Sermons

The Peak-Slope Illusion

 

Rod 'Peak' Frohman	Third Presbyterian Church
June 22, 2008	Genesis 1:26-2:3 and Mark 2:23 -28

    
Over the last couple of months there have been a number of events that have given me pause to look inward. One of them is the un-timely death newscaster Tim Russert, host of “Face the Nation”, at age 58. Russert was five years younger than I am. Another was the 40th anniversary of Joe and Lucy Matthews, colleagues and friends and members in my congregation and Gary Indiana. Marcia and I drove out to Indianapolis last weekend to celebrate this 40th anniversary. Joe is a year younger than I am. And just nine months ago Marcia and I became grandparents for the first time. (Did I say I was beginning to look inward?)

I was born in April of 1945, just before the end of World War II. To put this all in perspective for younger folk, I was born before television was available in homes, before open heart surgery, before contraceptives, before test tube babies, before African nations were free of their colonial ties, before Nehru jackets, before women were ordained as Presbyterian ministers, before PCs, before jet travel, before cell phones, and before text messaging.

When I was born Harry Truman had been president just 12 days succeeding FDR upon his death. I was a babe in arms when United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. I vaguely remember Eisenhower. But I clearly remember when the hula hoop hit the market. I remember duck and cover drills in high school, a pathetic attempt to protect students from nuclear war. I was a freshman in college when JFK was shot. I was in seminary when Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated two months apart and Neil Armstrong first stepped on the surface of the moon. The Vietnam War did not end until I was ordained pastor.

A very interesting thing occurs when one looks backward: one looks inward. (Did I say I was looking inward? ) What's the meaning of our years? It really all depends on our perspective. For example, since Shakespeare only lived to be 52 years of age, he could write the following sonnet at age 40:

“When forty winters shall besiege thy brow

And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,

Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,

Will be a tattered weed, of small worth held.”

Of course the Psalmist (Psalm 90:10) had a bit longer perspective:

“The days of our life are three score years and ten, or if by reason of strength, four score,” or 80 years.

Notice in these two famous quotes about age that they both contain a particular bias, denoted by a phrase coined by one of my seminary professors, Seward Hiltner: the “peak-slope illusion”. (Paul W. Pruyser, in Seward Hiltner’s Toward a Theology of Aging, copyright 1979 Human Sciences Pres, page 103 following) The peak-slope illusion is that life is lived up hill until a certain peak age, say 50 or 65, when somehow one is "over the hill" and then it's all downhill from there.

Someone might protest and say, “But Rod, the peak slope illusion is not an illusion it is a truth. A body at 50 cannot do what a body at 25 can do.” You don't need to remind me. This summer is the first summer in 53 years that I have not played on some form of baseball team which involved sliding into second base. I can still see a fast ball and a slider in slow motion, so it’s not my eyes. I'm not playing on account of the doctors caution about my fragile knees If I slide into second base the wrong way, my knees, in the words of Shakespeare, "will be a tattered weed, of small worth held."

So we say, "Look, there are facts, valuations and experiences in the aging process." We can all cite some of these like the losses experienced in aging. The list is quite humbling. We could cite the shocking loss of personal dignity in aging. Or we could cite the loss of work, as evidence of the peak slope truth about aging. Especially we could cite the loss of work for pay that in our society somehow magically stops at 65 or 70 for those in compulsory retirement situations.

Then there is a loss of independence that can come with aging. We are trained to be competent managers of ourselves from the cradle. So when we can manage ourselves less well than we used to, we lose our independence and very often our self worth.

Aging for some is experienced as a loss of time, a running out of time in which to do certain important things. Then of course, there is the crucial loss of loved ones in aging due to death. Many who are my age or older can experience all these losses as abandonment and its concomitant loneliness.

Notice that many of these losses are culturally determined. This is what Simone de Beauvoir reminded us about when she wrote so eloquently about the social conspiracy against the aging in her 1970 long essay La Vieillesse ("The Coming of Age"). There is no objective data that says a person suddenly looses mental capacity at age 70 and therefore must be forcibly retired.

Pearl Cavenor was a 100 year-old member of my congregation in Minneapolis who possessed a valid driver’s license for her Cadillac. She used to complain, “Why should someone who is 100 and can pass a full driver's examination be refused a drivers license when there are some 50-year-old tailgaters that need to have their licenses revoked.” She had a point.

Biology and destiny are not irrevocably intertwined. There are things that are age specific. But our culture tends to dictate those specificities more readily than behavioral science.

