ALWAYS A BEGINNING

NEW YEAR, 2007
Rev. Edward Searl
Unitarian Church of Hinsdale, IL
January 7, 2007

ALWAYS A BEGINNING: NEW YEAR, 2007, REMARKS

Between Christmas and New Year’s I received my first copy of the fourth book in the great rites of passage series I’ve been doing for Skinner House Books: Coming of Age. It’s made up of poems, readings, and quotations regarding the long journey through adolescence to maturity. (Having dispensed with the human condition, the fifth and final quote collection will deal with animals. In Praise of Animals will be published in late spring.)

Putting these collections together has reminded me of the significance of the ages and stages of a typical human life, as well as the rituals—or sacred activities/events—that meet life’s significant transitions. At the very least these transitions deserve our mindful attention, because they reveal the deepest meanings of human experience.

I think that looking at stages of life has religious significance from a variety of perspectives:

  1. A human life though a continuity is not monolithic—an unchanging phenomenon. As we age and pass from one stage threshold to the next, we have different passions, different needs, different outlooks, different tasks and so on. There isn't one-size-fits all ages' spirituality. The spirituality of an adolescent is surely different from the spirituality of an elder.
  2. The passages are supercharged, times of intensity when the flame of being burns brighter. The light of our flame illuminates the world around us but may also cast ominous shadows. We should keep our wits about us and maintain healthy perspective through the passages.
  3. The passages or transitional times can also be seen as crises, the proverbial dark night of the soul. The humanistic psychologist Eric Erikson popularized this notion of crisis. And in a sort of Promethean sense the confronting and surmounting these crises is heroic.
  4. The passages or transitional times might require leaps of faith—trusting that what will come next, though unknown will be good.
  5. Stage builds upon stage so there is an inner wisdom rising to an ultimate personal goal—from a Jungian perspective the archetype of the Self or the God-within awaits us toward life’s conclusion.
  6. There is health and function in progressing, as they naturally appear, through the usual and appropriate stages.
  7. And generally each stage of a life needs to be honored, particularly the transitional times—certainly the passages of birth, coming of age, marriage, death, but also newer ceremonies such as crone ceremonies or retirement gathering.

Influences in my appreciation of the significance of life stages and their passages are diverse:

When I studied Hinduism I was taken by the four part scheme that tradition upheld. First was the stage of the student, marked by the acquisition of knowledge and tradition. In this time of preparation the student often had a mentor/role model. Next came the stage of the householder. In this stage came marriage and the creation of home and family. This was a time of acquisitiveness—of acquiring property and acclaim through work. As midlife progressed the desire for property and esteem diminished signaling the time of Retirement, a retreat from worldly things. Throughout this span the life, spiritual interests grew and material attachments lessened, symbolized as a retreat into the forest. The fourth and final stage, obviously and ideal, was the non-attachment of a wandering beggar. In this scheme was the wisdom of living through, not denying, the desires of the flesh.

I’ve been a great admirer of Carl Jung’s scheme of individuation—the psychological journey that has as an end the convergence of the unconscious and collective consciousness in the conscious mind. This journey passes through a progression of archetypes beginning with the archetype Jung called the Shadow. When one archetype was integrated another archetype appeared: The Shadow was followed by the contra-sexual Anima or Animus followed by the Wise Elder and so on to the totally individuated Self.

Of course I followed the popularized versions of contemporary stage development theory of Gail Sheehy beginning with the best selling book Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life from the late 1970s. It chronicled, at least, preoccupations brought on by the aging of my Baby Boom generation.

And most recently, as I’ve worked on my quote collections, I’ve been immersed in literature chronicling birth and childhood, adolescence and maturity, falling in love and marriage, and death and remembrance. This venture has considerably humanized my theoretical understanding of life stages. For example, adolescence is a long maturing and many persons never feel totally grown up. For example, marriage has many variations after the initial throes of falling in love.

Yet all in all I come to think of my life not so much as a continuity as it is a series of episodes. (Perhaps this reflects the vision that the cinema gives us.) Each episode of life presents its own sets of tasks, as well as outlooks. And this brings me to a final influence regarding the ages and stages of life and the transitions from one stage to another.

Long term UCH member, world class physicist, and devoted husband, father, and grandfather Tom Fields wrote a book he titled Planning Life’s Projects: A Scientists’s Approach. Tom drew from his own life experiences melded to the sorts of life schemes I’ve been drawing, that is, the four part childhood, young adulthood, middle adulthood, and older adulthood. He has emphasized that each of these twenty year spans has particular tasks associated with it. Tom names these tasks and talks about them in detail.

I like the naming which leads to planning. Most of all I like the notion of what a project is he presents—that a project has measurable goals and a time frame; and once that is completed there is permission, even admonition to leave that project behind and begin a new, next project.

For me this emphasizes that there is always a new beginning waiting—a new and necessary life project to be addressed. Tom’s presentation lifted up a sense of newness, of freshness for me. (I heartily recommend Tom Fields’s Planning Life’s Projects. See amazon.com.)

I’m contending that a typical human life span, yours and mine, ours—is naturally made up of episodes marked by transitions and followed by change. To accept and understand this scheme is worthwhile, especially when this scheme is understood as a life adventure and that the tasks, particularly the challenges, create meaning. This meaning is not theoretical. It is experiential and existential. And it is meaning that is ever growing as it is ever new.