Itineraries Summer 2011: Serving From Spirit
Contents:
Honoring Our Elders: The Sprite of Elder Spirit by Drew Leder
Serving From Spirit by Claudia Moore
Remembering Christopher by Bolton Anthony
The Making of an Elder Culture by Theodore Roszak
Service as Spiritual Practice by Roger Walsh
Healing the World by Judith Helburn
How Can YOU Help? by Robert C. Atchley
Answering Our Call From the Future by Paul J. Severance
Pentecost with Andrew Harvey: Thoughts on Sacred Activism by Claudia Moore
Everyday Mysticism by Carol Cober
Jock Brandis: Championing Stone Age Technology by Pat and Steve Taylor
Service Through Life’s Season by John G. Sullivan
Books of Interest: Metaphor and the Aging Process by Barbara Kammerlohr
Honoring Our Elders: The Sprite of Elder Spirit by Drew Leder
My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age.
— Florida Scott-Maxwell
These words aptly describe Dene Peterson, not in their particulars — she was passionate in her 70s! — but in their spirit. I remember seeing Moulin Rouge with her when she was but a spry 72. The movie about a poet in love with a cabaret actress/courtesan was sexual, rocking, flamboyant, and outrageous in its rapid-fire cinematography and cutting. It left me in the dust, but not Dene, who enjoyed it thoroughly. I couldn’t have had a more fun date than with this ex-nun and distinguished elder.
In the Bible, Sarah is unexpectedly and repeatedly challenged by God. Uprooted from their home, she and Abraham must in their old age travel at God’s whim to a new promised land. She, like Abraham, is given a new name (Sarai is changed to Sarah) and — at the ripe old age of 90 — informed that she is to have a child. Her reaction? She laughs. And when the prediction is miraculously fulfilled. she names her child “Isaac” — which means, in Hebrew, “to laugh.”
Dene is Sarah, Sarah is Dene. How many times has she heeded God’s call and moved to new places, assumed new identities, given birth to new projects and new versions of the self? Born in Kentucky, one of 11 children in an energetically Catholic family, at age 18 she became a Glenmary Sister. Dedicated to serving the poor and marginalized, she worked in Chicago… and Ohio… and Michigan — ever birthing new projects. Called to be a nun, she then experienced herself called out — along with the majority of Glenmary Sisters — to pursue their service work independent of the institutional hierarchy. When the age of “retirement” came, it became the moment for new birthing — her grandbaby being the ElderSpirit Community.
Though ElderSpirit upholds the traditional association of elderhood with wisdom and spirituality, overstating the radical nature of this experiment in communal living — and its importance — is difficult. ElderSpirit was the first senior cohousing community founded in the United States. It is also the first model of a residential setting where elders of all faith traditions (or none) can use their later years to support one another, serve social justice and the planet Earth, deepen their contemplative practice, and grow closer to God/Spirit.
In a land where aging can mean isolation — or self-centeredness — or institutionalization — Dene has shown us a different model. Dwelling just off the beautiful Virginia Creeper Trail, in Abingdon, Virginia, ElderSpirit residents own or rent their own homes — the community is resolutely mixed income — yet share common spaces to eat, meet, meditate, and worship. They are engaged in outward service and inward contemplation. They live together, age together, and maintain that support through illness, disability, and death.
Dene may be the Dean of ElderSpirit, but her gift has been to bring so many together — members of FOCIS (Federation of Communities in Service), co-leaders of the community, the Retirement Research Foundation, government agencies, prospective residents, and supporters — to make this “promised land” a reality.
Elderspirit Community now houses 40 residents. It has become a national model, and a site for training communities around the country who wish to birth similar late-life experiments. She well deserves the Lifetime Achievement Award granted her at the 2011 National Cohousing Conference.
But what is her “lifetime achievement”? Herself? I know her as a person whose well-earned self-esteem is tempered with humility. “I am the first one to receive this award with but one project under their belt,” she said at the Conference, “and I made lots of mistakes doing it.” Mostly I think of Dene’s delightful sense of humor. “At 50,” wrote George Orwell, “everyone has the face he deserves.” Dene has such a face, filled with “wrinkles” which are really smile-lines. She made me laugh that evening when, visiting ElderSpirit, I found myself spirited away to Moulin Rouge, an outrageous film made more enjoyable by the outrageous person by my side.
In the Bible, when Sarah named her child “Isaac” (to laugh), she explained “God has brought me laughter; everyone who hears will laugh with me.” Let us laugh with Dene at a lifetime of joy and service. Let us laugh at her “retirement,” which was really a rebirth. Let us laugh at ElderSpirit Community, an impossible dream that now boasts some 29 completed homes.
If Dene’s 70s and 80s are this passionate — who knows what’s coming next?
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Drew Leder, MD, PhD, is a professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland, and the author of numerous articles and some five books, including one on how to age creatively and spiritually, Spiritual Passages: Embracing Life’s Sacred Journey (Tarcher, 1997). Having proposed, in the American Society on Aging Journal, Generations, the model of an ElderSpirit center, he served as a consultant during the design of the Abingdon community. He now gives talks and workshops on creative aging around the country. Reach him by email or visit his website at http://evergreen.loyola.edu/dleder/www/.
Serving From Spirit by Claudia Moore
Claudia Moore has three decade’s experience as a journalist and holds an MSW in community practice. Her graduate project — Invest in Kids Initiative, 2001 — organized New Hampshire early childhood education professionals to strike for better pay and benefits in order to insure lower turnover rates in the state’s childcare centers. She has experience in hospice and bereavement counseling and has been a student in the Academy for Evolutionaries, which explores concepts and practices of evolutionary spirituality. Claudia facilitates courses at the Duke chapter of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute on the subject of spirituality.
The idea of service beyond self — what sometimes is more narrowly termed altruism — traces its roots in the human psyche as far back in time as what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, the period between 800–200 BCE when the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid. Service to the greater good — service to Spirit — was a core value in the seminal philosophies that appeared simultaneously and independently during this period in China, India, Persia, Palestine, and Greece.
Over the past half century, the voices urging that we recommit to this higher service have come from many quarters. To note just one example — as relevant today as when they were penned back in 1964 by the hippie troubadour/prophet who turned 70 on May 24, 2011:
Your old road is rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
if you can’t lend your hand.
For the times they are a-changin’.(1)
The baby boomers, a massive vanguard of elders-in-waiting — “the best educated, most widely traveled, most innovative generation we have ever seen” — stand ready to serve humanity. Will they choose to do so? Some observers, like historian Theodore Roszak, are hopeful:
What boomers left undone in their youth, they will return to take up in their maturity, if for no other reason than because they will want to make old age interesting. Just as the Dutch have won land back from the sea, we have won years back from death. That gives us the grand project of using those extra years to build a culture that is morally remarkable.(2)
Another observer — philosopher Ken Wilber — offers a more tempered diagnosis. Members of the generation that fought for civil, women’s, and gay rights, staged war protests, and pioneered concern about the environment appear now to be gripped in a collective paralysis. They suffer from boomeritis, Wilber argues, a malaise caused by “the belief that reality is flat, that there are no levels of consciousness. We basically live in Flatland.”(3)
The problem, as Wilber sees it, is that baby boomers took a first step into a higher awareness — a further step in the evolution of consciousness — only to then find themselves stuck in self-absorption and narcissism. Like those stuck in the belief that the Earth was flat or was the center of the universe, intrepid boomers — however much they may have “stormed heaven” in places like Woodstock or Haight-Ashbury — are frozen in their beliefs about the nature of their reality and what to do with what they know. If we have the capacity to pioneer new states and levels of consciousness (as Wilber and others believe) — if we “are not human beings having a spiritual experience, [but] spiritual beings having a human experience” (as Teilhard de Chardin observes) — then what we do about this fact has implications for and responsibilities to generations that follow us.
Recent discoveries in physics — particularly in the field of quantum mechanics, along with trends in philosophy and psychology — provide evidence for an “instinct” for service beyond self and this “evolutionary impulse.” Don Beck, creator of Spiral Dynamics Integral and a leading global authority on value systems, societal change, and stratified democracy tells us:
Einstein said that the problems we have created couldn’t be solved with the same thinking that created them. And this is the hope that we have: that in the very dangerous and precarious global situations that we are in today, we could prepare the breeding ground and the fertile soil and the habitats to generate what the next models of existence will be. We have reached that stage where our successes and our failures have produced problems that we simply cannot solve, in the old Einsteinian sense, at the same level that they were created.(4)
The magnitude of the responsibility we as elders must assume may seem overwhelming. Roger Walsh, who has spent nearly a quarter century researching and practicing in the world’s great spiritual traditions (see his article in this issue), offers four down-to-Earth and reassuring insights to inform our service to Spirit:
- The discovery of our spiritual service is a process. Thinking we should know what to do is a trap of the mind. It takes time, he reminds us, to discover and then make our own specific contribution.
- We each have a unique answer to the question — “What can I do?” — because we each have unique skills, life experiences, and different spheres of influence.
- Moreover, we are human. We can only do so much and must acknowledge our existential limits. Serving from spirit is best thought of as a long-distance marathon.
- Finally, Walsh suggests we ask, “What’s the most strategic contribution I can make?” To think about this he gives us a splendid metaphor: the tiny trim tab found on the three-story-tall rudder of any 747 jet airliner. Rather than change the course of the plane by shifting the big rudder, the pilot employs the little trim tab. The “trim tab” questions for those seeking to serve from Spirit might be, “Where can I stand, what can I do to have the most influence?”(5)
We stand at a turning point in history. We have access to the wisdom of the ages and an unprecedented capacity to connect with one another. We are the leading edge of a massive demographic whose collective life experience has given us some inkling of what it might mean to be agents of social, economic, and political change and pioneers on the frontier of human consciousness.
So, what are we doing? What are we waiting for?
Among the articles in this issue of Itineraries you will find how some elders are responding to this challenge and see the shape their lives are taking as they try to live ever more fully in service to Spirit. May the articles in this issue encourage and inspire you to undertake similar choices and actions.
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Notes
1 Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” from the album The Times They Are A-Changin’, Columbia Records, 1964.
2 Theodore Roszak, The Making of an Elder Culture: Reflections on the Future of America’s Most Audacious Generation (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers. 2009), p. 7.
3 Ken Wilber, Boomeritis (Boston & London, Shambhala, 2002), pp. 54–55.
4 See http://www.spiraldynamics.net/dr-don-beck.html.
5 Roger Walsh, “Becoming An Optimal Instrument of Service: What Does It Really Take?,” a dialogue recorded on April 3, 2001, as part of the Beyond Awakening Community Blog. Access the audio recording at https://www.box.net/shared/static/gl42xyzk3e.mp3.
Remembering Christopher by Bolton Anthony
We lived in Fayetteville, NC, during the mid-1970s, my oldest son, Edward, was friends with a boy who lived a block away and was a year and a half younger than he was. They were inseparable companions — “best buddies” — for six years. Then, when Edward was 12, we moved to Greensboro; and though we made the 90-mile journey back to Fayetteville once or twice a year, absent the vital, almost daily contact that sustains childhood camaraderie, their friendship languished.
Over the years, my wife stayed in contact with Christopher’s mother; and we were aware how, as both our sons matured, a similar passion for photography — nascent during their childhood years — shaped and determined their later career choices.
Christopher was a stringer for the local newspaper, The Fayetteville Observer, while he was still in high school. At North Carolina State University, he worked on the campus newspaper, The Technician; then, after a master’s degree from Ohio University, he returned home to work again for The Observer, this time as a staff photographer.
Then, in 1998, some strange attractor deflected the trajectory of his life away from what had, until then, been a predictable course. He moved to New York City and from that base honed his photojournalistic skills in all the major conflict zones of the past dozen years: Kosovo, Angola, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Kashmir, the West Bank, Iraq, and Liberia. Following September 11, he took photos at Ground Zero, then later covered the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the earthquake in Haiti.
His photographs appeared on the covers of Newsweek and The Economist, and on the front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times. His work was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and honored with numerous other awards.(1)
On April 20, 2011, Chris Hondros was killed — along with fellow photojournalist Tim Hetherington — by a rocket-propelled grenade in Misrata, Libya, where he was covering the Libyan civil war. He was 41.
His friend, Greg Campbell, shared this on hearing of his death:
We talked about this special breed of journalism he was drawn to and how important it was to bear witness to atrocities that take place far from most of the world’s eyes. He believed entirely in the power of photojournalism to change the world, to enlighten hearts and minds, and to bring justice and possibly comfort to those who are suffering the most. His deepest commitment, from the very beginning, was to honor those he photographed and bear witness to their struggles.(2)
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Chris Hondros was the product of the great American melting pot. His mother, Inge, had been born in 1936 in that part of eastern Germany which Poland annexed in 1946. His father, after whom he was named, had been born in Greece. His parents, child refugees after World War II, had met and married in New York. They moved to Fayetteville shortly after he was born, and he grew up in a large house and extended family that included his father’s Greek parents and his younger brother Denos.