So, why does aging have to be perceived as on a downhill slope, as loss? It doesn't. As a matter of fact aging has many potential gains. Such gains can be better realized when we understand aging from the perspective of the Old Testament. What I would like to do is replace the peak-slope illusion with the Sabbath principle.

You recall that in the creation legends in Genesis, the seventh day, the Sabbath, is the climax of God's creation. God sat back and admired the creation and rested and called it good. In the Gospel lesson we read that the Sabbath was made for us and not the reverse.

In the Sabbath Judaism and our Lord have sanctified time. In the idea of a Sabbath one does not kill time or pass time to fill a void. Rather one realizes time is a gift from God for study, prayer, rest, renewal and work. The institution of the Sabbath was not designed as an escape from work. In the Old Testament, nothing is lost if people do not have to work. As a matter of fact, something is gained - refreshment, rejuvenation, and recreation. The Sabbath is the best elixir of life and invites people of all ages to drink of it deeply.

Now a Sabbath understanding of aging suggests that it can be a time of tremendous enjoyment of the inward journey only previously sampled. (Did I say I was beginning to look inward?) Faith, hope, love, in all their permutations when put in the crucible of old age can develop prescriptions for life. So in later years one's personal credo can be more easily laid out than before. It is no accident that old soldiers and diplomats write memoirs.

So for the individual attaining years of maturity, can the living all one's days can become an unending Sabbath. Applying the Sabbath principle, many aging persons can bear their successive losses of independence, work and spouses with hope and courage and not succumb prematurely to the strains of aging. As a matter of fact, the maturity of old age can be the climax of human development.

Applying the Sabbath principle, aging persons can find pleasure in the gradual discovery of some good and wholesome adult dependencies. The ideal of independence, of self-management, can be found to be quite illusory and fictitious. Besides, none of us really live in splendid self-actualization. We are inextricably intertwined with all around us. For example, when children grow up, parents begin to see how much they are fulfilled by their dependence upon their children's and grandchildren's liveliness and demonstrations of love and good will. My granddaughter, Elliott, lives in Iowa. So, on a weekly basis, we use our web cam and log on to “ooVoo” and watch our granddaughter giggle and burp online.

So for the retiree, each day can be a Sabbath. Ceasing work for pay does not mean

becoming idle or aimless. With leisure comes the opportunity for another kind of activity, the goal of which is the cultivation of one's soul and one’s potential. The 23rd Psalm gives a metaphor of Sabbath. God "restores our soul when we lie down in green pastures."

Further, in a Sabbath retirement satisfaction can be had from redefinition one's own social status. The consumerist culture which says that success is two cars, a mortgage and a job and lots of stuff can prove to be very shallow to people like my brother Nate, who, in his retirement, enjoys

roaming the country in his trailer. This summer he and his wife are retracing the steps of Lewis and Clark, up the Missouri and across the Rockies to Oregon. He undoubtedly is copying our parents. My dad, as an 85-year-old retired pastor, used to say to his wife, "Edith, I'm going to the nursing home to see the old people."

Also, aging need not be a time of coming apart at the seams. Erik Erickson's famous study of Gandhi shows how identity formation can take place in older life. Indeed the challenge of retirement is, in Erikson's terms, the struggle between generativity and stagnation. As an example of generativity, did you know that 97% of the volunteers in our food cupboard program are retirees?

Aging is also a time for the relaxation of defenses. The hyperviligance promoted by the rat race of life can be left behind in aging which is guided by the Sabbath principle and not the peak-slope illusion. Older persons can discover the joy of living in the present, of savoring moments like a short visit from a grandchild and staying at the ball game to the bottom of the 9th.

So in a Sabbath understanding of old age there is a new freedom for revealing one's innermost being. A former tightness and compartmentalization falls away. Witness Einstein's sponsorship of worthy causes or Karl Menninger's activism for prison reform or Maggie Kuhn's (a Presbyterian elder) founding of the Gray Panthers at age 73 to fight the last segregation, old age. Incidentally that founding took place in my presence in my church office in Philadelphia.

So life's chronology does not have to be based on the illusion of peaks and slopes. To become old will have its losses, but those losses need not be permanently devastating. Old age can become a time of continuous Sabbath refreshment.

The Sabbath is the best elixir of life. As a matter of fact, no matter our age, if we each remember the Sabbath day and kept it holy, we might actually make it to those biblical four score years.