Religion and Mid-Life, Part Two: Unfinished Business

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Patrick T. O’Neill Delivered at First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn, NY on November 16, 2008

I said I would begin this sermon today with Grandma Moses, and so I shall.  After church last Sunday someone told me a wonderful story about her own grandmother who lived to be a hundred.  Her grandmother always did wonderful things around the holidays, baking goodies etc. for the family.  But for the last ten or fifteen years of her life, she would always say, “Well, this is my last holiday season, I guess, I don’t think I’ll be around for the next one.”  Her granddaughter reminded her about Grandma Moses.  ”Do you know, Grandmother, that Grandma Moses didn’t even become a painter until she was past ninety?”  ”Really, at that late age?” said her grandmother.  ”That’s amazing.  But tell me, how did she get up and down those ladders?”

Well, of course, Grandma Moses is but one of the more famous examples of people who found a calling in the second half of life.  Other examples abound: last week I referred to Miguel Cervantes, who did not become a novelist until in his fifties;  and Gandhi who discovered at fifty his real mission in non-violent resistance.  Lou Andreas Salome was over sixty when she became a psychoanalyst.  Handel was deeply in debt, and recovering from a stroke, when at fifty-seven he accepted a commission to write the Messiah.  (see Wm. Bridges, Transitions, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, New York, 1980.   pp.-52)

Presumably, each of these people, having traversed whatever challenges their personal midlife passages presented them, came to an ability to generate creative and productive lives well beyond the energies and visions of youth and middle maturity.  They offer us shining stories of people whose best creativity did not even bloom until the second half of life.

As I said to you last week, the exact boundary lines for when midlife begins and when it ends are arbitrary and completely arguable.  Gail Sheehy, who has written about and studied the topic as much as anybody, defines “midlife” as roughly those years between our mid-40’s and our mid-60’s. (see Gail Sheehy, New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time, Ballantine Books, New York, 1995.)  But as some of you quickly reminded me after the sermon, this is a relative term, hard to pin down.

To recap a bit from last week, we said that human nature is a complex composite of physical, psychological, and spiritual processes, each representing simultaneous “dramas-in-progress” within the same life.  This tri-fold seasoning of our lives, however, does not necessarily proceed smoothly or at the same pace for all of us.  And it is the colliding and conflicting of three internal dramas– our physical, psychological, and spiritual selves– that our culture defines as “the midlife crisis.”

We talked about that “mirror moment” –that first moment in midlife when we look in the mirror and see a stranger looking back.  A stranger who is slightly older than we think we are, who bears perhaps an extra laugh-line around the eyes or mouth, an extra furrow in the brow, a suddenly thinner and undeniably retreating hairline.  A stranger who looks disturbingly more like our mother or father than like our youthful self.

We called that “mirror moment” of consciousness the dividing line forever separating “the person we have been all our lives”  from “the person we shall become in the years ahead.”    ( Bridges, p.43)

For some, the midlife crisis is as subtle as the sudden loss of certainty and confidence; for others it is as dramatic as the death of one’s dreams.  For some it is the crisis of personal failure, a sense that one has not been “good enough” at the basic life tasks of working, loving, relating, partnering, or parenting.

The midlife crisis is partly the sense that those places where we have spent our life’s energies and resources and where we have deposited our dreams and hopes, have all proven somehow hollow, or shallow, or less than worthy.  ”Is this it?” we ask ourselves one morning.  ”Is this all there is?  Is this all I get to be and do with my life?”  

This is the crisis of meaning that Rabbi Harold Kushner so succinctly summarizes in his book, “When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough.” (Summit Books, New York, 1986.)

The midlife crisis is not about vanity, it’s about disillusionment.  It’s about loss, and grief, and the unavoidable awareness of our mortality.  The new self-knowledge of midlife– that time is passing, that we are changing, for better or worse, whether we like it or not, whether we want to or not– this new self-knowledge is a wondrous and peculiar burden.  For it is the kind of knowledge which once possessed, forever changes the knower.  

The midlife crisis is about fear and loneliness and vulnerability.  It’s about being that generation in the middle that bears tremendous responsibility.  It is not an easy place to stand, in the middle.  You have to explain your children to your parents.  And you have to explain your parents to your children.  And the whole time, you yourself are under judgment from both your parents and your children.

And sooner or later, midlife is about dealing simultaneously with the loss of your parents to death and the loss of your children to their own life apart from you.

So, as we said last week, with all this interior drama going on inside us, it is hardly surprising that midlife can get very complicated, very quickly, no matter how careful we are.  We can find ourselves making poor choices, or foolish choices, or even risky and dangerous choices in this period of life, choices made out of vulnerability or desperation or the need to be reassured that we are still lovable and strong and worthy people.

That Mirror Moment of midlife spurs a lot of action in our human psyche.  The realization that we are getting older, that we may even die someday in the conceivable future, kicks off some very serious, albeit hasty reflection.

Some of this reflection is cased in what one researcher in the field calls “the last chance mentality”  or the “Now or Never Syndrome.”   (see Patrick Carroll and Katherine Dyckman, Chaos or Creation: Spirituality in Mid-Life, Paulist Press, New York, 1986.  p.25)  

Especially sexually, but often in other parts of life as well, midlife brings with it a kind of panic that one’s opportunities are irretrievably passing by, that it’s suddenly “now or never,” that this current moment, this day, this year is one’s “last chance” in life.  Some people get this notion at age 30, some get it at 45, some get it at 65– maybe it never stops for some people.  But it’s easy to see how this mode of thinking can lead to tremendous vulnerability, some disastrous behavior, and some true misery.

