Retirement

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What is Your Brand?

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The shortest description of marital conflict that I ever heard came from a man who said,

“First, you have to understand that my wife is Nordstrom’s and I am WalMart.”

It’s amazing how much we can tell about people by where they shop, the logo on their shirt, what kind of car they drive, even where they choose to live and what organizations they belong to.

For example, if I tell you that we own a Prius, that I love living in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in New York City (and the world), and that I belong to a church that has a huge ministry to homeless and LGBTQ+ people, you probably can guess how I vote.

My brands say:

  • I care about the environment.
  • I believe in diversity.
  • I am a compassionate human being.

The problem is:

  • My carbon footprint is still Sasquatch-sized.
  • My closest friends look like me, talk like me, vote like me.
  • I care a lot more about MY physical and financial security than I care about YOUR physical and financial security.

My brands are. . . . shall we say . . . “aspirational.”

My brands are a mask I wear on life’s stage to win the applause of the audience.

The Greek theater mask gives us the word “hypocrite.” You already know enough Greek to understand that “hypo” means “below” and “crit” is the root of “critic.” It comes from the Greek word “judge” or “discern”. Thus, hypocrites have not risen to the level required to make discerning judgments. They literally, “know not what they do.”

Jesus called out hypocrisy, because it was what got him killed.

My brands are my way to unconsciously pretend to be someone else, which is a very human thing to do.

The French philosopher, Rene Girard, called this tendency “mimesis.” It is the reason why, if you put two three-year-olds in a room full of toys, the only toy one of them wants to play with is in the other kid’s hands.

Marketers understand that very well.

When JoJo Siwa wears a new hair bow, thousands of “tween” girls want the same hair bow because they identify with JoJo. They, too, are positive, talented, and they stand up to bullies, just like JoJo.

I have zero interest in luxury watches, but I read a whole full-page ad that said that Daniel Craig wore a Rolex while playing James Bond. Since I, too, am ruggedly handsome, resourceful, witty — like Bond — I wondered if I should wear a Rolex.

Our brands give us our identity. They tell us — and others — who we are.

Perhaps this is necessary in the first half of life. We all start out identifying with Mom and Dad — our family is our “brand.” Then we individuate by identifying with peers: jocks, band kids, nerds, losers. Young adults may emulate mentors or personal heroes.

The Tantric religions like Buddhism and Hinduism call our brands “attachments.” The Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, call them “idols.” Both traditions tell me that

I will never find God or my True Self (which is either God or the Image of God), without letting go of my brands.

If only it were as easy as giving my shirt with the polo pony logo to Goodwill.

The truth is that giving up the “brands” that matter most to me, feels like this:

Banks, Thomas; Anatomical Crucifixion (James Legg); https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/O1350 Credit line: (c) (c) Royal Academy of Arts /

Jesus’ words: “Whoever would follow me must take up the cross daily,” mean different things to different people in different circumstances. That is the beauty of them. To me, in this Third Half of Life, it means letting go of my “brands.” My understanding of my “self” has to die so that something new and more real can take its place.

Sounds nice, but it feels like being crucified — slowly and painfully. We can do this intentionally through practices like mindfulness or letting go of our things, or we can just wait for life to nail us.

Anyone who practices mindfulness encounters stuff that contradicts the image that we like to present to the world — our personal “brand.” And that hurts. I know I am really meditating when, like Scrooge on Christmas Eve, I run into things that I don’t want to see:

  • The wrong turns I took in the past.
  • The needs of the world that I ignore.
  • The fact that I will die and all that I have will not matter at all.

It’s not fun. It feels like dying. I only do it because I keep finding something truer and less superficial underneath my “brand.”

Of course, you don’t have to meditate. Life itself will rip the brands off you, sooner or later.

When loved ones die, it can feel like a part of you has died. You lose one of your most important “brands”: “son” or “daughter,” “brother” or “sister,” “husband” or “wife.” Getting used to thinking of ourselves without those “brands” is not the only component of grief, but it is an important one.

One way we do grief work is that we often dream about the deceased in the first few weeks and months. Then, when we wake up, we realize they are really gone. It is one way our souls come to terms with the loss of that person and our “brand” in relation to that person.

When I retired four years ago, I dreamed every Saturday night that I had to preach the next morning. Unlike my dreams of lost loved ones, these were seldom pleasant dreams. They were filled with anxiety. When I awoke, the anxiety continued. Who am I now?

I am happy to say that those dreams are much less frequent and I am beginning to like No-Longer-Reverend Roger.

It takes a long time for an identity to die. Just as it takes a long time for someone to die on a cross.

This pandemic has stripped brands from a lot of people. The “stylish” were reduced to sweat pants and undershirts. “Gourmands” had to eat their home cooking or take-out. That is nothing compared to what was taken from people who lost their homes and incomes, their life-line visits from friends and relatives, and places where they gathered with their community: their bar, their bowling alley, or their house of worship.

