My neighbor was complaining the other day of her curtailed activities now that she "is up in years." She didn't want to hear another perspective, at least not at that time.
Seniors have lots of jokes about aging, and all of them accept the premise that aging includes limits, vulnerability, and diminishing faculties. So the jokes are an effort to make the best of a bad situation.
There used to be an upbeat TV show called, "Life begins at 80." Week after week the host interviewed lively, busy octogenarians. These folks did not placidly accept restrictions on their abilities and capacities to do good. Most of them led active and interesting lives.
Here, from Canada, is a contemporary role model. It's so refreshing to meet someone whose life quietly challenges these negative assumptions.
My friend Geraldine wrote a book of poems. They speak from deep within her heart. Many people write poems, and some of them are heartfelt. What makes this little book different is that she wrote it while on Death Row.
In a travesty of justice she spent seven years on Death Row before the Illinois Supreme Court overturned her sentence due to corruption in the judicial system.
She says the only way she kept her sanity was to know who she was in Christ. And her poems speak primarily of this relationship and how it lifted her above discouragement and depression.
Geraldine learned early on that bitterness, anger, resentment had no place in her relationship with God, and she let them go.
She found a mission within prison, to introduce Christ to women who didn’t know Him. Other prisoners felt her spirituality. Geraldine writes, “A lady I never knew asked me who I was. I turned and looked at her And as our eyes met, she said, ‘You are here to help us.’
Another time young women thought the Bible was for old people. Geraldine told them that God uses young people because they relate to Him. She told them how:
· Jesus at twelve years astounded the scholars in the temple. · David the young man slew the mighty Goliath. · Joseph the teen-ager thrown into a pit became a leader of Egypt. · She told them about young Queen Esther who risked her life for her people. · And about the 12-year old girl Christ raised from death. · About Mary, the young mother of Jesus · About young Moses the prince, and young Samuel and many others.
Fast forward to 2008. Fortunately there was a support system in place for her when Geraldine was released from prison.
She now works long hours on behalf of her community, getting kids off the street and into school so they can become leaders, not just drifters. She gives them tough-love, and they trust her. When she can find them, she mentors their parents. She has hopes for a Senior Center and an After School safe place for the children to do their homework.
Truly, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” St. Paul
Geraldine found her spiritual freedom while still behind concrete walls. And she brought that freedom with her into her new life.
One Sunday morning, a mother went in to wake her son and tell him it was time to get ready for church, to which he replied, “I'm not going.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“I'll give you two good reasons,” he said. “One, they don't like me, and two, I don't like them.”
His mother replied, “I'll give YOU two good reasons why you SHOULD go to church: one, you're 59 years old, and two, you're the pastor!”
________________________
Have you ever felt the world didn’t like you, and you didn’t much like the world either?
The mom in the story is right. We all have something worthwhile to give, whether we feel inspired at any particular moment or not.
The reason is not in ourselves, but because we have been created by a very intelligent and infinitely wise Mind to support and encourage one another. It’s second nature – or maybe first nature.
Selfishness, greed, self-centeredness, fear – whatever would tempt us to withhold our caring, would have us not help someone when it is within our power to do so – isn’t our nature at all.
We all have had moments when we have listened to an intuition, gone out of our way to follow through on that intuition, and realized afterwards what a right idea that had been. While this could apply to business, in this context it applies to our relations with others.
Those intuitions are angel thoughts that come to us because somebody needs what we have to give: our cheer, a friendly word or helping hand.
There are two good reasons we can leap out of bed in the morning. One, God loves us unconditionally. Two, as we accept that love as real, here and now, we discover we can pass it along without being depleted. We can pay it forward, regardless of whether or not "they" like us!
The lottery winner screams with happiness. She is almost delirious. She has beaten the odds. However, at the winning moment she isn’t thinking about how family, neighbors, and others will suddenly jockey with each other to become her new best friends. Former lottery winners have found that their lives have indeed changed as a result, not always in the direction of carefree bliss they had expected.
The tendency is to assume that happiness comes from “things,” from getting what we want.
The advice to “Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it,” understands that happiness is not necessarily getting what we think we want. Getting what we think we want sometimes leads elsewhere.
True contentment, at least in my experience, comes from a quiet joy in our relationship to our Father-Mother God. If that Being is good, present, caring, and wholly Spirit, He/She is active and has no limitations. And that’s a rather interesting parentage.