Everyone’s life traces back to the mysterious, always improbable, intersection of two other lives. This is true whether your parents first met on the playground in pre-school or — like Chris’s — were war-weary refugees washed ashore from the chaos of distant lands and forced to negotiate the intimate commerce of their shared daily life in a language that was alien to both. The embryo bursts forth from this fusion of two lives. To put the metaphor to further use: Perhaps, like its nuclear counterpart, the fusion creates a cache of latent energy.
When viewed from outside, Chris’s life for its first 28 years seems to move within a predictable orbit. Then, at the point of inflection, a firewall is breached and the latent energy is unleashed. In the 13 years that follow, the distance he travels away from the immigrant Greek community of restaurateurs and shopkeepers of his childhood in Fayetteville rivals the distance his mother and father traveled in the journey to his conception.
How does one explain this? How does one account for those uncommon few among us who — in dramatic and undramatic ways — seeing wrong, are stirred to try to right it; seeing suffering, try to heal it; seeing war, try to stop it?(3) How does one account for the young civil rights activists who — a generation earlier — rode interstate buses into the segregated South, for the leavening of college graduates who gave two years of their lives to Peace Corps service, for the conscientious objectors who protested the violence of the Vietnam War? How does one account for those who cannot do what most of us usually manage well enough: just see facts flat on, without some horrible moral squint?(4)
Those were the questions I pondered at Chris’s funeral, where I joined my son Edward and my daughter Shannon. The trajectory of his life had come full circle, ending here in a packed Greek Orthodox Church located not two blocks from his childhood home. The Greek community that filled the church to overflowing was the familiar community of his childhood and youth. My daughter, who in recent years had reconnected with Chris and visited him in New York, had an answer for my questions: “It was Inge,” she told me; and she sent me something Chris had written:
I grew up hearing tales of war from my mother… the sounds of American bombers flying over her village; the feelings of hunger when food ran short; the sight of her older brother Herbert in uniform and sent off to fight the Russians, [a cipher in the] columns of German troops marching east in tight formations, and returning west bedraggled and doomed after months on the front. [Then, during] the summer of 1946… all the ethnic Germans like my mother [who was 10] were forcibly expelled from the eastern fringe of Germany by revenge-minded Polish troops, who then annexed the lands…
So when I started covering war as a journalist, she understood what was driving me better than many mothers might. When I showed her pictures of Kosovo refugees packed onto rusty trains, she nodded knowingly and related her own similar experiences. Tales of barbarity from Iraq elicited from her not empty platitudes, but informed observations of how easily stable societies can come unglued, and how quickly the horrific can become commonplace. My mother, like me, sees war as an abomination, but not an aberration; she has no expectations that humanity can ever fully escape the call to arms. We will probably always fight wars, but if we do we should know what war means. Fulfilling that mandate is my main mission as a war photographer.(5)
Probably, there are no universal answers to the questions that gnawed at me. What kindles our compassion and spurs us — often against our own narrow self-interest — to act for the sake of another is always a part of our own unique story. Why this movement of grace happens in some lives and not others is shrouded in mystery.
But some lives do shine, some lives do sparkle. More than others. And Chris Hondros lived such a life. In his autobiography, Report to Greco, the great Greek writer, Nikos Kazantzakis, explains his motive for writing. As you read the words, substitute photography for writing and perhaps you will have a small window into Chris’s soul:
The more I wrote the more deeply I felt that in writing I was struggling, not for beauty, but for deliverance. Unlike a true writer, I could not gain pleasure from turning an ornate phrase or matching a sonorous rhyme; I was a man struggling and in pain, a man seeking deliverance. I wanted to be delivered from my own inner darkness and to turn it into light, from the terrible bellowing ancestors in me and to turn them into human beings.(6)
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These ruminations have been informed in part by the news I received in early July, a month after Chris’s funeral: Theodore Roszak — a social critic and cultural historian of the first rank, whose seminal book, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society, helped define the generation that came of age during the tumultuous 60s — had died at his home in Berkeley, California, at age 77.
Though Ted went on to write some 20 books — including notably The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology (a field of inquiry he pioneered) and seven novels — most of the tributes published after his death focus on his early book which:
… offered a rationale for the so-called Summer of Love in 1967 and the eruption of student dissent a year later. He warned middle Americans that their greatest enemy lay not in Red China or Moscow but “sat facing them across the breakfast table.” Roszak’s thesis held that technology and the pursuit of science… had alienated the young. Consequently they sought comfort and “meaning” in psychedelic drugs, exotic religions and alternative ways of living.
His “counterculture” neologism defined this “alternative society.” Its members, he said, were long-haired young people, many smoking dope or dropping acid, listening to psychedelic rock or protest songs by Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. When they gathered at pop festivals, “love-ins,” or student demonstrations, their concerns ranged from racial discrimination to global poverty and included what are now called “green issues.”(7)
The book argued that science-dominated modern society was ugly, repressive and soulless; that youthful dissent was coherent enough to be termed a culture; and that this anti-rationalist “counterculture”… might offer the foundation of a new visionary civilization.(8)
Few of the tributes mention the book that was the occasion for my working with Ted. He had called me during the summer of 2007 with a novel proposal. He had completed the manuscript of a book and then been frustrated by a long and futile search for a publisher. He thought of the new book, The Making of an Elder Culture, as a kind of sequel to the earlier book. “Boomers don’t read,” he had been told by would-be publishers, “and even if they did, they wouldn’t read books about aging.” He asked if Second Journey wished to publish the book online.
After a 40-year hiatus, Ted had returned to the boomers because he believed there was for “America’s most audacious generation” a second act: In the “elder insurgency” Ted imagined, what the “boomers left undone in their youth, they will return to take up in their maturity.”(9) In its youth, the boomer generation had discovered “the politics of consciousness transformation. ‘You say you want a revolution… Well, you know, we all want to change your head.’” In its elder years Roszak believed it would perceive that:
Aging changes consciousness more surely than any narcotic; it does so gradually and organically. It digests the experience of a lifetime and makes us different people — sometimes so different that we are amazed, embarrassed, or even ashamed at the person we once were. Pious people often claim that religion offered them the chance to be born again. But, curiously enough, growing old can also lead to rebirth, a chance to leave old values, old obsessions, old fears, and old loves behind. Aging grants permission. It allows us to get beyond the assumptions and ambitions that imprisoned us in youth and middle age. That can be a liberating realization. Perhaps there is a biological impulse behind that possibility, a driving desire to find meaning in our existence that grows stronger as we approach death. It may even lead to rebellion, if one has the time and energy to undertake the act.(10)
Think of the gift of “all those extra years of life,” he urged us — the nearly 30 years of extended life expectancy that medical science and improvements in public health have over the past century created — think of them as a resource:
…a cultural and spiritual resource reclaimed from death in the same way the Dutch reclaim fertile land from the waste of the sea. During any one of those years, somebody who no longer has to worry about raising a family, pleasing a boss, or earning more money will have the chance to join with others in building a compassionate society where people can think deep thoughts, create beauty, study nature, teach the young, worship what they hold sacred, and care for one another.(11)
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The untimely passing of Chris Hondros — like that of Robert Kennedy who was only a year older when he died — has reminded me that a whole generation, in its youth, once dreamed of things that never were and asked why not: Why not a world without racism? Why not a world without hunger? Why not a world without war? It is reassuring to find that that ancient dream still moves some among our children and reassuring to hope their example will help rekindle the arrested efforts of their elders to “build a compassionate society.” R.I.P.
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In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field; our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.
— Annie Dillard, from “Total Eclipse,”
in Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982
//
Notes
1 Reference Chris Hondros’s website for examples of his work — chrishondros.com/index.html.
2 “Chris Hondros, RIP: How my best friend died in a combat zone.” Greg Campbell is the author of Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World’s Most Precious Stones and other books.
3 A paraphrase of Edward Kennedy’s tribute to his slain brother, Robert, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City on June 8, 1968:
My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.
Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.
As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him:
Some men see things as they are and say why.
I dream things that never were and say why not.
4 Spoken by Cardinal Wolsey to Thomas More in the play A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt (New York: Vintage, 1962), p. 19.
5 See popphoto.com/how-to/2008/12/happy-mothers-day-nine-top-photographers?page=0,0.
6 Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), p. 451.
7 “Theodore Roszak,” The Telegraph, Sunday, August 14, 2011. telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/8650652/Theodore-Roszak.html
8 Douglas Martin, “Theodore Roszak, ‘60s Expert, Dies at 77,” New York Times, July 12, 2011.
9 Theodore Roszak, The Making of an Elder Culture: Reflections on the Future of America’s Most Audacious Generation (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers. 2009), p. 7.
The Web-based version of The Making of an Elder Culture was published by Second Journey in four installments between October 2007 and March 2008. A special limited hardback edition of the book, whose copies were signed by the author, was also produced. In March of 2008, the rights to produce a trade paperback edition were purchased by New Society Publishers
10 Elder Culture, p. 176.
11 Theodore Roszak, America the Wise: The Longevity Revolution and the True Wealth of Nations (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 8.
The Making of an Elder Culture by Theodore Roszak
Forward
The news of the day — and for that matter the history of the twentieth century — gives every good reason to despair for the future of our society. And yet, as bleak as things may seem, there are other forces in play — subtle, long-term undercurrents that are shaping our lives for the better even if we cannot always see them at work. One of these, and I believe it is the most consequential but least appreciated force of all, is the demographic transition usually called the longevity revolution. That more people are living longer is common knowledge, the subject of all the television snippets about pension plans, health care, and fitness that fill in the last five minutes of the network news. What is less recognized is how deeply rooted our lengthening life expectancy is in the history of modern times, that it is indeed so inevitable a development that it deserves to be seen as the biological and spiritual destiny of our species.
The longevity revolution is a cultural sea change that does not depend on the brilliant insights of a few gifted minds, less still on organized movements or the charisma of a great leader. It is more like an environmental than a political transformation. Indeed, I believe it may be the planetary ecology finding a way to protect its cargo of life from a runaway industrial system.
As a history teacher, I have often pondered the fact that, throughout the past, the people I have been studying were born to a life span of some 50 years. By the time they reached 45, they were old. Some lived to be very old, but not many. When old age pensions were first established in Europe and the United States, the retirement age was arbitrarily set at 65 by political leaders who knew that most people would never live to collect the money. That in itself — the sense of how much time one has left to work out one’s salvation — changes everything about the way one makes choices, about one’s hopes and ambitions.
In its youth, the boomer generation discovered the politics of consciousness transformation. “You say you want a revolution… Well, you know, we all want to change your head.” I had students during the sixties and seventies who were dosing on anything that was rumored to be psychedelic, every herb, plant, and industrial chemical they could lay their hands on that might allow them to explore some purportedly higher level of awareness. But the greatest consciousness-transforming agent of all, in fact, comes to us from within our own experience and as naturally as breathing. It is the experience of aging, which brings with it new values and visions, none of them grounded in competition and careerism, none of them beholden to the marketplace.
It may be that the old have always realized that you can’t take it with you, but their numbers were never great enough, their voice never strong enough, to make them a decisive factor in society; nor did they expect to live long enough to lend their insight any social importance. Now, in ever greater numbers, we are aging beyond the values that created the urban–industrial world. That fact begins with the boomers, but it will roll forward into generations to come as the now-young become the then-old — and live longer and longer. Which means that every institution in our society will be transformed as its population drifts further and further from competitive individualism, military–industrial bravado, and the careerist rat race. It is as if the freeways of the world will one day soon begin to close down, starting with the fast lane and finally turning into pastures and meadows.
And with that change in personal life we can begin to see a subtle wave of ecological change that will help us rein in the worst excesses of commercialism, consumerism, and environmental damage. Life in “Eldertown” will be nothing like the worldwide urban ethos of freeways, sprawling suburbs, shopping malls, and gas-guzzling cars. The elder culture will find little reason to uproot forests, pollute the seas, and strip mine the Earth. To be sure, on its own, the ecology of aging will not take effect rapidly, surely not soon enough to save many environmental treasures. But that is not what I expect. Rather I believe there will come a time within this century, perhaps before the boomer generation leaves the scene, when we begin to recognize that, by working along the grain of the longevity revolution and the changes it brings about in our everyday values, we can achieve an environmentally enlightened social order.
What will our world be like when there are more people above the age of 50 (or 60 or 70) than below, people whose highest needs are for compassion, companionship, philosophical insight, and a modestly sustainable way of life? If the aging of the modern world is experienced consciously and creatively with an awareness of how promising this transition is, it can be the path to the sort of countercultural utopian social order that became so popular among the countercultural young during the sixties and seventies.
Others will disagree. They see the rise of the wrinklies as a disaster, a fiscal train wreck, a death blow to the prospects for progress. They see a world dominated by grandparent power as backward, stagnant, and unaffordable, a society burdened to the point of bankruptcy by nursing homes and demented millions. Meanwhile, there are those in the biotech community who are doing all they can to extend our life expectancy by decades, if not centuries — seemingly with no regard for the larger consequences of what they do.
