Willis in a Die-Hard movie.
I tried not to hear as she explained in an ever louder voice to the shop owner why he absolutely must replace my stolen items and when he repeatedly objected, my lovely 34 year old princess said to him, “This is elder abuse! My dad is a senior citizen and he doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment!”
Suddenly the headrest and the umbrella took on a different dimension. Her rage was not simply because my venial loss was unjust, it was because I, as a vulnerable senior citizen, was being abused. What is slightly even more painful is that this argument worked on the shop owner who couldn’t be much younger than I am.
I sometimes take advantage of a senior discount at a movie theater or a store but that’s just a number and I don’t think about it much, but realizing the larger truth, which is more factual than I care to acknowledge, is that I have accidentally gotten old. I didn’t mean to. It happened gradually, so gradually that unless I happen to be looking into a mirror, I still think of myself as that 35-year-old lion of the pulpit, ready to take on presidents and kings in pursuit of social justice, climate legislation, and a more just economy. But, in truth, it has been years since I was a runner and now, I don’t even walk very fast. I have arthritis in my thumbs that makes me hand a stubborn jar to my daughter for her to open. I often get dizzy when I stand up and even my racquetball partners often stop the game to ask, “Are you OK?” as if the “big one” might be right around the corner.
I have been semi-retired for a couple of years and at the end of this year I will retire entirely, and I will likely move near the ocean somewhere in Florida where I can sit among my peers and criticize the government full-time.
I hope that I will occasionally get an invitation to preach or to add a new video to our YouTube channel. I can’t imagine the anxiety most of you must feel at the thought of being permanently deprived of knowing my opinion about absolutely everything. Before there was a FaceBook or Twitter, I understood that the whole world has a right to my opinion. I will strive to not disappoint you.
But we live in a culture that worships youth. I was just a kid when I first read the quote from the former head of Revlon where he said, “In the factory we manufacture cosmetics but in the store we sell hope.” When I was little, my mom was still in her 40’s, she and most of the ladies at church, died their hair, wore, not just makeup but also wigs and girdles, to make themselves look younger. Now, science has cursed women with myriad expensive and dangerous ways to deny the reality of aging, and now Botox injections are also being marketed to men and it is no longer just Johnny Depp who wears eye makeup all of the time. There is a none-too-sublet message in culture that your value as a person goes down with each successive birthday.
But factually, I know a whole lot more than I knew when I was 35. In fact, a few years ago I destroyed everything I had ever written before I was 50 because I didn’t want anyone to ever see it. I am well aware that employers, even churches, want to hire people in their 30’s, in spite of their ignorance and pompous self-confidence. We are a culture that prefers image over substance, and we are not alone in that. I have traveled a lot over the past few years, and I can tell you that plastic surgery is apparently more common in places like Thailand and Brazil than it is here in the USA.
And as sad and pathetic as the desperation expressed in such measures can be, religion can be even worse.
How many funerals have you been to where the preacher make promises about an imaginary world in which the deceased gets new eyes and ears, new legs and feet, no more disability, no more infirmity or disease.
I’m still waiting to hear them promise that in heaven, cheesecake isn’t fattening.
I realize that my stark realism is sometimes painful to hear, but dear friends, mortality is a one-way ticket. Every cradle swings over a grave and there is no surgery, there are no cosmetics, and there is no religion that can change the inevitable truth that life is short and for those of us who are fortunate to have a longer rather than a shorter life, we will live through loss of vitality even if modern science can help us to keep our teeth and renew our knees we are still falling apart on our way to our final resting place.
What I want to say today is that age isn’t just an irrational robbery that takes things like good looks and athletic prowess away from us. Old age also has gifts to give to us if we are willing to receive them. There are things that you can only learn through experience. In fact, there are things that you can only learn through repeated failure. There is wisdom that can be mined from 20,000 days of living that you can’t learn at Harvard or Yale.
When he was 81 years old, the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, wrote an essay entitled “How to Grow Old.” He pointed out that getting older allowed us to transition into a time when we could increasingly let go of our ego. It wasn’t until I had read Russell’s essay that I was able to see how much competition had played a role in my entire career. There are none-too-subtle ego battles that take place in ministry. We often call it “steeple envy.”
When I was a pastor of a moderately sized church in Louisville, KY, I had lots of friends in the clergy. We often took family vacations together. \
There was a group of ministers I met with every Tuesday as we worked out our sermon outlines together. We supported one another and helped one another when we could. But the pastors of the largest churches in our denomination in the area never attended those meetings, and so, it seemed natural that they often were the subject of our gossip.