Most of all, there were those who lost their health or their loved ones. I’ve written before about how COVID-19 took my “brand” as a strong, vital man (see Daniel Craig, above). Yet, I am also discovering a person underneath who is:

  • more open to the flow of life.
  • more accepting of change.
  • perhaps even a tad more ready for the loss of my most fundamental “brand,” my body.

I wonder what you lost? How hard was it? What did you find underneath your “brand?”

What A Healthy Old Age Looks Like

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What I’ve Learned from My Grandfathers Since They Died: Part 1

One of the challenges of this Third Half of Life is health. Sure, that means eating right and exercise, but it begins inside of our heads. 

When we get older and we get sick or injure ourselves, we are tempted to look at the calendar and say, “I’m old,” and think: 

Old = sick

Old = feeble

Old = dying.

We are not necessarily helped much by the medical profession. Doctors were once taught that the paradigm of health is a man. So, they treated things that were uniquely female, like menopause or having a uterus, as pathologies that needed medication or removal. 

 That may have improved. However, it’s hard for lay people and professionals to get past the unconscious assumption that the paradigm of health is a 19-year-old. The more we deviate from that ideal, the more likely we are to get  prescriptions and procedures to “fix” us. 

As my mother used to say, “Every time I go to the doctor, I get a new pill. Then, every two years, I wind up in the hospital and they take them all away from me.” 

Too many of us are conditioned to think that there is nothing we can do about our health. When I talk with friends about how a lot of chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes or even heart disease can be healed with diet and exercise, a lot of them say wearily, “just give me a pill.” 

I think that they lack a mental image of what a healthy old age looks like.  I am grateful that my Grandfather Talbott taught me that old people can rebuild their health after it takes a nosedive.

I’ve learned a lot from my grandfathers since they died. The older I get the more I learn. It’s not that I remember stories that they told me or any advice that they gave me. But, I do remember how they lived and how they negotiated old age. I am benefitting from their examples.

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

James Baldwin

Grandpa Talbott was a dairy farmer. He was active in the Dairyman’s League, a cooperative of farmers who banded together to sell their milk at a fair price. As my Dad took over the farm, Grandpa took on more responsibility in the League’s organization. Before I got to high school, he was commuting 300 miles to New York City every week to work at the League headquarters as the treasurer. Then, he became president of what was then the largest dairy cooperative in the country.

It was a lot of stress and responsibility. By his mid-60’s, he was sick and worn out. He spent several weeks in the hospital before he retired.

Shortly after he retired, he drove up to our farm one morning. Dad and I had finished breakfast and we were cleaning the barn after milking. The cows had gone off to pasture. The barn floor needed cleaning. I had used a shovel to take care of the manure. Grandpa picked up the push broom and started down the barn floor, sweeping everything on his left into the gutter. He went very, very slowly.

My Dad and I watched him. It was kind of agonizing. When he got to the other end of the barn floor, he leaned on his broom to catch his breath.

My Dad said, “Go take that broom away from your grandfather.”

I walked down the floor and said, “Here, Grandpa, I can finish it.”

He said, “No, Roger, I need to do this.”

So, we watched him come back, sweeping the other side. Then he got in his car and went home.

He came back the next day. And the next. It took a few weeks, but then he was sweeping the floor as fast or faster than I could. He would stay and help my Dad with other chores. He also worked on my uncle’s much bigger farm. In fact, he was plowing my uncle’s fields into his 80’s.

I, too, pushed too hard and too long on my work for my own good. By the time I retired in 2016, I was overweight and suffering from a severe digestive disorder. I found a doctor who said she could cure me. And she did. I made a lot of life-style changes and got better and better. Then, I spent December 2019 suffering from a flu-like illness. I spent six weeks in bed with mild fever, and moderate fatigue and brain fog.  Sounds like COVID-19 doesn’t it? Trouble is, doctors diagnosed the first case in New York City in March 2020.

Whatever it was, I feared I was going to spend my life as an invalid. But I started walking and working out. Then, I decided to try running. My son, Jim, who lives near us, is a runner. When my knees hurt, he taught me how to shorten my gait and land on my toes. The pain disappeared.

By the end of October, I could run 5 kilometers (3 miles). I had to thank my Grandfather Talbott. 

As I tied on my running shoes every other day, I thought of him pushing that broom.

When I could only run about 20 yards, I thought about him pushing that broom.

When it rained, I thought of him pushing that broom.

He’s been dead thirty years, but I keep learning from him. Next week, I’ll tell you what I’ve learned from my other grandfather since he died. 

Who have you learned from since they died?