Perhaps the doomsayers will be correct. Perhaps it will turn out that way — though not because it has to. My own hope is that the boomers — the best educated, most widely traveled, most innovative generation we have ever seen — are not too frivolous to face the dilemmas of longevity. On the contrary. I believe they will, in growing numbers as the years unfold, recognize that the making of an elder culture is the great task of our time, a project that can touch life’s later years with nobility and intellectual excitement.
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Theodore Roszak was the author of 15 works of nonfiction, including The Making of a Counter Culture, Person/Planet, and The Voice of the Earth, and of six novels, including the critically acclaimed The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein. The Making of an Elder Culture: Reflections on the Future of America’s Most Audacious Generation was initially published by Second Journey in four online installments between October 2008 and March 2009 before the rights to the book were acquired by New Society Publishers. Ted Roszak was educated at UCLA and Princeton and taught at Stanford University, the University of British Columbia, San Francisco State University, and the State University of California – East Bay. He died at his home in Berkeley, CA, on July 5, 2011.
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Notes
1 This essay is the Foreword to an edition of the book, The Making of an Elder Culture: Reflections on the Future of America’s Most Audacious Generation, originally published by Second Journey, first, in a Web-based version, released in four installments between October 2007 and March 2008 and then in a special limited hardback edition whose copies were signed by the author. In March of 2008, the rights to the book were purchased by New Society Publishers. The paperback edition published by NSP does not include this Foreword.
Service as Spiritual Practice by Roger Walsh
Roger Walsh M.D., Ph.D., is professor of psychiatry, philosophy, and anthropology, and adjunct professor of religious studies at the University of California at Irvine. He is a student and researcher of contemplative practices, and his publications include the books Essential Spirituality: The Seven Central Practices, Paths Beyond Ego, The World of Shamanism, and Gifts from A Course in Miracles.(1)
If there’s one thing on which the world’s great religions agree, it’s the importance of generosity and service. “Make it your guiding principle to do your best for others,” urged Confucius. Mohammad never said no when asked for anything, while Jesus encouraged us to “Give to everyone who begs from you and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.” When Mohammad was asked, “What actions are most excellent?” he replied, “To gladden the heart of a human being, to feed the hungry, to help the afflicted, to lighten the sorrow of the sorrowful, and to remove the wrongs of the injured.”
But the great religions regard helping one another as more than mere obligation. Rather, they see service as both a central human motive and as a source of profound satisfaction and well-being. In the monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, love and service of others are often given equal status with love and service of God. In Buddhism, compassion is seen as an inherent aspect of our nature, while Confucianism regards benevolence as “the most important moral quality.”
So esteemed are generosity and service that some traditions regard them as the culmination of spiritual life, the practice upon which all other practices converge. From this perspective, a central goal of spiritual life is to equip oneself to serve effectively. Even the supreme goal of satori, salvation, or awakening is sought not just for oneself alone, but also so as to better serve and awaken others.
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The Joy of Service
For a long time psychologists held a rather dim view of altruism and argued that people helped merely to feel good about themselves or to look good to others. However, recent experiments paint a far more pleasant picture. Human beings seem to be genuinely altruistic; we all have a desire to help.
Mother Teresa’s nuns offer dramatic examples of generosity and the joy it can produce. Theirs is an austere lifestyle. They leave the comforts of home and live like the poorest of the poor people whom they serve. At their central house in Calcutta, they are packed three or four to a room, and their only possessions are two dresses and a bucket for washing. They eat much the same food as the poor, and despite the suffocating Indian heat they have no air conditioning. They rise before dawn and spend their days working in the slums. It’s an existence that most of us would regard as difficult, if not downright depressing.
[Yet] when a television interviewer visited Mother Teresa, he told her, “The thing I notice about you and the hundreds of sisters who now form your team is that you all look so happy. Is it a put-on?” She replied, “Oh no. Not at all. Nothing makes you happier than when you really reach out in mercy to someone who is badly hurt.” “I swear,” wrote the interviewer afterwards, “I have never experienced so sharp a sense of joy.”(2)
The Nobel Prize winning Indian poet, Tagore, summarized the practice in two exquisite lines.
I awoke and saw that life was service.
I acted and behold, service was joy.
Another Nobel Prize winner, Albert Schweitzer, who devoted his life to treating the poor and sick of Africa, agreed and warned: “The only ones among you who will be truly happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.”
Of course we don’ t have to be nuns or Nobel Prize winners to serve and to reap the rewards of service. When people are asked to recall acts of generosity they feel good about, they are often surprised by how simple and apparently small acts — even small gifts or simple acts of kindness — can produce an enduring glow which psychologists call “helper’s high.”
Psychologists have found striking evidence that support religious claims for the benefits of generosity. Generous people tend to be happier, healthier (both physically and psychologically), and even to live longer. For older people it is their contributions to the world and future generations that usually give meaning and satisfaction to their lives. Paradoxically, taking time to make others happy makes us feel better than devoting all our efforts to our own pleasures. Psychologists call this “the paradox of pleasure,” and there are three major reasons for it:
- First, generosity weakens negative motives and emotions. For example, when we share our possessions, time, or energy, we loosen the heavy chains of egocentric greed, jealousy, and fear of loss that keep us contracted and defensive.
- Generosity also strengthens positive emotions and motives. For example, when emotions such as love and happiness are expressed as kindness, they thereby grow stronger.
- We ourselves experience what we intend for others. If we boil with rage, it is our minds that are convulsed by the anger, even before we vent it on someone else. On the other hand, when we desire happiness for others, feelings of happiness first fill our own minds and then overflow into caring action. What you intend for another, you tend to experience yourself.
But in order for service to be a source of joy for everyone, including us, it’s important to find out how you would like to help.
There is a little-known secret about service: It’s okay to have a good time! In fact it’s more than okay; it’s a gift to everyone. It is a gift to you because service is then a pleasure rather than a chore. It is a gift to others because then you not only share your time but also your happiness. After all, who wants to be assisted by someone who’s grumpy and resentful about giving?
The first step is to get in touch with your feelings and find out how you would like to help. For this it is crucial to set aside any tyrannical thoughts about what you should do, any limiting beliefs about what you cannot do, and to simply recognize what you would like to do. Often what you would really like to do is also what makes best use of your unique talents. Of course it may take time and perhaps experimenting with different types of service to find out what most appeals to you.
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Awakening Service: Service As Spiritual Practice
Spiritual life therefore has two central goals: to awaken to our true nature and to help heal and awaken others. Obviously, it would be wonderful if there was a way of doing both simultaneously. Fortunately there is. It’s the practice of what we might call “awakening service.” This is a variant of a venerable practice that is particularly well described in the Indian yogi tradition where it is called “karma yoga.” Karma yoga is the yoga that uses our daily activities as the focus and opportunity for spiritual practice. Karma yoga classically has two aspects, both aimed at changing and purifying motivation.
The first aspect is to do our service and work in the world, not for ourselves alone, but for a higher purpose. This purpose might be the good of one’s community or the welfare of the world. However, the traditional goal is to express and fulfill the Divine Will by offering one’s actions to God. Thus, one of Hinduism’s central scriptures, the Bhagavad Gita, declares:
Work is holy
When the heart of the worker
Is fixed on the Highest….
Action rightly performed brings freedom.
Of course this idea is not unique to Hinduism. St. Paul, for example, urged, “Do everything for the glory of God.”
The second element of classical karma yoga and of awakening service is to release attachments to the results of our contributions. Often when we contribute something, we have definite ideas about the outcome we want and the rewards we deserve and get very attached to getting them. Yet this is a recipe for disaster. For if things work out differently than we expect or if we are not lavished with praise, then our attachments go unfulfilled and we suffer accordingly. This is one reason why Confucius recommended so strongly, “Put service before the reward you get for it.”
How much we suffer depends on whether we are run by, or learn from, our attachments. On one hand, if we mindlessly cling to our attachments and they aren’ t fulfilled, then we may boil with anger or slide into a funk. On the other hand, we can recognize these painful emotions as a wake-up call. They are the screams of our frustrated ego letting us know that we are attached to a particular outcome, and reminding us that we can stay attached and continue to suffer, or let go and come to peace.
One way to reduce attachment to recognition is to do good works quietly, without the fanfare and trumpet blowing that would draw attention, swell our egos, and puff up pride. “So whenever you give alms (charity),” urged Jesus, “do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do.” In fact both Jesus and Mohammed used almost identical words when they recommended, “When you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be done in secret.”
Awakening service is a delicate balancing act. We work and contribute wholeheartedly, yet at the same time try to relinquish attachment to how things turn out and to receiving recognition. The Bhagavad Gita summarizes the challenge as follows:
Do your duty, always; but without attachment.
That is how [one] reaches the ultimate Truth;
By working without anxiety about results.
In fact… many others reached enlightenment
simply because they did their duty in this spirit.
Adding a third component makes awakening service still more potent. By learning as much as we can from serving, we simultaneously grow in wisdom and effectiveness.
To do this means bringing a desire to learn and grow to all that we do. Each act of service and every result of that service then becomes a source of learning. With this attitude, each success or failure and each emotional reaction becomes a kind of feedback. If the project we are working on turns out well, we try to learn why. If we make a mistake (which of course we will, many times), we explore this also. Mistakes can prove just as valuable as triumphs, sometimes even more so. With this perspective there is no need for guilt or self-blame; these are merely sorry substitutes for learning. Sufis call one who has learned to accept and learn from any outcome a “contented self.” A person at this advanced stage is a living example of Confucius’ claim that “The person of benevolence never worries.”
These three elements — dedicating efforts to a higher goal, relinquishing attachments to specific outcomes, and learning from experience — are the keys to effective awakening service. By combining them we create a spiritual practice of enormous power. Through awakening service we simultaneously purify motivation, weaken cravings, serve as best we can, and learn how to serve and awaken more effectively in the future.
One enormous advantage of awakening service is that it transforms daily activities into spiritual practices. With its help we need not change what we are doing so much as how and why we are doing it. Awakening service is therefore a superb practice for those busily engaged with work and families. With this approach, work and family — far from being distractions from spiritual life — now become central to spiritual life, and each project or family activity can be transformed into a sacred act.
A beautiful example comes from Sri Anandamaya Ma, a 20th-century Indian saint who mastered multiple spiritual paths. Although she had only two years of schooling and referred to herself as “a little unlettered child,” she spoke beautifully and profoundly, and her students included renowned scholars, philosophers, and statesmen. She described her relationship with her family as follows:
This body has lived with father, mother, husband and all. This body has served the husband, so you may call it a wife. It has prepared dishes for all, so you may call it a cook. It has done all sorts of scrubbing and menial work, so you may call it a servant. But if you look at the thing from another standpoint you will realize that this body has served none but God. For when I served my father, mother, husband and others, I simply considered them as different manifestations of the Almighty and served them as such. When I sat down to prepare food I did so as if it were a ritual, for the food cooked was after all meant for God. Whatever I did, I did in a spirit of divine service. Hence I was not quite worldly though always engaged in household affairs. I had but one ideal, viz. To serve all as God, to do everything for the sake of God.(3)
As with all practices, awakening service initially requires effort. But over time the effort becomes spontaneous and service becomes joy. Gradually awakening service extends to encompass our lives and each activity within its healing, awakening embrace. As it does so, we begin to recognize who we really are, and the words of an ancient Hindu saying ring increasingly true:
When I forget who I am I serve you.
Through serving I remember who I am
And know I am you.
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Notes
1 This article is based on parts of the book Essential Spirituality: The Seven Central Practices by Roger Walsh (Wiley, 2000). The author would like to acknowledge the excellent assistance of Marisol Palomera and Bonnie L’ Allier in the preparation of this article.
2 Andrew Vidich, Light Upon Light: Five Master Paths to Awakening the Mindful Self (Houston, TX: Elite Books, 2008), p. 139.
3 Atmananda, Atmananda, Matri Darshan (Westerkappeln, Germany: Mangalam-Verlag S. Schang, 1988).
Healing the World by Judith Helburn
Since 1994, Judith Helburn has worked closely with elders in a number of ways. She is a Certified Sage-ing Leader, active in the Sage-ing Guild at different times as Chair of the Coordinating Circle and Training Coordinator, and currently Editor of the quarterly newsletter. This past October, she shared the first SG Reb Zalman Leadership Award, She has facilitated the senior programming at her congregation for 12 years and has worked twice a month with an Alzheimer’s respite program since its inception. She has also been President of the international Story Circle Network and leads a monthly writing circle.
I came to introspection late in life. The whirlwind of life was too exciting, too invigorating for me to slow down enough to look within. For me, it was about action. I was a doer. I didn’t know that to be a whole being, I also needed stillness and quiet. I didn’t know that I needed to listen to inner voices as well as those out there. Yet, through the first seasons of my years, I was seeking I knew not what. It was in the autumn of my life — in what my teacher and mentor, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, calls “harvest time” — that I realized that one could both do and be. I discovered the Kabbalah and the story of the shards of Divine Light which gave me focus. The story explained my own desire to balance doing and being.
