If you lived in China, one of the first questions you would be asked upon meeting someone is "How old are you?" You and your family would be proud and happy that you were 62 years old and looked it. Chinese families consider themselves blessed to have grandparents and great-grandparents living with them. Our culture generally admires youth and signs of getting older are experienced as tragic by many if not most Americans.

          The only time in our lives when we like to get old is when we're kids. If you're less than ten years old, you're so excited about aging that you think in fractions. A conversation might go like this:

          "How old are you?"

          "I'm four and a half."

          You're never 36 and a half!

          When you get into your teens, you jump to the next number.

          "How old are you?"

          "I'm gonna be 16."

          Then comes the great day of your life; you become 21. Even the words sound
          like a ceremony. You become 21 Yes!

          Then you turn 30. People might send you over the hill cards.

          Then you're pushing 40.You reach 50. You make it to 60.

          By then you've built up so much speed, you hit 70. After that, it's a day by
          day thing. You hit Wednesday.

          When you get into your 80's, you hit lunch. My grandmother won't even buy
          green bananas. "Well, it's an investment," she says, "maybe a bad one."

          Into the 90's, you start going backwards. You say, "I was just 92."

          Then a strange thing happens; if you make it over 100, you become a little
          kid again: "I'm 100 and a half!"

          Do you remember in the late 60's and early 70's when we women started to getsensitive about being called "girl"? Perhaps you retorted as I did: "I'm a woman." However, when I went out to California in the seventies, I was shocked when the supermarket clerk said, "Can I help you out with your bags, Ma'am." Only a year before I'd been a girl or a Miss.

          A few years ago, I caught sight of the reflection of a woman in a Sears store window and I thought, "That woman looks just like my mother." So strikingly like my mother was this woman that I glanced over my shoulder to see her real image. There was no one. I looked back into the window. That woman was me! I looked soooo mature. (On the positive side, I think my mother would have quipped, "You're very fortunate to look like your mother!") When I related this incident to my friend, Brenda, she asked, "How old do you think you should look? I thought for quite a few minutes while she made tea. I couldn't come up with a specific age. It's just that I felt very young, vibrant, and playful inside. I could have run, skipped, and jumped and this self that I felt seemed incongruous with the mature image that confronted me. You're probably thinking, 'What's wrong with running, skipping and jumping at your age?' Oh, I do when you're not looking! And I hope you do as well. If your body doesn't allow you, I hope you do it in your mind.

          I forgot about this 'looking like my mother' incident until more recently when people far older than I am now confided how they felt quite young. That is what led me to do this sermon. In the reading, we heard John McLeish describe some individuals as Ulyssean [Reader, please see the attached reading.], in that, they are like the adventurous, creative, and active Ulysses of the ancient world, archetype for the vibrant older person. He found these older individuals had an "…openness of mind, sensitivity to the need for new ways and new experiences; they were resourceful, had courage, curiosity and a continuing sense of wonder at the kaleidoscopic beauty and mystery of the world and the cosmos; they had acceptance of the fact of aging but were not intimidated by it."

          The Ulyssean person is not only active but creative. McLeish says that life is a creative process…where our outside experiences and knowledge mix with the right amount of our inner feelings and subconscious lucidness and mysteriously nurture a high degree of creativity. I'm sure you know individuals who have continued either their profession or taken up new activity well into their later years.

          You have heard the old saying that 'life begins at forty.' In a sense, this is true for it is the age at which we generally 'wake up' to who we really are. Between 40 and 50 years we may see people make sudden life changes as the life they have created suddenly doesn't seem to fit who he or she is now. He or she may feel so constricted that he must toss off society's beliefs and examine whether the outer life he or she leads must be changed to match the inner person he now finds him- or herself to be. Churches like this very much because this is the age people try their skill in committee work or leadership in a safe place-the church. In one sense, my reflection in the shop window was a wake-up call to examine whether my outer image and activities matched who I perceived myself to be. These were the years when I changed my career to what it is today. But it doesn't have to be a career change.

          The inner urge is really an impetus to actualize fuller potential, which can be within a career, a hobby, work in the church folks (!) or retirement to pursue a life change in other ways, including art forms---remember Georgia O'keef who painted well into her 90's and Grandma Moses, a farmer's wife who began painting in her 70's? Grandparenting is also a wonderful endeavor to express who you really are with the young and nurture a future generation. I have friends who are definitely expressing their creativity as grandparents, splitting their time on opposite coastlines to do this. There are many other possibilities.

          This congregation very recently lost a great Ulyssean, Leonard Pierce. He was 80 years old and very active in this church, in his family, and in the community. After a 40-year career in a bank and 10 of those as bank president, his family said that he blossomed in so many other ways after he retired. We all saw this. Who will do all the things that he did as well as greet visitors so warmly now that he has gone?

          New Age guru, Deepak Chopra tells us that "We must break the chains of accepted beliefs in order to experience an ageless body and timeless mind." He says that we need to realize that the mind and body are not separate and independent from each other.