There is yet another powerful aspect of the unique emotional work that midlife demands of us, a task which presents us with unusual challenge, but also with the promise of unusual reward.  Counselors sometimes call this work attending to “unfinished business.”

You remember last week I suggested that midlife might be symbolized by the Roman god Janus, the two-faced god of the pantheon, who has one face looking forward to the future, and one face always looking backward at the past.

From the vantage point of our fourth or fifth or sixth decade of life, human hindsight is as sharp as it is critical.  And so with the heightened awareness of midlife aging comes the awareness of a whole agenda of personal “unfinished business,” still unresolved issues from the first half of life that somehow must be addressed or attended to or reconciled before we can be free to cross the threshold to the second half of life.

In our confrontation with mortality, our own and that of those we love, “we wonder who we are and what we are worth… and we wonder how to sustain faith when the God of our youth is conspicuously absent in this crisis time.” (Carroll, p.26)

All the most central activities of our lives, it seems, come under question and evaluation: our jobs, our partnerships, our families, our friendships, our loves– all the important choices we’ve made in these regards to this point in our lives– all are cast under the scrutinizing backward gaze of Janus. That moment they write songs about: Is That All There Is?  Is this career really what I set out to accomplish?  Is this love of mine as caring and joyful and satisfying as I dreamed it would be?

Even those of us who love our jobs are challenged and occasionally defeated by them, of course.  As for our marriages and partnerships, well, those that survive for any amount of time are hopelessly human adventures in sincere and loving compromise– which means they thrive as much on patience as on passion, as often on forgiveness as on trust.  These are human contracts, not harlequin novels.

The point is, this midlife psychic report card is tough stuff, and because none of us is perfect, no one has to look far for problems and dissatisfactions.  It isn’t major crisis or crashing defeat that marks midlife for most people.  It’s a smaller part of us that is often damaged in this self-critical process, a smaller, more private part of the heart that shuts down.  More dreams die with a whimper than with a bang.  Sometimes we hardly notice them dying at all.

The unfinished business from the first half of life might include reconciling ourselves to opportunities that will never come again or which were never our option to accept.  It may call us to grieve for the families we never had, or for the imperfect families we did have.  Lost loves or the chasms that can exile children from the families of their upbringing;  the harms and abuses done to us by others who should have known better, should have cared more, should have been more loving or loyal or persevering or constant or faithful.

In many, many ways the unfinished business of the first half of life involves that one ability that we never wanted to get good at–saying good-bye.  And it requires of us that one virtue we never cultivated enough–honesty.  And it takes that one condition that we never guessed would be so important–trust.

Given that this is true, the first questions of midlife must be these:  What now are the adjustments I must make in my life to bring it to harmony and peace and reconciliation?  What acceptances, what forgiveness, is required of me if I am to ground myself for living the rest of my life?  What unfinished business must I attend to in order to move on from this point?

We have a notion in our culture that there is only one “prime time” in life, which God forbid it should pass us by in the night without our knowing it, we might miss it once and forever if we’re not vigilant.

When do you suppose it is, this “prime of life”?  And is it necessarily the same time for everyone?

In truth, history rings with stories of great men and women who did not begin to find their personal peaks until the second half of their lives.  Handel wrote the Messiah at 57.  When was Handel’s “prime”?  Dame Edith Hamilton did not begin to write her definitive books on classical mythology until she retired from teaching at age 65.  When was Edith Hamilton’s prime of life, do you suppose?  Don Quixote was written when Cervantes was over sixty.

And yet, for all we know, these people too– who achieved so much in their later years– may have gone through the same anxieties, the same “last chance” panics that afflict so many of us.  They had, I’m willing to guess, their own fair share of silly and scary choices to live through in their time.

The point to remember is that all of life’s most significant doors do not suddenly slam shut at any single age in life!  New doors open for those willing to embrace their time of life.  New satisfactions, new accomplishments beckon, new levels of love and grace and wisdom are offered to us if we stay open to life.  

Ramarkrishna wrote that “all our lives we live continually in the winds of grace– we have only to lift our sails.”

Are there real limits to our physical capabilities that are part of the aging process?  Of course.  Do we need to come to terms with those physical limits, with the passing of some of our youthful energies and stamina?  Of course.

But here is the gift and wonder of life:  that grace and beauty always shine outward from the soul that is in love with life.  Here is the mystery:  that the most gracious qualities of life are burnished and enhanced with time.  Here in the end is the truth:  the “last chance” mentality, the “Now or Never Syndrome” is a paper tiger whose roar is frightening only to the inexperienced.

Do you suppose this process of attending to such unfinished business is in fact what mature living is always about?  Looking at our lives and evaluating our experience, adjusting our dreams, accepting our imperfections, learning and relearning over and over to love ourselves, to improve ourselves, to become our true selves in honesty, in gentleness, in trust?  Is that not what being alive amounts to?  I think so.

In a few words, it may come down to the serenity prayer that so many have found powerful in the twelve-step programs: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”  

If there is a better definition of attending to unfinished business than that, I haven’t heard it.

“When I was young,” wrote Harold Kushner, “I asked the young man’s question, How far will I go?  But my questions now are those of a seasoned man– When my life is over, what will my life have been about?”

If it has been about learning to embrace the full journey with acceptance, with joy, with a modicum of faith and hope and love, I suggest it will have been a life worth living.