In 1991, I was hired by the largest church of my denomination in the region when I was only 34. I suddenly had no friends among the clergy, and I realized that I had become the topic of cruel conversation in clergy gatherings. There was a solution to that though. Our denomination organized an annual meeting for the 50 pastors of the largest congregations in the country. I went to a few of those testosterone driven meetings of almost exclusively tall white men, all eyeing the prospects of their next promotion. The Christian religion had become something that was a far cry from the poor carpenter who died on a Roman cross that it claimed to follow long before I realized that I was no longer a part of it.
From the time that I was a student minister in a little rural church in Kentucky until I was even called to be the senior pastor of our denomination’s national cathedral, the question we were confronted with every day was whether our attendance was going up or down. I am certain that this is not a disease known only to pastors.
Whether you are a pastor of a cathedral or the manager of a Starbucks, the question of growth is where you are trained to derive your self-esteem. If sales are less this month than they were last month, if average church attendance is less this year than it was last year, you have sleepless nights, anti-depressants, antacids, and anxiety in your future. It is almost impossible to be happy for a peer whose latest book is selling more copies than your last book. The actor has not yet been born who had the strength to not read the critics’ reviews of their last play or most recent movie.
But age, especially in retirement, can give the gift of letting go of all of that. You don’t have to beat anyone. You don’t have to impress anyone. You don’t have to be better than your rivals.
And even if you are, you don’t have to be more sexy than your younger competitors. Bertrand Russell says that when you can let your ego diminish, you can allow the universe of your interests to expand. I don’t have to be the one who can tell the difference between something that Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or Plato actually said and what some internet meme says that they said.
I can read a fiction novel just because I enjoy it, not because reading it will make me better informed, more culturally aware, or loaded with powerful quotes for my next sermon. You can go to your 50th high school reunion regardless of how much more of you there is under your belt or how little coverage you still have on top of your head. You should have been able to go to your 20th high school reunion without worrying about such things but at least, as a senior citizen, you should be able to let go of such concerns and simply be happy that you are one of the lucky ones who is still alive.
When I, as a puppy preacher, came to town to be the senior pastor of a flagship church, I inherited a congregation with a lot of retired ministers in it. Most of them were kind and supportive but a couple of them were so insanely jealous that they were always sniping at me whenever they could, being publicly critical and offering their unsolicited advice about what I should be doing. One especially ego deficit fellow sat in the balcony every week, just shaking his head during each sermon and at the end of the service he would slowly make his way to the front of the church and loudly enough for everyone to hear, he would flatter the organist, then the soloist that day, and then he would turn and explain to me why I was an idiot and why that everything I had said was wrong.
Honestly, sometimes his criticisms were spot on, and he was naming things that I really did need to reconsider, study, and think about more deeply. However, he delivered his predictable barbs in a way that never made me want to actually change and honestly made me just hate him a little bit more each week. He was the one the guys Mark Twain had in mind when he said that he had never actually wanted to kill anyone but he had read certain obituaries with uncommon satisfaction.
But advanced age can gift a person with wisdom, and if it does, it sure is nice when they learn how to pass it along in a way that can be digested. I was lucky enough to have a couple of those as well . . . people who would say things like, “Your message reminded me of this certain book, I have a copy of it if you would like to read it.” Or I would open a letter and find a copy of an article or a poem that some wise mentor was suggesting might be something I would appreciate…. And those articles and poems always became sermons later, as much for the kind way in which they were shared as for the quality of the content of the piece.
There is literally no telling how much good you can do if you can get your own ego out of the way enough to teach without being condescending, to mix your correction with compliments, and to actually help someone else rather than stroking your own reputation.
Next year, I will much more often be the retired pastor in the pew than I will be the preacher in the pulpit, and I am writing this message today as a reminder to myself of what kind of retired pastor I want to be, and I hope that you can apply my observations to your own situation in life.
Bertrand Russell said that when you are young you are focused by your ego on your own accomplishments but as we age, we should increasingly see ourselves as being more a part of the whole of humanity. We have a lifetime of learning to share if we can just learn how to do it effectively.
I’ll close today with a confession: for the past several years, when I have been forced to take my car to the dealership, I have most often been shocked by both the incompetence and indifference of the staff and, as a writer, I have employed my very best skills and vocabulary in writing reviews that described their incompetence and indifference in the most forceful way possible. They send out those customer survey forms, so they must want to know the truth? However, what is most notable over these past six years is that their customer service has only gotten worse.
I have lately decided to take a different tact with them, I watch for the employee who seems to sincerely try to be helpful and I write to the management to compliment that employee, and if they really go out of their way to be helpful, I take a fruit basket or a box of chocolates in to thank them and allow them to share my praise with their peers. Anger and gratitude are both rooted in the same insights about the shop’s work, but gratitude makes me happier than anger does, and it appears to make the employees happier as well. I’m sorry that I had to be this many years old to realize this, but I hope that my sharing this may save you some time.
Folks: growing older is unavoidable. Growing wiser is a choice left up to you.