Isaac Luria, a sixteenth-century Kabbalist, used the phrase “Tikkun Olam” (which is usually translated as “repairing the world”) to encapsulate the true role of humanity in the ongoing evolution and spiritualization of the cosmos. Luria taught that God created the world and formed vessels to hold the Divine Light with which to finalize the work. But as God poured Light into the vessels, they shattered, tumbling down and carrying Light sparks toward our newly formed world. By doing good deeds and helping to mend the world, we are able to discover the shards and the sparks and grow closer to that which is holy.
…[O]ur personal inner work makes a difference. If we can raise ourselves to the station where the Divine can see and act through us, then we complete the momentous work of restoring at least one part to the Whole. . .(1)
Based on the premise that by healing ourselves, we heal the world and vice versa, what is the next step? First, we are only expected to do our part.
It is not incumbent on thee to finish the work,
but neither art thou permitted to desist from it altogether. — Pirkei Avot
Where do we begin? I’m not certain that it matters. However, if we are content and happy, we are more likely to reach out to others. According to a study by the British Office for National Statistics, happiness is made up of knowing oneself and contributing to society. Other studies show that helping others helps us to live longer. Helping others moves us beyond ego, puts our own lives in perspective. Positive attitudes help our immune systems. Sharing our stories with other generations connects us to the future. Our stories help others to find precedents for dealing with the Unknown. It is one way of giving back.
David Brooks states in an interview by Charlie Rose about his recent book, The Social Anima, that we have a desire to merge with the other, be it another person or even God. There is happiness in connecting. He elaborated further in an Op Ed column in the New York Times (March 2011):
We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships…. [Our] unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God.
Grace is what happens when we let go of our egos and open ourselves. In the “harvest time” of later life, we have access to wisdom from the heart, not just the head. The demands of daily life ease a bit, and we as elders have more time to do our inner work. Even when what we work towards doesn’t happen, something else does, opening up new possibilities.
Martin Luther King put it this way: “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”
Reb Zalman put it this way: “If my outer world is degraded, then my inner world is degraded.” The moral imperative for me is that I must reach out. I must give back. Eric Erikson believed that Generativity, the act of contributing to society and helping to guide future generations, was the single most important function of old age.(2)
I do so by helping people be the best they can be in the second half of life. I lead a monthly “learn and lunch” for the Second Sixty of my Jewish community. I have facilitated a women’s memoir writing circle for 14 years. I introduce Sage-ing or vital aging anywhere and everywhere I can. More importantly, I try to live Sage-ing as who I am.
One can be of service even unconsciously. I have volunteered to work (and play) in an Alzheimer’s Respite Care group meeting once a week. Of course, that is a service needed and appreciated, but what a great gift it has given me! I have discovered that my unacknowledged fear of dementia has diminished considerably. The people with whom I work are, for the most part, charming, fun, and able to carrying on interesting conversations. It is their memories which they are losing at this point, not their personalities and their intelligence. They are not conscious of their gift to me, but I am. I have learned to listen. Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot, a Harvard professor, recounts this lesson learned from Mary Catherine Bateson: “You must listen to your daughter — she is from another planet, and she has a great deal to teach you.” We must not only listen. We must continue to learn from others, old and young.
I am concerned for our planet. I do what I can — recycling, conserving energy, creating a small haven for animals and birds in my own yard, living mindfully. As I have aged, I have found that my needs and desires have lessened. I look beyond what it is that I want to what is best for the greater community. I have a cartoon from Sally Forth in which the family is planting a tree. Sally explains to a neighborhood child that the tree will bear fruit in the future — for others.
The buzz of my earlier life is no more. My energy and enthusiasm continue, but I am a quieter presence now. Making a difference makes me feel good. And when I feel good, I feel connected to all that is.
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Notes
1 Joseph Naft, “Tikkun Olam: The Spiritual Purpose of Life.”
See innerfrontier.org/Practices/TikkunOlam.htm.
2 This seventh in Erikson’s “Psychosocial Stages of Development” which is generally navigated in later midlife, pits Generativity and Stagnation: “If you have a strong sense of creativity, success, and of having “made a mark” you develop generativity, and are concerned with the next generation; the virtue is called care, and represents connection to generations to come, and a love given without expectations of a specific return. Adults that do not feel this develop a sense of stagnation, are self-absorbed, feel little connection to others, and generally offer little to society; too much stagnation can lead to rejectivity and a failure to feel any sense of meaning (the unresolved mid-life crises), and too much generativity leads to overextension (someone who has no time for themselves because they are so busy)” —psychpage.com/learning/library/person/erikson.html.
How Can YOU Help? by Robert C. Atchley
Robert C. Atchley is a distinguished professor of gerontology emeritus at Miami University, OH, where he also served as the director of the Scripps Gerontology Center. Atchley was previously a professor and chair of the Department of Gerontology at the Naropa University, in Boulder, CO. He is the author of 28 books, including Social Forces and Aging, Continuity and Adaptation in Aging, and Spirituality and Aging.
For many people, service — voluntarily giving aid or comfort to others — is a spiritual experience. The motive and action of service connects them with their deeper, transpersonal spiritual nature. The capacity to perceive the spiritual aspects of everyday experience develops throughout life and usually reaches its highest levels in later life. So it is no surprise that the spiritual side of service assumes more importance as people age.
Much attention has been given to the assertion that aging baby boomers constitute an enormous reserve of experienced people who might have a profound effect on the quality of humanitarian work being done in our communities. My thesis is that such service is primarily motivated by the fact that for many people service is a spiritual experience. There is a fundamental link between spiritual development (a growing capacity to perceive the spiritual elements of experience), years of life experience that has been well reflected upon, and capacity for spiritually centered community service.
In their book, How Can I Help?, Ram Dass and Paul Gorman (1985) assert that service stems from the human impulse to care. We can see this especially clearly in how communities respond to disasters such as floods or tornadoes. At such times, the impulse to care for one another is overwhelming. The impulse to care is a noble inclination, but it tells us little about how to care or what will be effective. Service over the long run requires that we build on the impulse to care.
A model of spiritually enlightened service begins with the need to be spiritually grounded as we serve. This means that each of us must attend to our inner spirituality. The spiritual journey involves finding and exploring our particular spiritual path and seeking experiences that open us to the vastness of inner space. As we grow spiritually, we develop levels of consciousness and awareness that alert us to the obstacles thrown in our path by self-centeredness. Ego-based service is first and foremost about the ego’s needs. Enlightened service rises above the ego to more clearly see what is needed. Moving toward enlightened service requires developing the skill needed to remain spiritually centered as we go about our work.
Many well-intentioned people find their service less satisfying than they would like it to be because they do not have essential information about the structure and operation of the field in which they wish to serve. Most areas of service have their own unique concepts and language about what they do and how they do it. “Paying your dues” involves getting the experience needed to ensure being sufficiently informed to serve effectively. This does not mean passively accepting other people’s definitions of what is good, true, or beautiful; it means thoroughly understanding the situation before weighing in with suggestions for change.
A person who is accomplished at serving from spirit is able to stay spiritually centered amid the ups and downs of working in an organizational environment, often in situations involving people who are in desperate need. It is essential to be very knowledgeable about how to work within the organizational context and with the types of people who are to be served.
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Listen to Your Entire Being
People find their way to spiritual paths and to community service in a large variety of ways. The mind, the ego, the heart, the body, and the soul can each lead us. But if we are only listening to one part of being, then we are not taking advantage of all our resources for being clear about what we are doing, or thinking about doing. Listening to your entire being means cultivating sensitivity to each dimension of being. This possibility is greatly enhanced by contemplative practice — meditation, rumination, and inner stillness and quietude. In this sense, contemplative practice is an important companion on both the inner spiritual journey and the outer journey of service. Contemplative practice can put us in touch with higher levels of consciousness, from which it is possible to see clearly the workings of the mind and the ego, our true compassion, actions that would truly be of service, and a pace that is healthy for the body.
Mindfulness and Transcendence
Mindfulness and transcendence are important qualities to bring to the spiritual journey and to bring to service. Mindfulness is being right here, right now. It is an intense awareness of the present moment. With mindfulness we are able to see more clearly what is before us. We are more likely to see what will actually be helpful in serving another human being or serving an organization. In this framework, it is not so much a matter of doing for others as you would like to be done for, but doing for others as they would like. It is a matter of doing service that is not self-centered.
To employ mindful service, we also need a vantage point that transcends our ordinary consciousness of self. Ordinary consciousness is ego-centered. We are the main character in the drama. But as soon as we begin to witness our ordinary self, we have transcended that self and can see it more clearly than we possibly could from the middle of our ego-agendas of desire or fear. To the witness, we are only one of the characters in the drama and not necessarily the most important one at a given moment.
Becoming Wisdom and Compassion in Action
Being wise and having compassion are not all-or-nothing. They are qualities that exist in degrees. They are not something we have, they are capacities we can develop. They are qualities that we might be able to bring into being to a given situation. If we have cultivated wisdom and compassion, then we have a greater capacity to manifest those qualities, but this happens in the present moment. Whether we can manifest wisdom and compassion depends on how centered we can remain. When we are in a situation of service, we are usually called to be wise and to be compassionate. How well we can do this depends a great deal on how long we have been practicing wisdom and compassion.
Often we think of service as something that involves volunteering or working within an organizational context. However, service is really an intention that we can take with us into a wide variety of situations we find ourselves in. What would happen if we went joyfully about our daily lives seeing every person as someone we could potentially serve, in however small a way? What would happen if we took every opportunity to tend our planet and our environment? Many times these are not big programs or long-term tasks but instead are things we can do moment, by moment, by moment. It only takes a few minutes to deeply listen to someone who needs a receptive ear; it only takes a few seconds to pick up a piece of trash. The feeling of service is something that happens in the present moment, whether you are doing it in an organizational context or purely on your own.
Paying Dues
Each new service environment we enter has its own language and customs, and we need to give ourselves time to assimilate these elements. Otherwise we risk behaving in ways that seem arrogant, naïve, or clueless to those already working in the environment. Curiosity and humility provide a useful stance from which to pay one’s dues and earn the respect of others in the environment. Be careful about assuming that knowledge from another field can be readily adapted to a new situation. Ask lots of questions and ask for help learning the ropes.
Much of our service occurs in an organizational context. What are the mission and vision of the organization? What values serve to anchor the operation of the organization? What are the major goals of the organization? What outcomes does the organization seek? To what extent are the clients involved in setting goals? Who are the major stakeholders in the success of the organization? These and many other questions create a big picture within which your work will take place. It’s important to know how your work fits into the whole.
Take Care of Yourself
Effective service is based in a balance between caring for others and caring for oneself. We all need rest, nourishment, and perspective if we are to be able to serve over the long run. Rest is not just sleep, although sleep is very important. Rest also occurs when we pace ourselves so we are not living in a perpetually rushed state. Nourishment of the body is equally important, but so is nourishment of the mind and spirit. Contemplative reading of sacred texts or books and articles on spiritual themes is an example of a practice that nourishes the mind. Meditation is an example of a restful practice that nourishes the spirit. Leading a contemplative life aimed at nurturing the whole person provides a perspective that allows us to bring enough love to our acts of service that we can endure the pain of compassion.
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Does Life Stage Matter?
If we think about stages of adulthood in terms of issues and challenges of young adulthood, middle age, later adulthood, and old age, then there are major differences in (1) competition from interests other than community service, (2) effects of the amount and type of life experience, and (3) interest in an intentional spiritual journey.
In young adulthood, people often focus on finding a livelihood that is right for them and making decisions about mate selection and family formation. By the time people reach middle age, their job and family responsibilities often become routine, perhaps still demanding but well within their capacity, and opportunities for community involvement often increase. In later adulthood, having launched children into adulthood and having retired from the workforce can bring increased freedom to choose a life of community service. In old age, many people maintain their involvement in community organizations, especially religious organizations, and some find themselves serving as sages and spiritual elders.
In terms of the intersection of spirituality and community service, young adults often experience strong pressures to concentrate on employment and family, both of which can mobilize the impulse to care. For many young adults, issues concerning the meaning of life have not yet stimulated them to think about a conscious spiritual journey. By the end of young adulthood, most people have had enough experience living with the results of their own actions to have deep respect for the difficulties of deciding a right course of action.
By middle age, many adults have begun to question our materialistic culture’s definitions of the good life. Many have followed society’s prescription for life satisfaction, only to find the results less than satisfying. They may then embark on a search for meaning, and the world’s wisdom traditions offer many spiritual paths for finding it. At the same time, increased opportunities for community involvement and service can provide an experience of meaning through service. The spiritual journey and the journey of service usually complement one another.
Later adulthood can also bring a need for new direction. Those who did not develop an orientation to serving from spirit in midlife may find themselves drawn to it later, as child launching and retirement create opportunities to rethink one’s lifestyle. After a period of resting up from the demands of middle age, many people at the beginning of later adulthood begin a period of experimenting with various ways to lead a satisfying life. Eventually, some settle into a life focused around community service.