Take Joseph, youngest son of Jacob, whose brothers were so jealous of him, they nearly killed him, but decided to turn a profit, and sold him into slavery instead. What gladness could possibly lie ahead? Suddenly there was no one who loved or cared about him, no parents to guide and protect him.
But wait. Is there a Father-Mother God guiding him, if Joseph just asks for that guiding?
The Bible story doesn’t specifically tell us Joseph was happy, but it shows him in a productive life of service in Egypt. First he served in Potiphar’s household in a position of trust and authority. Later he served Pharaoh in a position of even greater authority, saving Egypt and its neighbors from mass starvation.
Helping those less fortunate
The clue is “service.” When I worked in a nursing facility years ago, I discovered it was fun to be on duty on the holidays – Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, etc. It was totally satisfying to bring special joy and cheer to clients on these days when often they did not have family coming to see them.
Happiness isn’t selfish. Happiness is spiritual and it’s found in service. Selfishness may deceive us for awhile, but eventually we discover that self-serving is out of sync with the laws of the universe.
Some say we are hard-wired to be happy when we are able to contribute to making others happy, to feel that our lives are somehow making the world a better place. It does seem to be human nature, hard-wired or otherwise, to discover meaning and purpose through unselfish caring.
A favorite song by Peter Link says God’s gifts are given generously to each of us. That each of us has at least one specialty: perhaps patience, kindness, generosity, mothering, fathering, teaching, healing. That these gifts are God’s love in action.
He goes on to say that sharing these gifts goes on endlessly, because the giving of our goodness to one another is never done!
Don’t you love this sense of purpose unconfined!
My friend Helene celebrated her 93rd birthday earlier this week. She thought nothing would give her more joy than to have her favorite birthday pie, lemon meringue, surrounded by her best friends. So she prepared two tables with crocheted placemats and her fine china for this select group of women. I was honored to be included as one of four not from her generation.
As we ate, blue jays, cardinals, goldfinches, and hummingbirds provided constant entertainment for those facing the windows.
The conversation was lively and stimulating. At one point I wished I had one of those new Flip camcorders to record some of the local history being recounted.
These vibrant women were gifts to me that day. They included a retired school teacher, a retired business owner, a woman still active in her family business in her ninth decade, a retired mayor, as well as those who had been simply devoted to their families, now grown and flown.
They stay active, interested in their communities and their neighbors. Their lives say they understand that the giving goes on endlessly, because the gifts God has given us are always fresh and new. They never wear out, never deplete, never deprive or compete.
Each of us has our special gifts that need to be shared.
Have you seen those cutesy emails about Baby Boomers reaching Social Social Security age –that detail in a humorous way the aches, vulnerabilities, and deterioration accepted as normal for seniors?
While it’s probably better to laugh than to cry, I must protest. Might age be a state of mind? Musicians and politicians (very strange bedfellows) often stay physically active and mentally sharp decades after others have retired.
Grandma Moses stands as a worthy example of a woman who, unexpectedly, launched a new career in the arts in her 70s.
Another woman who defined “productivity” during her senior years was Mary Baker Eddy – author, editor, publisher, lecturer, teacher, and preacher. She wrote, “Except for the error of measuring and limiting all that is good and beautiful, man would enjoy more than threescore years and tenand still maintain his vigor, freshness, and promise. Man, governed by immortal Mind, is always beautiful and grand. Each succeeding year unfolds wisdom, beauty, and holiness.”
In fact, when Eddy wrote those words, the average life expectancy was 45 – so that age 70 (threescore years and ten) is about 60% greater. Google reveals the life expectancy in 2007 in the United States at 78 years. So, an increase of 60% over that, using Eddy’s cheery estimate, would be 125 years. In other countries, today’s life expectancy is even greater – 82 in Japan, 81 in Singapore, 80 in Sweden, Australia, Switzerland, Iceland, Canada, and France.
So why not anticipate vigor, freshness and promise -- right through 125 years of age? What if the antidote has more to do with attitude than we think? -- to not measure or limit anything good and beautiful in our lives.
This includes deciding whether to forward even those emails that, while eliciting chuckles and smiles, spread an accepted curtailment and inevitable decline of intelligence, health, and mobility for those past a certain number of years.
Yes, the lives of those in all generations can embrace “all that is good and beautiful.”
The ad below affirms the satisfying surprise of challenging assumed limits for age and gender too.