How to Know When To Let Go

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We all know intuitively that the essence of the art of living is knowing when to let go. This is longer than usual, so I’ll begin with a summary:

  • It’s not wise to let go too soon.
  • It’s costs a lot when we don’t know when to let go.
  • If we let go at the right time, we get out of jail and find joy.

The good news is that we have practiced letting go all our lives. You took your first step when you let go of a parent’s fingers. You can’t take a breath without letting go of the one you took before.

We stumble in life when we don’t let go. My college roommate began Freshman year wearing his high school varsity jacket around campus. He was proud of it because his basketball team had won the division championship. But, after a couple of weeks, he realized that upperclassmen were laughing at him. He had to let go of that jacket or look foolish.

On the other hand, it took me almost a year of getting C’s to let go of my high school self-image as “the smart boy” to whom A’s came easy.

Letting go isn’t that hard in the first half of life. Like the toddler taking that first step, we are reaching out for freedom when we:

  • Take the car by ourselves for the first time.
  • Get our first job.
  • Leave home.

In this Third Half of Life, however, we often feel diminished when we:

  • Have to let go of our job/career/identity.
  • Let go of driving the car.
  • Let go of the home we may have lived in for decades.

I bet you know people who didn’t let go of those things soon enough. Do you think you will know when to let go?

Pharaoh can teach us about letting go.

Pharaoh? You mean the Egyptian king?

Yep. Pharaoh

.

I ran into Pharaoh a couple of weeks ago when I was asked to lead a Torah study for the National Advisory Committee of the Jewish Grandparents Network. How did a retired Methodist preacher find himself doing that? Because I let go. I’ll get to that below.

The Torah portion began at Exodus 3:17. Jews name their weekly Torah portions using the first word or two in the first verse. But the first word in this verse, in Hebrew, is “Pharaoh.” They didn’t want a Torah portion named after the Hitler of the 13th century B.C.E, so they used the second word, b”Shalach. The root, Shalach, means “to let go” — an action.The prefix “b’” turns it into a time. B’Shalach means “letting-go-time.”

So we translate it: “WHEN Pharaoh LET the people GO.”

This Third Half of Life is b’Shalach, “letting-go-time.” Time to let go of:

  • A job. A blessed relief for some. For others (OK, for me,) it means letting go of our identity.
  • The house we needed to raise a family.
  • Habits that our younger bodies could sustain (or survive) but are damaging our aging bodies.
  • Our role (and status) within our communities or in our family.
  • Communities in which which we have lived most of our lives.
  • Beliefs and prejudices that we grew up with that we have never examined.

What can Pharaoh teach us about when and how to let go?

Something will tell us when it is time

Pharaoh had Moses — a voice that kept coming to him to say, “Let my people go.”

You and I will hear a voice. It may be a doctor’s voice, a spouse’s voice, a child’s voice, a friend’s voice, or that voice inside our heads. It will say, “Time to let go.”

For many years, I was part of a committee that interviewed and guided people who felt “called” to become ordained clergy in my denomination. That may sound like religious mumbo-jumbo to you, but bear with me.

Most of these folks were going to have to let go of good jobs in order to go back to school to prepare for a profession that is usually underpaid and overworked and that carries a psychic load that few others in our society have to bear. That is a big jump. The only thing that sustains people through that change and in the practice of pastoral ministry is a deep inner conviction that this is what they are meant to do.

We asked if they were hearing that inner voice?

We got all kinds of answers. Some people had visions rivaling the Prophet Ezekiel. Others heard a still, small voice.

We also asked if anyone on the outside was saying the same thing?

Some people only heard the outside voice — a parent or spouse telling them they should become a minister. Others only heard the inside voice. No one else thought they would make a good pastor. We were most sure of the people who heard both voices.

We were even surer if they had a history of resisting those voices.

If we are smart, we will ignore the voice at first, like Pharaoh did.

Pharaoh didn’t rule Egypt by obeying every crackpot carrying a staff who criticized his policies.

You didn’t get to where you are by stopping every time the going got tough, leaving a relationship at the first argument, or changing your mind every time someone told you that you were wrong.

Most of the pastoral candidates we interviewed confessed that they kept thinking they were mistaken — or God was. They were there because they couldn’t shake the feeling that this is what they were supposed to be doing.

If we are stupid, we will continue to ignore the voice even after it starts to cost us, like Pharaoh did.

Pharaoh, famously, suffered — and Egypt suffered — through nine plagues, including the death of the first-born in every household, before he let the Israelites go. Pharaoh illustrates this truth:

“There is that law of life, so cruel and so just, that says that we must change or else pay more for staying the same.”

Norman Mailer, The Deer Park

One day I stepped on the scales at the doctor’s office and the nurse said cheerfully, “198. First one under 200 today.”