          The cells of our body respond to our thoughts. When we experience too much stress, our immune system can become depressed and we become ill. Psychological depression can produce the same effect. Even remembering stressful events releases a flood of destructive hormones. On the other hand joy and fulfillment keep us healthy and extend life. He says, that to reach our full potential, we must integrate our personality with the innermost core of our being, our eternal self.

          You know that there are thethree ages of man: the Chronological, the Biological, and the Psychological. Of these, only the Chronological Age is fixed. We can consciously affect the other two. Chopra tells us the story of two stroke patients in their mid-fifties with identical medical conditions. One responded well to physical and speech therapy and the other gave up and became an invalid. The determining factor was psychological age, the most personal and mysterious of the factors. Biological age responds to the psychological age, dramatically in the case of the stroke patients.

          When we experience a decline of physical functioning, we still have the option to compensate in other ways and gain abilities of a more inward kind. If we want to remain vibrant, it is essential that we maintain our creativity and our interest in others. It is not good for us to give up and recoil from all challenge and move into ourselves only.

          To those of you who are younger adults with children, it can seem that you have nothing for yourselves. I hope you have a sense that child raising is the most creative endeavor of all. At the same time, it is also good to have some personal expression. It is a good model for children to see a parent who is nurturing of them and also nurturing of the self as well.

          The key is to be mentally and/or physically active so that creativity can be expressed in some manner even though it may be in compensating for a loss of functioning. Living with constant pain is the greatest challenge to the creative individual. The critical thing is to be sure that our own beliefs are not standing in our way of expressing a more creative self. When we are being mentally or physically creative, we are in touch with our inner being, our divine self. Some time, I'll tell you of the 'God is Creativity' theology of Unitarian theologian Henry Nelson Wieman.

          The Taoist scripture, the Tao Te Ching tells us "Whatever is flexible and flowing will tend to grow; whatever is rigid and blocked will wither and die."

          Albert Einstein's postulated a unified field theory, an energy that underlies all creation. He wrote to a close friend "I feel myself so much a part of all life that I am not in the least concerned with the beginning or the end of the concrete existence of any particular person in this unending stream." In the Tao Te Ching Lao Tzu says, "That which fills the Universe, I regard as my body, And that which directs the Universe, I see as my own nature."

          Perhaps this is the place I perceived when I beheld my mother's image and my timeless inner self. And this is the place some of you experience when you say, "I feel so young." You may call this place Soul if you like. I call this inner self of me, Essence. Essence means core or center, or the innermost nature.

          When we meet someone who is in the place of Essence, where their usual personality has momentarily receded, it will evoke in you contact with your own Essence. This can happen when we are listening to one another completely. This is a true love contact, an Essence contact, an openness of heart that promotes Essence contact with each other. We can sometimes mistake this for being in love. We are not in love, we are in a loving place. Young children detect this place with some grandparents who have evolved to being in Essence a lot of the time. Our culture doesn't encourage us to live in this place. Living with an open heart can make us seem strange. It is a place where there is no fear but there is creativity, moment by moment in the human interchange and in all that we do.

          The Prana Meditation we did today is a way of reaching the ageless Essence self. I know that it is strange to think of ourselves as being two in one. One is the socially conditioned self, the personality. The other is the Essence, the eternal and ageless self. Our goal is to integrate the two, which we can practice achieving through meditation. We don't have to be theists, humanists or any other belief to do this. We just have to be psychologically aware of the inner self. This place of timeless awareness is the fountain of youth from which we can all drink. May it be your libation.

References

The following have inspired and informed this sermon:

Chopra, Deepak M.D. Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, New York: Harmony Books, 1993.

McLeish, John A.B. The Challenge of Aging: Ulyssean Paths to Creative Living, Vancouver and Toronto, Douglas and McIntyre, 1983.

From The Challenge of Aging by John McLeish (p. 6-8)

          John McLeish asks us to recall the ancient hero Ulysses who, in his seventies, had many adventures before returning to his home and his wife, Penelope in Ithaca? The poet Alfred Lord Tennyson gives voice to Ulysses, who is in his seventies:

          "Come, my friends,

          'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

          Push off, and sitting well in order smite

          The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

          To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

          Of all the western stars, until I die.

          It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

          It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

          And see great Achilles, whom we knew.

          Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

          We are not now that strength which in old days

          Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

          One equal temper of heroic hearts,

          Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

          To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

          In our own time, a later-life man or woman who maintains the questing spirit, and who does so with courage and resourcefulness in a wide variety of circumstances, public or [private], may well be described as Ulyssean. It is not the time or the location but the quality of the life being lived that creates the Ulyssean adult.

          [The Ulyssean adult may be one who strikes out on a new path or journey, like Ulysses or may continue a life-long endeavor long past retirement age. Either way the creativity and resourcefulness does not stop.]