A Sermon by the Reverend Ellen Rowse Spero
First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church,
Chelmsford, Massachusetts
June 13, 2004
Ancient Reading: 1Cor. 13:11-13
Modern Reading: from Robert Weston in Life Prayers, Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon, eds.
Copyright 2004, Ellen Rowse Spero. All rights reserved.
We think of coming of age as the celebration of the transition from childhood to young adulthood. Most religious and spiritual traditions have some kind of acknowledgment of this transition: a bar or bat mitzvah, confirmation, a vision quest—some ceremony that acknowledges that the community now accepts this young person as an adult. In our UU congregations, we have a coming of age program: a whole year spent by interested high school age parishioners exploring Unitarian Universalism, their own personal beliefs, and how the two intertwine and influence one another. The program culminates in a worship service led by the young people who share their credo statements, around this time of year. At this point, they are eligible, if they are sixteen or older, to sign the membership book. But more than this, the Coming of Age program helps our young people explore their religious and spiritual identities as Unitarian Universalists, so that as they move into adulthood and most likely, out of their home congregation, they take that sense of identity with them.
As I have grown older, I have come to realize that coming of age is not something we do only once in our lives. In fact, coming of age is a constant. In the span of our lifetime, we will make several transitions from one way of being to another, expanding and adapting our identity to include the life experiences that define who we are. When we are young, our comings-of-age come quickly: from baby to toddler then preschooler, from preschooler to elementary school student, then to adolescent, and then high school graduate into the world of college or work. Each transition takes us one step further out of our home into the world, ever expanding our circle of relationships and experiences.
And it doesn’t stop when we become adults. Careers, marriage, children become the markers of the next stage of comings-of-age. We don’t all do all things, and we may shift back and forth, putting emphasis on one for awhile. We might never marry. We may become mainly involved in our career. We might begin in the workforce but choose to stay home with our children. We may be involved in all three. But I think there is a time of transition as we move into these new ways of being: it takes time to adjust to being married or partnered or to having a child. What has struck me about my coming of age as a parent is how I could have never predicted my own feelings and responses. I never knew I could love another human being with such depth, and with all the fierce passion and protectiveness of a mother lioness. With Sam, I struggled in the first year with the fear of losing myself, my identity, into the care of this new being. With Henry, it was easier because I knew from experience that the constant demands of an infant recede soon—giving way to new ones of course, but ones that allow for a bit more sleep and a return to some semblance of normality. Even with the experience of Sam, Henry brings out new and unexpected responses from me. I continue to learn what it means to be a mom to two boys, instead of one, in partnership with Josh, and in balance with my other important identity, as one called to ministry, serving a congregation.
I turned forty last November and I think part of the coming of age that has hit me during the last five years or so is that I no longer feel that I have my whole life ahead of me. The choices I make now and the events that happen which define my life have a deeper resonance to them because I know that they are taking me down a certain path, leaving others behind. I am more aware and thoughtful about what really matters to me in choosing what to give my time and energy. And in some ways, the choices are no longer simply mine: I have to think of my family, my congregation, and my call.
Other significant comings of age happen as we grow older. Our children leave home and start families of their own. We retire from our jobs, for many of us what has defined us for so long. After church today, I will be going to an open house in celebration of my dad’s retirement from his medical practice. For thirty-seven years, he has worked as a pediatrician, doctoring to three generations of patients. He has seen tremendous changes in what began as a small town general practice to a large suburban one, with the advent of HMO’s and the commercialization of medicine and medical care. He greets this coming of age with a mixture of feelings: satisfaction for a job well-done, relief at stepping down from long hours and bureaucratic demands, and sadness for leaving his vocation. In the next few months, he will transition from town doctor to a retired person, learning what that means in terms of what he will have to let go of and what he will gain.