In old age, there are adults who are uniquely qualified to serve as sages and/or spiritual elders — individuals who combine a deep spiritual connection, insights based in their considerable life experience, and concern for nurturing the upcoming generations of adults. As parents, many spiritual elders help ease the transition of their offspring into later adulthood. They serve as role models and mentors for middle-aged and older adults as well as for young people. Spiritual elders continue to participate in the life of the community, but they often have moved beyond the need to take an operational leadership role.
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Bon Voyage
I’ve covered a lot of ground in this essay, but I hope it gives you food for thought as you think about your own journey of spiritual development and how it ties into your impulse to care for others and our planet. If you want further reading on spiritually grounded service, How Can I Help?, by Ram Dass and Paul Gorman (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), is an excellent place to start.
Answering Our Call From the Future by Paul J. Severance
Paul J. Severance founded United Senior Action of Indiana in 1979 and served as executive director until his retirement in 2004. He has also served on both the board and executive committee of the National Coalition of Consumer Organizations on Aging (a unit of the National Council on Aging) and as a member of the Consumer Action Board of the Medicare Rights Center. Currently, Severance is board chair for the Sage-ing Guild, a national organization devoted to conscious aging and the teachings of Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, and he is developing his own conscious aging educational organization, The Center for the New Elder.
There is a principle which anthropologists tell us has operated in our societies for over 99 percent of human history. This principle has been central to human societies scattered throughout the world — from the Kalahari Desert of Africa to the pueblos of the American Southwest, from the rain forests of South America to the Arctic North.
The principle: Elders have a special responsibility for the young people of the tribe and generations as yet unborn. For eons, elders have served as mentors and initiators. Elders have carried special responsibility to speak for future generations. In the tribal councils of the Iroquois Confederation, elders call attention to the provision of the Great Law that says “In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation…”
As elders, when we connect with spirit, we are drawn to serve those coming behind us. That is the essence of legacy. If we listen, we will hear a call from the future.
In the 300 or so years since the beginning of the industrial revolution (that’s about four-fifths of 1 percent of human history) the traditional role of elders in society has greatly diminished. Our youth-oriented cultures are more and more dominated by short-term thinking and immediate gratification. As a result, in this relative blink of an eye, we have managed to gravely threaten the future of life as we know it on our planet.
Richard Leider eloquently underlines the urgency: “We cannot wait for the wise ones to come. We must become the new elders.”
Many of us fulfill the role of elders in our families — at least to the extent that is possible given how so many families are dispersed around the country. But the power of cultural messages makes it difficult for us even to hear our call to serve future generations beyond our family.
The barriers to fulfilling our role as the wise elders of our tribe — and our tribe is all humanity: we are all in this together — are both internal and external. The external barrier is that society does not look to us to play that role. It fact, it tends to ignore us if we try — unless we enter that role with great stature, like, for instance, Jimmy Carter.
The internal barrier flows from the messages we receive from our culture: First, we do not develop our wise elder qualities, because our culture does not recognize or encourage that. Second, we do not see ourselves as capable of making a significant difference in the world. Internalizing the cultural message that we are over the hill, we don’t look for opportunities to make a difference for future generations.
We CAN, however, break free of this cultural conditioning. In our lifetimes we have seen African Americans and women reject the cultural limitations placed on them. For the sake of our grandchildren and their grandchildren, we need to reject the culture’s view of elders and accept the call of Spirit to take responsibility for future generations.
How do we do that?
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Developing Our Elder Qualities
It came naturally to elders in earlier societies to become the wise elders of the tribe: The wise elders that preceded them were their role models; their societies expected them to be wise elders in their older years.
We, on the other hand, must consciously develop the qualities of the wise elder. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi puts it this way: “People don’t automatically become sages simply by living to a great age. They become wise by undertaking the inner work that leads in stages to expanded consciousness.” In his seminal book, From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Profound New View Of Growing Older, Reb Zalman provides a roadmap for that conscious development whose elements include:
- Life review. We certainly learn from the experience of our living, but gaining the full wisdom contained in those years of experience requires reflection.
- Healing the resentments, bitterness, and anger which we may have accumulated through our lives. These truly wall us off from the wisdom we are capable of.
- Forgiving others and forgiving ourselves are particularly potent forms of healing.
- Coming to terms with our mortality. Fear of death and being in denial of our own death are important barriers to wisdom.
- Clarifying our values and beliefs. A process of stating and examining our values and beliefs will clarify and deepen them — which not only adds to our wisdom, but enables us to communicate it to others.
- Developing/deepening our spiritual practice (however we pursue this) helps us get in touch with our deepest wisdom.
As we become wise elders and live our day-to-day lives from that place of awareness, wisdom, and compassion, we affect all of those we come in contact with. Those ripples extend into the future in ways we cannot know about, but we can be confident we are making a contribution every day.
Beyond this essentially inner work is a further obligation, which is to discern and fulfill our own unique responsibility to future generations.
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Discerning Our Call from the Future
How does each of us discern our special call from the future? A good place to start is noticing what concerns us deeply and what we passionately hope for. Think about the generation of your grandchildren’s grandchildren — in your community, your nation, the world. What are your greatest hopes for them? What concerns or fears do you have about the world they will be born into?
These are questions that call for an emotional response, not a logical response. Never mind at this stage whether you think there is anything you can do about it. Just notice what really touches you deeply. Really spend time with these questions, and listen. If the answers are not immediately clear, stay with them.
When you have some clarity about your hopes and concerns for future generations, it’s time to switch gears and think about yourself. Spend some time with two questions:
- What are your best talents? What are you particularly good at? What comes easily to you that may be difficult for others?
- What do you love to do? (Another window into your special gifts.)
Now it’s time to bring your creativity into play. You now have the ingredients to create a purpose for your third age. I don’t have a logical formula for this. It is truly a creative process. It will be your unique concoction that combines your hopes and concerns for future generations with your own talents and what you love to do. Again, let this percolate. This is a spiritual process — not to be rushed. Sitting quietly with the question is essential for most of us.
The biggest barrier to identifying your purpose will be an inner critic that says “I could never make a difference on that. The challenge is too big, and my talents are too small.” Ignore that voice at this stage. The place for realism will come at the stage of developing your specific mission (more on that later). For now, it’s just a matter of developing a sense of purpose. You don’t have to single-handedly solve the problem you’re concerned about or bring the dream you have into reality. We’re not talking about you becoming the Lone Ranger for the world. We’re talking about developing a sense of purpose which will guide you in defining a mission which will make a difference.
Your call from the future is the sense of purpose you have developed. The future needs you to put your strengths to work on behalf of generations to come.
I suggest developing a two-part statement of purpose: In the first part you name the problem you are deeply concerned about; in the second part you identify the talent(s) you want to utilize. So your purpose statement doesn’t talk about what you’re going to do, it simply identifies the problem or dream you want to address and what you are going to bring to the table, so to speak — the knowledge, skills, and assets that you will use. Here is an example:
My purpose is to attack the problem of climate change which threatens the well-being of future generations by dedicating my problem-solving skills and my motivational skills to making a difference.
A word about purpose before we move on to talking about what you can do to fulfill your sense of purpose. Some thinkers urge us to identify a single life purpose for our-selves. I am simply urging you to develop a purpose for your third age that addresses your responsibility for future generations. If this occurs to you in the context of a single life purpose, that’s great. If not, that’s also great. It’s having purpose as a central factor in your life that is important.
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Answering Your Call from the Future
Lastly we turn to the issue of how to put your purpose into action. I believe that to have power, we must translate our purpose into mission. I use “mission” here in the sense of Mission: Impossible. In other words, a mission is a project to achieve a specific goal.
While purpose is at least relatively constant, your mission exists until it is accomplished — or abandoned in those instances (rare, we hope) that you become convinced that it cannot be accomplished. Then it is done and you create a new mission.
Here’s where realism comes in. You want a mission that has a reasonable chance of being achieved. An achievable goal is a powerful motivator — it will keep you going when things get tough.
A caution here: I know from my experience of 35 years in working with people to solve problems in their communities that people always underestimate their ability to make a difference. So push yourself to adopt a mission that is more challenging than you might initially think is achievable. There is an art to this, and you’ll get better as you go.
A critical decision in adopting a mission is whether to make it a personal mission or to come together with a few others who resonate with your purpose and come up with a group mission. A group multiplies the power of the individual members. As anthropologist Margaret Meade observed, “Never doubt that a small group of dedicated people can change the world; indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.”
It often requires research to decide on a mission, and more research to develop your strategy and tactics for accomplishing your mission.
Given the sample purpose stated above, here are some possible missions in line with that purpose:
- My mission is to reduce my carbon footprint by 50% by using my planning skills and my dedication.
- My mission is to submit at least one letter to the editor to publications in my community discussing what elders can do to help stabilize the environment.
- My mission is to organize a committee in my church to create a recycling program.
- My mission is to get a curbside recycling program adopted by the City Council by organizing a group to carry out a letter writing and publicity campaign.
- My mission is to work with my Sierra Club to pass state legislation supporting mass transportation.
Obviously, the number of possible missions is huge. Come up with one that utilizes your special skills, knowledge, and talents, and will involve doing something you love that not only will make a difference, but will inspire others to undertake their missions.
By now, you might guess my mission: To use my writing and presenting skills to inspire 1,000 elders to adopt a mission to make a difference for future generations.
I would love to hear about your mission for future generations, or just what you are thinking about that. And we can create ways to support each other, such as a MasterMind group, where we provide each other with ideas, encouragement, and accountability. Let me know if you are interested in that or have other ideas to suggest.
Let us become the new elders who create a powerful movement to make a difference for our seventh generation.
Pentecost with Andrew Harvey: Thoughts on Sacred Activism by Claudia Moore
Claudia Moore has three decade’s experience as a journalist and holds an MSW in community practice. Her graduate project — Invest in Kids Initiative, 2001 — organized New Hampshire early childhood education professionals to strike for better pay and benefits in order to insure lower turnover rates in the state’s childcare centers. She has experience in hospice and bereavement counseling and has been a student in the Academy for Evolutionaries, which explores concepts and practices of evolutionary spirituality. Claudia facilitates courses at the Duke chapter of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute on the subject of spirituality.
Everyone whose eyes are open knows the world is in a terrifying crisis. As many of us as possible need to undergo a massive transformation of consciousness and to find the sacred passion to act from this consciousness in every arena and on every level of reality.
— Andrew Harvey
Over a lifetime, certain events blaze forth like beacons that mark turns on our path. For me, one such event took place on the Feast of the Pentecost, May 15, 2005. In search of the spark to rekindle the dry tinder of rote weekly religious worship, this particular morning I’d driven to a neighboring town where an alternative faith group met in a strip mall storefront “chapel” that had recently undergone its own conversion experience.
Unhappy about the status quo of my spiritual life, I knew that the heart of my discomfort was that I desired to serve Spirit, though I didn’t know what that might mean. I had no clue of how exactly my request for clarity was about to be answered as I made my way into the building and found a seat. The roar of the enthusiastic welcome that greeted Andrew Harvey, the guest speaker that morning, suggested that something unusual was about to unfold.
For those unfamiliar with his life and work, Andrew Harvey is an internationally acclaimed poet, novelist, translator, mystical scholar, and spiritual teacher. Harvey has published over 20 books including The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism and Heart Yoga: The Sacred Marriage of Yoga and Mysticism. In addition to exploration and explication of Rumi and Sufi mysticism, he collaborated with Sogyal Rinpoche and Patrick Gaffney in the writing of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Harvey was a Fellow of All Souls College Oxford from 1972–1986 and has taught at Oxford University, Cornell University, The California Institute of Integral Studies, and the University of Creation Spirituality, as well as various spiritual centers throughout the United States. He was the subject of the 1993 BBC film documentary The Making of a Modern Mystic. He is the Founder of the Institute for Sacred Activism in Oak Park, Illinois, where he lives.
On that drear New England Sunday, Harvey began softly but quickly turned up the heat:(1)
I’d like to share a practical vision with you of what being a mystical activist in a time like this really means. I beg you to listen — from my heart to your heart — because if you don’t listen now, the crises that are coming will make it even harder to listen. It is extremely important to realize that we are not going to get out of this crisis… We will not avoid the bill for our monstrous shadow. We are going into storms that will shake humanity in unparalleled ways. Unless you and I are strong now, those storms will threaten us with madness and despair.
The divine work I’m offering to you is not luxury. It’s not something you can decide to do or not. It is something that if you hear what I’m trying to say to you on this day of Pentecost, you will realize it is something you have got to do to stay clear yourself and to be useful to others in any serious way at this moment. True prophets bring warnings and empowerments. And the Mother herself brings warnings and empowerments.
There is no authentic spirituality in a time like this without a commitment to do something. You are the most privileged race that’s ever been on the Earth. You belong to the most powerful nation on this Earth, which is responsible for a quarter of the emissions that are causing global warming and for a foreign policy that is hurtling the world towards Armageddon. It is time that we of the West wake up and claim our divinity, not just inwardly but in a conscious act of self-donation to making ourselves radioactive nuisances at a time when we have to turn up as real people or be guilty of the matricide of the planet.