I am watching also my aunt transition from life to death. She has always been an independent person. She is a former CIA employee, and chose to serve tours of duty in "hardship posts": Libya during Qaddafi’s rise to power, in Africa during many countries’ move to independence, and Viet Nam during the war. After her retirement, she traveled a great deal, around the country and the world. But the skills and personality traits that made her good at her work make dying a struggle. She is not used to having to depend on nurses and caregivers. She has been gracious and accepting in many ways. She knows she is dying and seems okay with it. But she is very upset that she can no longer drive. It is this concrete piece of her identity as a well person that she struggles with most.
In the Evensong class I led this past year, there were participants of all ages, from their twenties up through their seventies. Everyone had wonderful insights to share, and we all learned a lot from one another. But I think we were all struck by the wisdom of the older participants. Their sharings and stories were always received as real gifts. Robert Weston described it perfectly: "But most beautiful and most rare is a gracious old age which has drawn from life the skill to take its varied strands: the harsh advance of age, the pang of grief, the passing of dear friends, the loss of strength, and with fresh insight, weave them into a rich and gracious pattern all its own. This is the greatest skill of all, to take the bitter with the sweet and make it beautiful, to take the whole of life in all its moods, its strengths and weaknesses and of the whole make one great and celestial harmony."
What I learned from this class, and what I learn from talking with the older members of the congregation is how our comings of age over the years can bring color and harmony to the black and white lenses of our youth. When we are young, we tend to see things clearly: as fair or unfair, right or wrong, good or bad, whether it is the size of the slice of cake we get in comparison to our siblings, the umpire’s call at home plate, the existence of God, or an injustice that we see in our school or our society. As we grow older, we come to realize that truth is not at one pole or the other, but the dynamic in between. As we go through life, we understand better that we indeed see through a mirror dimly and imperfectly. No one person is always right and always good. Life is at once simpler and more complicated that we imagined. The heartbreaks we experienced in our youth from which we thought we would never recover: the rejection by a college or a team or a boyfriend or girlfriend, we manage to survive. We know now how small they are compared to the ones that come later in life: the loss of a job, the dissolution of a marriage, the deaths of friends, and perhaps our spouse, and perhaps worst of all, our own child. Yet we survive these too, somehow. I have seen also in those who have aged with graciousness that death is not as alien and frightening. Not that it is welcomed and sought, but it is a closer reality. Its closeness clarifies even more sharply what really matters. The transitions in comings of age are about letting go. Through most of our life, I think we fight that idea. We are in control, darn it! But as we grow older and begin to lose control over those things that we used to take for granted--our health and our bodies, our mobility, our income—we can choose two paths. One is to fight it bitterly. The other is to embrace life fully and graciously, the bitter and the sweet.
The former is the cultural norm. We live in a society that values youth and holds that time in our lives as of ultimate value. We experience daily barrages of the ways that we can hang onto our youth. Growing older, we hear, is just a state of mind that can be overcome through the magic of diet pills or skin creams or the car we drive.
But if we are wise, we will see that all our comings of age are sacred, even the painful and sad ones. We become less concerned with hanging on to the past or worrying about the future, and more engaged in living with who we are, here and now, even with the creaks and wrinkles. In realizing that we indeed see through a mirror dimly, we see more clearly. We are better able to discern what matters most. We are able to hold life, with all its moods, ambiguities and paradoxes, together, to weave it into something with meaning and color and depth. It takes skill and courage to be open to the cycles of our comings of age, to move with graciousness and openness from one stage to the next. And it is our call as a community of faith to honor all these comings of age, to treasure each and every one no matter where they are, and to help one another navigate through them. A life well-lived is not one with smooth skin, a lithe body, and a three-car garage. A life well-lived is one lived in a faithful attempt to make the world a better place for the next generation, in hope of the potential of the human spirit to bring forth truth, beauty and wisdom, and with trust in the power of love, in our giving and receiving of it, to be what holds us to others, even after we have passed on. It is not just we as individuals who come of age. Our community goes through its own comings of age. With each generation, we add another strand. It is our task then to add to our own color and beauty to the tapestry, in hopes that one day, it will be whole.