Harvey closed the morning service with these words: “What is being asked of us by the Mother, by the flames, is that we stand in the middle of this apocalypse to see it for what it is, to see the birth and to know the birth in ourselves, to give ourselves over to the birth, and then, to stand in great passion and great joy, with great energy and give and give and give and serve and serve and serve and become, at last, truly authentic and truly divine.”
Thunderous applause signaled the close of the service. Whoever this guy was, I knew without doubt he spoke in tongues of fire. No longer a dusty Bible story, Pentecost had just become live in Technicolor for me. Reeling, I made my way to the table in the lobby where I bought a ticket for the afternoon workshop, which would delve more deeply and more practically into Harvey’s concept of “Sacred Activism.” As I sat in my car in the parking lot waiting for the doors to open once more, I remembered the adage, “Be careful what you wish for…” The irony that my prayer for a spirit-igniting spark was answered on that Pentecost in the form of a sacred activist wielding a blowtorch wasn’t lost on me.
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Over the course of the afternoon, Harvey outlined what we each must do to become sacred activists. As I listened, I thought about what had seemed to be a mysterious impetus that led me to return to college at age 50 to complete two degrees in social work. For an also unknown reason, I chose to specialize in community organization. Courses that focused on how to help people come to consensus, to strategize for empowerment, and to come to victory for the greater good somehow resonated deeply. Though unable to see an exact way I could use the education I’d acquired in combination with what might be described as eclectic life experience, after hearing Harvey’s message, I sensed that soon enough, I’d find a way to live my service to Spirit as some sort of elder sacred activist.
However, along with this revelation, some significant questions took form. What does it mean to be an elder in a culture rife with ageism? What does it mean to be part of a demographic of people turning 65 at the rate of 8,000 per day? While I have no definitive answers to these questions, I have observations to offer based upon my experience working with elders and my experience of my own aging.
Not so long ago, I worked in an assisted living facility. Make that to read “warehouse-for-elders-who-don’t-yet-require-full-nursing-care-but-their-families-for-some-reason-don’t-want-them-at-home.” The most difficult aspect of my job was to witness the effects of isolation and the sense of utter purposelessness so many of the residents voiced. These were men who had headed some of the biggest corporations in the country. These were women who ran hugely successful volunteer organizations. These were men and women who knew how to balance budgets, among other significant skills, people who knew how to “make things happen.” Their primary activities in this facility were tea parties, crafts, bingo games or, the very worst, sitting by the window where they stared at nothing. I hated to see this waste of their life experience, wisdom, and willingness to return to the marketplace, as the Zen ox-herding tale describes, with help-bestowing hands, if not in active duty at least as consultants — wise elders.
I found and continue to find comfort that there are no signs that say “Need Not Apply” on the door marked “Sacred Activism” for those of us over 65. In fact, and as a proponent of the adage “Old age and treachery trumps youth and beauty,” I believe that though any and all may engage in sacred activism, only the seasoned metal that has endured the most intense flame is destined to become the vehicle for healing and transformation so desperately required in our world today.
In addition, the sheer bulk of the numbers suggests that elders are a next vast “natural resource” to be tapped and utilized for great good. This demographic of elders around the globe is ripe and ready to undergo “the massive transformation in consciousness” to which Harvey calls us — a shift away from the limits of materialism in which we seem ensnared to a consciousness open to the infinity of Spirit.
The down-to-earth words of Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, point the way for those willing to become pioneers in this shift in consciousness:
Older people are not just card-carrying members of Leisure World and mid-afternoon nap-takers. We are tribal elders, with an ongoing responsibility for safe-guarding the tribe’s survival and protecting the health of the planet. To do this, we must become society’s futurists, testing out new instruments, technologies, ideas, and styles of living. We have the freedom to do so, and we have nothing to lose.
Harvey urges us to find our sacred passion. To do this, he warns us not to follow our bliss but, rather, to follow our heartbreak. What prevents us from doing this? Why do we find ourselves paralyzed, contracted with fear as we survey the rapidly escalating chaos before us?
In answer to the matter of fear, I suggest — and not glibly — that fear is a four-letter word like many others — good, hope, love, to name a few. A popular definition of “F.E.A.R.” suggests this unpleasant emotion is nothing more than false evidence appearing real. One of the great gifts of elderhood lies in the fact that we would not have arrived at this point in life had we not stood nose to nose with fear in about all of the forms it can take, not the least of which is that of death. Remember Maggie Kuhn: We’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain as we step into our role as tribal elders, sacred activists.
Yes, the crises we face are many — the insanity of political discourse, the fragility of global economies, the collapse of institutional structures that dispense such “goods” as medicine, education, and law. In combination with staggering unemployment and environmental devastation, the choice of “Leisure World and afternoon naps” may well appear attractive. However, as Joe Lewis reminds us, we can run but we can’t hide. Elder sacred activists understand that to hide in the face of global crisis is not an option. How many times have we heard the saying, “We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for”?
The authentic spirituality to which Harvey is calling us demands a commitment to do something: to follow our heartbreak, not our bliss. If crisis and opportunity are two sides of the same coin, what is the one opportunity that masquerades as a crisis — the opportunity that breaks our hearts — here, now? Why stand on the sidelines, overwhelmed by the number and immensity of the challenges our culture faces? Identifying a commitment to one particular issue is unlikely to require that we think long or hard. In fact, each person who has achieved elder status has likely devoted considerable time, energy, and treasure to at least one source of heartbreak over the course of their lifetime, either through their professional or personal experience.
Wisdom gleaned in the trenches is invaluable, especially if elder sacred activists align their efforts as a global collective. Could this not spark the massive transformation in consciousness that Harvey is urging? Chaos theory tells us that any small, localized disturbance in one part of a complex system creates widespread effects throughout the whole system — the “butterfly effect.” As I write these words, I wonder about the effect if, tomorrow morning, all over the globe, elders awoke to the power of their sacred activism and flapped their wings. What if each one of us engaged in one action followed by another and another to heal the issue that breaks our hearts? What magnitude of tsunami would such a wave of action create on behalf of the greater good?
While certainly tinted by the urgency Harvey voices, the vision I hold as an elder sacred activist reaches across time to embrace an inevitable infinity. The collective consciousness of our species has been evolving for a long time. Read the opening verses of the third book of The Mahabharata(2), written in the 4th century BCE, and you will find its description of the chaos threatening to engulf the Earth eerily contemporary. Harvey’s dire warning that our species is both out of time and out of grace is meant to prod us to action. However, against his dire prediction, I wish to suggest that the notion that “the end is near” works on one level only, that of the material world.
Not being much of a “Material Girl,” my elder eyes see through the terrifying and chaotic illusion in the reality around me and find the shape a deeper truth. “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience,” Teilhard de Chardin observed. Thus, what does or doesn’t happen to human inhabitants and the planet becomes irrelevant. The variable that does have eternal relevance here though, along with the invitation Andrew Harvey issued in his Pentecost workshop, is quite simply that of our dedication to live in service of Spirit.
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Notes
1 I include the somewhat lengthy direct quotations, transcribed from tapes and CDs of Harvey’s presentation, to capture the palpable urgency of his message.
2 The Mahabharata, Book 3 Vana Parva, Section CLXXXIX, Kisari-Mohan Ganguli (tr.) (1885–1896). http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/m03/m03189.htm#fr_46
Everyday Mysticism by Carol Cober
After 30 years managing mental health and rehabilitation programs, Carol Cober now combines her work as a researcher at Westat Inc. with her private practice as a body-centered therapist at a wellness center. Her work at AARP on wellness, widowed persons programs, and long-term care led to her current research evaluating aging in community and preventing elder abuse. She co-leads mindful watercolor painting retreats, incorporating Rosen Method bodywork, at Blueberry Gardens, a Wellness Center located on an organic blueberry farm in Ashton, Maryland.
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
— Franz Kafka
It inspires me to witness what can happen if we are still enough and open enough to the inward process. Connecting with what is deep within us opens up possibilities. Into the expanded awareness that Silence creates, there arises something new. Although we may not approach a time of inner exploration with any outcome in mind, this often is the result. I believe ordinary or everyday mystics learn how tending this inner process leads to outer connection, outer service.
Centuries ago the Desert Fathers urged people to learn from Silence, because it can lead us back to our true selves. My Quaker contemporary J. Brent Brill has similar advice: “Holy Silence calls us to lives of justice, kindness and humility, walking with God. Holy silence is a way towards sacramental living.”
Some find a gateway to deep knowing in childhood, perhaps from their experience of nature or from music or art. For others, the pull toward discernment arrives after times of difficulty and great struggle. For others still, it is an outgrowth of community. It seems that both inspiration and desperation will get us there.
Spiritual development is a process. We are most familiar with its personal component. But the communal component is equally important. Our longing to know, our curiosity to seek information, grows out of connection, Parker Palmer argues: “Knowing of any sort is relational, animated by a desire to come into deeper community with what we know.” He urges us to look beyond knowledge inspired by pure curiosity or a desire to control. Another kind of knowledge is open to us, “one that begins in a different passion and is drawn to other ends.” This knowledge originates in compassion or love. The compassion or love that Parker alludes to includes not just the mind, but embraces the body, the heart, and the community connections in our environment.
For those whose inner work is prompted by challenges or sufferings, community can offer profound comfort and support. I found a dear spiritual home at the Quaker Meeting; resting within Silence among others salved the raw and tender losses deep within. Community can be formal or informal. It might also include a group of individual supporters we invite to accompany us on our journey, similar to the many helpers I found along the way: a Rosen Method practitioner who introduced me to focused bodywork, a Jungian Analyst, an acupuncturist, and various teachers of yoga and tai chi.
As my meditation time increased and more mystical experiences surfaced, the process became more difficult for me to understand — a common dilemma for the everyday mystic who lacks the support of a monastic community and the daily guidance of a teacher. I turned to books and devoured advice both ancient and modern: Theresa of Avila, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr, Thomas Keating, and Anthony De Mello, and the words of Quakers like Thomas Kelly, Douglas Steere, Elton Trueblood, Richard Foster, and Rufus Jones.
I also ventured beyond my own faith community, seeking out writers on mysticism immersed in Buddhism and Hinduism. Reading Ramana Maharshi, Gangagi, Aurobindo, Almaas, Kornfield, and Chodron felt like having conversations with wise friends. These explorations into other traditions convinced me that the spiritual unfolding was a well-travelled and fluid process that was shared across traditions. I was not alone.
The work of American philosopher Ken Wilber also proved enormously helpful in my quest to understand intellectually the process that at times seemed almost to overwhelm me. Wilber explored the contemplative state of non-dual awareness (where subject and object are one), transrational experiences beyond words, and the “suchness” of reality. He offered a clear description and synthesis of mystical states and spiritual development from many traditions where God is a direct experience.
But to affirm the authenticity of my intuitions, I needed more than intellectual clarity. I needed a kind of “direct experience” that my avocation as a painter, my training as a bodyworker and massage therapist, and my skill as a sign language interpreter all inclined me to prefer. I needed not just an intellectual understanding, but a body-based recognition of the truth. During this period of searching I moved more deeply into body-centered spiritual practices, such as tai chi, qi gong, yoga, and the walking meditation of Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. I joined with friends in African American-style ecumenical praise services full of singing and dancing, moved by the vibrant expressions of Praise. I could feel what I knew on some deep inner level through the body wisdom in my feet, in my hands, in my voice, in every part of me.
In my process of seeking I eventually found several “leadings” towards change. Most surprising was the vocational shift I was led to pursue through retraining in a form of somatic work. I had spent 20 years as a mental health practitioner and program administrator. The programs I had tended dealt with the losses people face. I’d worked with the parents of deaf and blind children, counseled young adults with spinal cord injury, and worked with widows and others grieving. Even though I had incorporated the body in some way by training in American Sign Language and felt comfortable with using my body as a communication tool, to add on the idea of working with clients through touch was a radical new idea for me.
Another insight that changed in me was living more fully. What I feared most after surviving all my losses was the concept of an unlived life. As I sunk more deeply in the Silence and stillness of God’s presence, I was at the same time being drawn out. What a wonderful process! As we enjoy this great Silence, we are also being led to dig up our buried talent and set it free! We carry within us all of the unwritten poems, the unpainted pictures, the unmade calls of loving friendship, the unheeded love of the nature around us — carry all this within our creative hearts. It is my hope and the affirmation of other mystical seekers that tending the inward life will help us avoid the unlived life, the unused light.
Through the seeking process I felt a greater ease emerge. It was like finding my voice again, or emerging with a newness in the creative expression I had carried with me for decades. This leading came with a push, a spiritual nudge, to share that inner voice with others. My first attempts to do so felt like being naked in public, but I knew deep within it was what spirit invited me to do. So I painted more, I wrote more poems — and sometimes I shared these with others, despite my natural bent toward shyness. Changes emerged and opportunities arrived. I met a watercolor teacher who was also a meditator, and we found ways to join together and lead mindful Creative Renewal retreats. We merged her teaching background with my therapist and bodyworker background; and we offered a space and resources for others to find rest, encouragement, and nourishment for their own expression.
With time I returned to being a more active member of my own community. I felt like I had new eyes, a softer heart, a different way of being with others. My capacity to listen was somehow expanded. During my explorations, I had taken a long break from the committee work that is part of a Quaker Meeting community. But with time and strengthening I felt a genuine leading to resume being more fully in my community. I found a way that my recovered gifts could be of use even within traditional committee work. By bringing my full self, my reclaimed passion for creative expression, into my work on a committee I was able to invite others in my Meeting to create a regular gathering opportunity on Creativity and Spirituality. We formed a group who find spiritual sustenance from creative practices, and we meet to explore new opportunities for our community to experience the journey of creative exploration and encouragement.
There is a natural and non-linear process of seeking within that leads to changes in how we are connected to others. Many people — ordinary everyday seekers — who long for the sense of peace and clarity and support can achieve it through a faithful practice of inner seeking. I have witnessed a greater sense of strength arise from seeking what lies within as part of a community. May we learn to trust that which we know deeply within on all levels — body, mind, spirit. May we find a way to participate in supportive community and enjoy the journey!
Jock Brandis: Championing Stone Age Technology by Pat and Steve Taylor
Pat and Steve Taylor are great admirers of their brother-in-law Jock Brandis and ardent supporters of the work and mission of the Full Belly Project. Pat is a retired university lecturer and administrator; Steve is a retired attorney and magistrate. They now live in Philadelphia and Walnut Creek, California.
In the face of a possible nuclear holocaust and the rape of the earth and the obscene poverty of whole peoples… it is time to reconsider what life is really all about.
— Joan Chittister
Joost (Jock) Brender a Brandis, a Dutch native who grew up in Canada and now resides in Wilmington, North Carolina, has created a Universal Nut Sheller, a device called “the holy grail of sustainable agriculture.” With this invention, and the several others that followed, he is considered one of the world’s leading authorities in the emerging field of appropriate technology.
Jock has been interested in technological innovation since his undergraduate service as a cadet in the Canadian Naval ROTC. That fascination continued in his first career as an electrical technician and lighting director for dozens of major motion pictures. One of his oft-repeated stories involves his on-the-set creation of a carnivorous bed from air mattresses, food coloring, and Mr. Bubble foam. His encore career — to which he promises to devote as much time and energy as he did to his work on movie crews — began after the death of his wife from cancer in 1995 and his decision to remain close to home to care for his young children, then 9 and 14.
When asked by a friend for advice in fashioning a solar-powered irrigation system for a village in Mali, he gathered various components and flew to Africa to oversee the installation.
While there, he noticed that the women of the village had bloody fingers from hours spent shelling their main cash crop, peanuts. He promised that he would send them an inexpensive peanut sheller, but when he returned home, he discovered that everything on the market required some sort of electrical power source. The nearest electric service was many miles away from these village women, so Jock invented a device that can be operated by simply turning a crank on the top.
To most Americans, shelling a peanut may seem neither difficult nor meaningful, but in Sub-Saharan Africa, some half a billion people in dozens of countries depend on the peanut as a primary source of protein, livelihood, soil restoration, and rural economies. And the variety of peanut that grows there is so difficult to remove from its shell that the women who spend half of their lives at such labor become progressively crippled.
His creation, which he modestly refers to as “Stone Age technology,” uses $28 worth of materials and can be manufactured on site from a kit assembled by volunteers in his Wilmington, North Carolina, workshop. He quickly interested a group of Peace Corps veterans in forming a nonprofit called Full Belly Project which would distribute the shellers. Meanwhile, he was tweaking the invention so that it would operate not only on peanuts, but also on coffee beans, pistachios, and, perhaps most significantly, jatropha seeds, which can now be used to produce diesel fuel, fertilizer, and a natural insecticide.
As Jock realized the tremendous effect his invention had on people’s lives, he moved on to other simple and inexpensive machines. His gentle manner, old-world charm, and humility won over philanthropic people from many countries and allowed him to attract volunteers and grant money to Full Belly Project. He also has earned the trust of native peoples around the world whom he has trained in the manufacture and operation of his machines. They have become social entrepreneurs and manufacturers in 17 countries.
Mali, Haiti, and the Philippines are among the beneficiaries of his ingenuity, but not the only ones. His latest device was invented to solve a problem he found closer to home. In Rutherford County, North Carolina, small farmers needed a simple way to get water to their farm for irrigation and livestock consumption. These farms are bordered by small creeks — themselves tributaries of larger rivers that feed reservoirs of the larger cities in Central North and South Carolina. The streams, however, are fenced, both to control erosion and to prevent the livestock from fouling the water. To solve the farmers’ problem, Jock ran pipe beneath the fencing and created a gravity-powered water pump to siphon the water from the stream. Again, he used only readily available materials: PVC pipe and rubber gaskets made from used truck tire inner tubes.
The sandy-haired, greying 6-footer with blue eyes that twinkle when he talks about his projects likes to work quickly. He admits that he hears “time’s winged chariot,” and he feels he has much left to do in adapting wind, solar, water, and human power to the problems of the developing world. He also recognized early on the importance of replicability, and so he has created what he calls the “factory in a box.” He and his volunteers ship the designs and instructions for assembly, along with the basic components, to dozens of villages each month to make problem-solving entrepreneurs of the local people.
Allen Armstrong, an engineering professor at M.I.T., notes that Jock’s Universal Nut Sheller is entirely new — new shape, new materials, and a new method of manufacturing. Moreover, his work is beginning to change the way international development is done — away from large corporate centers often far removed from its beneficiaries, and toward smaller, local groups with simple products. These simpler devices use low-cost, locally available materials, and can be operated and maintained with a minimum of training by local people. Jock is currently working with the National Geographic Society and a Philippines philanthropist to come up with a school building that can be made from plastic bottles.
Jock is one of those people who has thought deeply about the purpose of life, so deeply and yet so emotionally that, in 2008, he was the recipient of a $100,000 cash award. Bestowed annually to those who are “taking matters into their own hands and fashioning a new vision of the second half of life,” the Purpose Prize arrived just in time for him to keep his home from foreclosure. For most of his life, he has possessed few material goods. In our family, he is often called a modern St. Francis, because, like Francis of Assisi, he trusts that the universe will provide. Once, when he was several months in arrears on his house payment and was literally days from foreclosure, an unknown woman appeared at his door, told him she had seen a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation video about his work, and handed him a check that more than covered his delinquent payments.
Jock is the quintessential optimist, which helps him develop new ideas. Studies have shown that hopefulness and optimism lengthen life. Those who are dynamically engaged, full of plans, working toward meaningful accomplishment are almost guaranteed a longer life span. Jock is also a good listener. Each day, in his workshop, he is surrounded by volunteers from high school students to senior citizens, eager to learn practical things — how to weld steel, mix concrete, and assemble PVC — but also to expose their ideas to Jock’s problem-solving analysis and technological know-how.
His work has touched the lives of a diverse group of people, from African village elders using machines adapted from old bicycles, to Indian farmers using foot-powered water pumps, to M.I.T. graduate students eager to learn how to think outside the box, to former President Jimmy Carter (a man who knows a thing or two about peanuts himself). Several short documentary films have been produced about his work.
He has inspired many to imitate him. Ming Leong, an M.I.T. engineer who spent a summer as a Full Belly Project intern, says, “Just being around Jock has made me feel like, yeah, I have a chance to make a difference too.”
Service Through Life’s Season by John G. Sullivan
Lord, help me . . .
Because my boat is so small,
And your sea is so immense.(1)
Once upon a time, in a far kingdom, a certain king said to himself: “If only I knew the answer to three questions I would never go astray.” The questions were these:
- What is the best time to do each thing?
- Who is the most important person to work with?
- What is the most important thing to do?
The king’s counselors had many answers. Yet none satisfied the king. So he decided to consult a hermit, widely renowned for his wisdom.
The hermit lived on a mountain and received none but common folk. So the king put on simple clothes, left his bodyguards at the foot of the mountain, dismounted, and climbed to the hermit’s hut alone.
When the king approached, the hermit was digging in his garden preparing to plant seeds. Seeing his visitor, the hermit greeted him and went on digging. The hermit was frail and weak. He breathed heavily as he worked.
The king went up to him and asked his three questions — about the best time to act, the best person to work with, and the best thing to do. The hermit listened but said nothing and continued digging.
“You are tired,” said the king, “let me take the spade and work awhile for you.”
“Thanks!” said the hermit, and, giving the spade to the king, he sat down on the ground.
As the king continued to work, the sun began to sink behind the trees. Finally the king was ready to leave, but the hermit said: “Here comes someone running; let us see who it is.”
The king turned to see a bearded man running out of the wood, holding his hands pressed against his stomach. Blood was flowing from under his tunic. When the man reached the king, he fell fainting on the ground, moaning feebly. The king and the hermit unfastened the man’s clothing to reveal a large wound in his stomach. The king washed the man’s wound and bandaged it carefully. When at last the blood ceased flowing, the man revived and asked for something to drink. The king brought fresh water and gave it to him. Meanwhile the sun had set, and it had become cool. So the king, with the hermit’s help, carried the wounded man into the hut and laid him on the bed. Lying on the bed the man closed his eyes and was quiet; but the king was so tired with his walk and work that he crouched down on the threshold and he too fell asleep — so soundly that he slept all through the short summer night.
When the king awoke in the morning, he struggled to remember where he was and who was the strange bearded man lying on the bed, gazing intently at him with shining eyes.
“Forgive me!” said the bearded man in a weak voice, when he saw that the King was awake and looking at him.
“I do not know you, and have nothing to forgive you for,” said the king.
“You do not know me, but I know you. I am that enemy of yours who swore to revenge himself on you, because you executed my brother and seized his property. I knew you had gone alone to see the hermit, and I resolved to kill you on your way back. But the day passed and you did not return. So I came out from my ambush to find you, and encountered your bodyguards. They recognized me and wounded me. I escaped but should have bled to death had you not dressed my wound. I wished to kill you, and you have saved my life. Now, if I live, and if you wish it, I will serve you as your most faithful servant, and will bid my sons do the same. Forgive me!”
The king, very glad to have made peace with his enemy so easily, not only forgave him but said he would send his servants and his own physician to attend him. Furthermore, the king promised to restore the man’s property.
Having taken leave of the wounded man, the king went out into the porch and looked around for the hermit. Before going away he wished once more to beg an answer to the three questions. The hermit was outside, on his knees, sowing seeds in the beds dug the day before. The King approached him, and said:
“For the last time, I pray you to answer my questions, wise man.”
“You have already been answered!” said the hermit. “Do you not see, if you had not pitied my weakness yesterday, and had not dug those beds for me, but had gone your way, that man would have attacked you. So the most important time was when you were digging the beds; I was the most important person; and to do me good was your most important task. Afterwards when that man ran to us, the most important time was when you were attending to him, for if you had not bound up his wounds he would have died without having made peace with you. So he was the most important person, and what you did for him was your most important business. Remember then: there is only one time that is important — Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. The most necessary person is the one you are with, for no one knows whether he will ever have dealings with anyone else, and the most important affair is to do the other person good. For that purpose alone were we humans sent into this life!”(2)
This parable recovered and retold by Leo Tolstoy is a teaching story that sees life as service. We learn that “now” is the most important moment, the other whom we encounter is the most important person to work with, and doing good to the other is the best thing to do. Adding to service the phrase “in the spirit” reminds us that not only what we do but how we do it makes all the difference. How do we dwell in the moment — peacefully or anxiously? How do we receive each person — lovingly or resentfully? How do we proceed in seeking the other’s good — wisely or foolishly?
Four gifts of the spirit can be found in the wisdom traditions of east and west. They are love, compassion, joy, and peace. From this perspective, we are serving in the spirit when we are dwelling and acting ever more lovingly, compassionately, joyfully, and peacefully.(3)
Yet more can be said. Suppose we think of life in four seasons and correlate each season with a stage of life as understood in ancient India.(4) Then we can distinguish four kinds of service, each appropriate to a stage of life:
Summer: Householder
(ascending arc)
Autumn: Forest Dweller
(ascending arc)
Winter: Sage
(descending arc)
Spring: Student
(descending arc, returns to Summer)
On the arc of ascent
- the service of the Spring Student and
- the service of the Summer Householder.
On the arc of descent,
- the service of the Autumn Forest Dweller and
- the service of the Winter Sage.
The seeds of all the stages are present from the beginning so that we can, in certain moments, touch future stages as if for a preview taste and we can also return to earlier capacities from a new place on the spiral of our lives.
Life in Two Halves
To understand the four kinds of service, it will be helpful to look at life in two halves: the first half of life ascending and the second half of life descending.(5)
In the first half of life, we strive to become somebody — to take our place in the world, to achieve maturity, to develop the capacities to love and to work.
In the first half of life, we focus on the three R’s: Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmetic, as part of our striving toward mastery in the world. Or, even more powerfully, we are inducted into another three R’s: the Rules, Roles, and “Religions” of the Culture, where “religion” can include worldviews such as nationalism, rugged individualism, capitalism, and other ideologies.
In the second half of life, we release into the depth, becoming in a certain sense nobody and everyone — an empty mirror for all that is. In the downward arc, we are invited to release from attachments to what we have constructed and to rest in the Great Mystery — in the silence, in the stillness, in the simplicity, in union with the Source and all things. In essence, we release from those stories and sentiments that no longer serve. We let go, return first to our place in the natural world and then to our true nature in and out of time. We experience life as vast, mysterious, loving, compassionate, joyful, and peaceful.
In the second half, we focus on the three R’s of later life: Receiving, Releasing, and Remembering. Receiving life as sufficient and responding in gratitude and joy. Releasing from being defined by roles and rules and ideologies. Remembering who we are in our widest and deepest natures. At our core we already have all we need to live a life of quality.
Our deep Self reflects more and more our Source and reflects more and more how deeply intertwined we are with one another in the great Circle of Life — people, other animals, plants, and minerals.
With this context in place, it is time to explore briefly the four kinds of service from each of the four standpoints.
Service of the Student-in-Us
Here we serve by learning. The deeper the learning, the better the service. The best learning stays with us, becomes more and more a part of who we are and what we do. There is a form of detachment, of cultivating an observing, listening self able to see what is happening and how we are commenting on and emotionally intertwined with what is happening. The time of the lifetime is opening before us.
Zen practitioners celebrate “beginner’s mind” throughout all the circumstances of our lives. Zen master Shunryu Suzuki tells us:
In Japan we have the phrase shoshin,
which means “beginner’s mind.”
The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner’s mind. . .
Our “original mind” includes everything with itself.
It is always rich and sufficient within itself. . . .
If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything;
it is open to everything.
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities;
in the expert’s mind there are few.(6)
So at any stage of life we can be of service by remaining a learner. By emptying mind of preconceptions and engaging life anew. Thus, we stay open to possibilities and encourage creativity.
Service of the Householder-in-Us
This is service as we usually think of it. Concrete visible works. Building up the community through good deeds. Seeking social betterment. Freud has characterized maturity as gaining the capacities to love and work, that is, the capacity to engage in long-term relationships of intimacy and the capacity to take on tasks and see them through, whether one feels like it or not! The capacities to love and to work are very much Summer Householder skills.
The Householder takes on responsibility for units larger than him or herself alone. Care for one’s relationship, one’s family, one’s organization broadens the horizon in space. As families welcome children, a sense of ancestors dawns as well. Householders begin to understand — in their bones — that they stand in the midst of seven generations, called to honor the ancestors (one’s parents and their parents and their parents) and to serve the children (this generation of children and their children and their children). Intergenerational time expands before us. And, in space, we are invited to expand our sense of the human to include all humans as our brothers and sisters.
From the standpoint of Householder various kinds of service become permanent possibilities. We can mentor youth, aiding them to find their paths in work and in intimacy, aiding them to learn how to join with integrity and effectiveness in the world work they are given. For those of us in retirement, encore careers become possible, where people place their householder skills in service of new profit-making enterprises or in service of non-profits, devoted to causes one supports.
Service of the Forest Dweller-in-Us
Here we arrive at a reversal of sorts. We begin the arc of descent. On the circle, we move from Summer into Autumn and Winter. We move from expressing ourselves in the “doing” mode to dwelling more in a “being mode.” In Eastern terms, the transition is from Yang (active upward and outer movement) to Yin (receptive downward and inward movement). We also tip into the side of the circle where paradox reigns. We are both this and that. We are neither this nor that.
In space, we widen the circle from “humans only” to all creatures great and small in the interconnected community of the natural world. In time, we move to cosmic time — the time of billions of years.
At this period of human history, the Forest Dweller takes on ecological significance. As post-retirement Forest Dwellers, we come to love the natural world, to learn from it, to see ourselves as intimately interwoven in it. We come to simplify and care for elemental realities. We come to situate ourselves within “the Great Family,” in poet Gary Snyder’s phrase. And we tend to align ourselves with deeper rhythms.
Poet Wendell Berry expresses it in this way:
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.(7)
Service of the Sage-in-Us
When we contact the sage-in-us, we return, in a new way, to what is — to the present moment, yet in a new way. We return to a present moment in time and out of time. As we grow into the Sage-in-Us we live more in mystery, in a kind of wondrous unknowing. Resting in peace, we are in contact with the eternal. We sense the spacious and special everywhere. Released from control, we rest in openness to what is emerging. Retired from responsibility to change the world, we can love more fully, holding true to that which matters. We can encourage creativity and bless the young.
In the language of the East, the meditative and mindfulness disciplines now bear fruit. In the language of the West, a new sense of prayer emerges — less for petition, more for simple gratefulness and joy. In fact, life becomes prayer. More and more, we rest in the silence, in the stillness, in contact with the mysterious Source, ever present, ever new. Having developed a taste for silence and stillness, we keep returning to a present moment that excludes nothing. Our presence is our service. What we do is less important than who we are becoming.
Service here is subtle. It is a service of being ourselves more fully. And finding that our deepest being is intertwined with everything. It is a mode of presence that opens us, as a channel, for the Great Mystery to manifest through us.
//
It is said, in Jewish tradition, that there are 36 just humans. They do not even know who they are. Yet for their sake the world is not destroyed. Here, one can think of a punishing God who withholds punishment. Yet I believe this teaching points far beyond reward and punishment. The service of the 36 derives from how they are present in the world. They are relatively sane in the midst of collective insanity. They understand what is real, what is true, what is good, what is beautiful. Because they hold to the real, the leaven is there for all, the lamp in the darkness does not go out. A smile remains. Love remains. Compassion remains. Joy resurfaces. Peace returns. And we see again and again the answer to the three questions:
- What is the best time to do each thing?
- Who is the most important person to work with?
- What is the most important thing to do?
Releasing from attachments to unnecessary things, we enjoy all our kin in the natural world.
Remembering the saints and sages, we rest in contemplative mind. As the East would have it:
When the ten thousand things
are viewed in their one-ness,
we return to the Origin
and remain where we have always been.(8)
Is this not a beautiful service to all our kin?
//
Notes
1 French Medieval prayer. See Robert Bly, The Soul is Here for its Own Joy (Harper Collins Publishers, 1999), p. 112.
2 I take the story with minor edits from Tolstoy’s telling. See “The Three Questions” in Leo Tolstoy, Fables and Fairy Tales, trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York: New American Library, 1980), pp. 82–88. The story was first published in 1903.
3 See my book, The Fourfold Path to Wholeness: A Compass for the Heart (Chapel Hill, NC: Second Journey Publications, 2010). In the Buddhist tradition these four are called the Four Divine Dwellings or Brahmaviharas. In the west, they could well be a shorthand for the gifts of the spirit or even four of the names of God.
4 See my book, The Spiral of the Seasons: Welcoming the Gifts of Later Life (Chapel Hill, NC: Second Journey Publications, 2009) for an extended discussion of the four stages of life as understood in the wisdom tradition of India overlaid on the four seasons.
5 Life in halves has a certain simplicity. However, while holding this perspective, it is also useful to hold a second perspective wherein we see life in thirds: say, 20 years as student, 40 years as householder and 20 years — what the British call the Third Age — as the post-retirement years. The life stages of Autumn Forest Dweller and Winter Sage belong most properly to the post-retirement years. For more, see my book The Spiral of the Seasons: Welcoming the Gifts of Later Life.
6 See Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (New York & Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1970), p. 21.
7 From the poem “Wild Geese” by Wendell Berry. See Wendell Berry, Collected Poems 1957–1982 (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), pp.155–156.
8 Seng-Ts’an. Quoted in Nancy Wilson Ross, The World of Zen: An East-West Anthology (New York: Vintage Books Division of Random House, 1960), p.271. Also see Frederick Franck, Echoes from a Bottomless Well (New York: Random House Vintage, 1985), p. 91.
Books of Interest: Metaphor and the Aging Process by Barbara Kammerlohr
The Spiral of the Seasons: Welcoming the Gifts of Later Life
by John G. Sullivan
Second Journey Publications, 2009
Harvest the Bounty of Your Career
by Deborah F. Windrum
(with art work by Michele Renee Ledoux)
Axiom Action, 2009
//
For those willing to sit with her and do the work, Metaphor is one of the world’s greatest teachers. She facilitates understanding at an intuitive level where facts, feelings, ethics, and consciousness come together to form meaning. Sitting with Metaphor until the Aha! moment leads to a special kind of learning — the realization of something deep within that may be so profound no words can express it adequately. Harvest the Bounty of Your Career and The Spiral of the Seasons are two books that use metaphor to communicate such messages. Authors John Sullivan and Deborah Windrum, having plumbed the depths of metaphorical understanding, organize their thoughts around metaphor and call on the reader to understand those thoughts at their own level.
//
The seasons of life provide the metaphor of The Spiral of the Seasons, a small book of four essays about our human journey into later life by John Sullivan, Second Journey’s Philosopher in Residence and Board Member Emeritus. Excerpts of these essays are on Second Journey’s Web site and in earlier editions of Itineraries. However, the hard-cover book edition, with its poetry, full-color photographs, and more complete text gives the reader a deeper and more complete understanding of how Sullivan views later life than the excerpts on the Web site.
As others have done, Sullivan overlays the four stages of life on the four seasons — spring, summer, fall, and winter. However, his understanding of those four seasons has a clearer focus when he talks of how the ancient sages of India understood life’s journey:
In Spring, we are in the stage of Student.
In Summer, we move to the stage of Householder.
In Autumn, we enter the stage of Forest Dweller.
In Winter, we drop into the world of the Sage. (p. 2)
A full-page color graphic helps explain: It is a picture of two arcs placed together, an arc of ascent and an arc of descent. From student to householder, we are in the arc of ascent, looking for fame and fortune. In autumn, we approach the arc of descent — downward and inward returning to what is central in life. It is in this descent that we can acquire the consciousness of the sage, that we can become what others have called “an elder.”
The book’s four chapters are actually four essays that expand on Sullivan’s understanding of the metaphor: “Spring’s Stirrings,” “Summer’s Fullness,” “Autumn’s Way,” and “Winter’s Gifts.” Physically, it is one of those “little books” that inspires the reader to buy several copies to share with like-minded friends.
//
Harvest the Bounty of Your Career by Deborah F. Windrum speaks to the unique circumstances of women. She invites the reader to an exploration of life’s meanings and lessons using metaphors of harvest and trees. While not excluding men who might like to try the process, Windrum believes that the spirals of women’s careers are different from those of men and that women will embrace the inner work she advocates more readily than men. Indeed, the book does contain many insightful ideas about the changing life cycles of women and well-articulated specifics about how those cycles differ from the cycles of men.
Windrum’s fundamental premise is: “Every transition in life can be supported and enriched by the bounty of all that precedes it — the experiences, learnings, gains, releases, relationships, and emotions. (Hence the metaphor of harvest.) The process of engaging with the book’s metaphorical elements can help conclude or shift a career and experience what comes next.
Windrum refers to her book as both a conversation and a workbook. However, it is not the typical dry workbook. The art work, her own deeply personal reflections, and ample quotes from thoughtful authors engage the reader in ways a workbook could not. For those who do well with workbooks, there are questions and activities at the end of each chapter that can be used for further reflection.
For the most part, each chapter is an extension of a metaphorical element addressing life’s changing conditions. Engaging with the chapter’s metaphor deepens understanding of how what has gone before can influence what comes next. Some of her metaphorical elements include: roots that anchor us; branches that show where we have reached out; fruits to be harvested; seeds that continue the process in another season or time; and the season of harvest. Chapter by chapter, Windrum introduces each element, shares her own reflection on that metaphor, and suggests questions (acorns) and other reflections to help engage the reader more deeply. This is not a workbook format, but an extended conversation between the author and reader.
One chapter does stand out as different from the others — ”The Four-part Harmony of A Woman’s Life Cycle: Maiden, Maker, Maven and Muse.” This is Windrum’s reflection on the life cycle of modern woman, the counterpart to Sullivan’s four stages of student, householder, forest dweller, and sage. Their understanding is similar, but Windrum’s is more specific to the life cycle of women.
//
Authors
John G. Sullivan is Powell Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Elon University in North Carolina where he taught for 36 years. He is principal designer and faculty member in an innovative master’s program in transformative leadership at Tai Sophia Institute in Laurel, MD. His abiding interest is the place where philosophy, psychology, and spirituality — East, West, and beyond — intersect and mutually enhance one another. His two previous books are To Come to Life More Fully (1991) and Living Large: Transformative Work at the Intersection of Ethics and Spirituality (2004).
Deborah F. Windrum was, for more than 30 years, an academic librarian specializing in instruction and outreach, primarily at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her inner trajectory has taken her life work into parallel ventures as a writer, presenter, workshop developer, and facilitator dedicated to the transformational possibilities of learning. Her first book, Process and Politics in Library Research, was a pioneering effort in the application of critical thinking, active learning, and feminist principles to the college research course. Windrum has also contributed articles to Itineraries.