I was there because my acid reflux was so bad I began worrying about getting esophageal cancer. I had been ignoring my body, my doctor, the scales, the mirror, and reality itself. It was costing me too much to stay the same. I was as dumb as Pharaoh.

I weigh 148 this morning because I let go of eating meat, dairy, eggs, salt, oil, and sugar. It wasn’t easy, but I also didn’t do it all at once. In fact, it has taken me twenty years to make these changes. Ninety percent of the credit for that is that I eat every day with someone who has made getting healthy her life’s mission.

Letting-go-time is when we move from jail to joy.

Your first act of letting go — birth — happened because you could not grow anymore in your mother’s womb. It was a good place for you, until it wasn’t. When b’Shalach came, you and your mother both let go and you were free to grow into the mature adult you are now.

We have to leave Pharaoh behind here. He did not see letting go of his slaves as a growth experience, although it could have been.

Every time I have let go of something in my life, I have grown. That’s how I wound up on the National Advisory Committee of the Jewish Grandparenting Network. It is both a great honor and a source of much amusement when I think about where I came from.

I grew up as a conservative evangelical Methodist. I still think I’m a conservative evangelical Methodist, although many of my conservative evangelical friends would disagree so much that they want to start a new denomination that will keep out people like me. They think I am “tossed about by every wind of doctrine”.

Instead, I kept running into people of faith that led me to realize:

  • God is not a Methodist.
  • God is not a Protestant.
  • God is not a Christian.
  • God is not a White heterosexual male.

I didn’t even know that I believed some of those things until I let go of them. But, every time I let go, my heart grew, and my God got bigger.

When our son, Jim, decided to convert to Judaism and marry, Rachel, a Reform Rabbi, it was b’Shalach, letting-go-time, once again. We don’t celebrate Christmas and Easter with our grandchildren, but that’s OK. We get to celebrate Passover and Yom Kippur. Our lives are larger because we have Jewish grandchildren, which makes us Jew-ish grandparents. It was only a few more steps to doing the Torah study that night.

One final story. Four years ago, Jacquie and I started talking about the possibility of moving to New York City to be closer to those grandchildren and . . . to be in New York City. One more adventure. But, that meant letting go of a house that we had spent years (and thousand$) to make our own. It meant letting go of a neighborhood and city we loved. I, newly retired, and still reeling from having let go of a job I loved, was resistant.

Jacquie said, “Today’s joy is tomorrow’s jail.”

What time is it in your life?

In some ways, it is always b’Shalach, letting-go-time. We let go of every breath. We let go of every day when we go to sleep. It may have been a good day, but we have to let go.

Indeed. Life is like the monkey bars on the playground. If you don’t let go and reach out, you just stop and swing there. You have to keep letting go in order to reach the next one.

That’s the secret of life. The day will come to each of us when we will let go of our last breath and reach out for whatever joy lies beyond. That will be easy or difficult depending on how much we have practiced letting go.

The Duty and the Burden of Solemnity

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There is no good verb for what clergy do in a wedding ceremony.


We don’t “marry” the couple. They marry each other.
“Preside” implies that you are in charge of the wedding. I know that some clergy insist upon this role. They lock themselves into a battle of wills with the bride’s mother, the hotel/restaurant events manager, or the bride herself. Worst case scenario, the photographer wants to preside. In 45 years, I can only remember two weddings in which the groom took charge. Not a good sign, either time. On some simple, lovely occasions, I did “preside.” I would count the one couple who asked if they could be married in our living room with Jacquie as their witness as one of those. But presiding at most weddings means you are in charge of the choreography, the placement of the flowers, rolling out the white carpet, training the ushers, making sure the bridesmaids are zipped. That is beyond my competence.

The verb that works best, I think, is “solemnize.”


It’s harder work than you may think to solemnize a wedding. Weddings are, by definition, joyous. They symbolize peace and love and good will. They should be celebrated with good food and drink and music and dancing — and they usually are, after the ceremony. Weddings lead (snicker) to wedding nights and all that implies. It’s tough to be the one who tamps down that hilarity for an hour.


Yet, I always thought it was necessary. It is necessary for the community, represented by family and friends — or the pastor’s wife, to witness the couple making their solemn vows to each other. It is necessary for the couple to feel the enormity of the promises they are making. (Although only the widowed and the more-than-once divorced ever come close to understanding.)

It is necessary to place this very human and natural event into a larger context. The very fact that this couple has come together and chosen each other is a kind of miracle. Their love and faithfulness to each other, especially over the long haul, will be a sign and symbol of the Love that is at the heart of the universe.
That demands solemnity. It requires seriousness.


But, it can take a toll on the person who has to do the solemnizing.


Do you remember, when you were a little kid and made a face, your mother would tell you to be careful because your face might get stuck in that position?


She was right.


It has taken almost five years for my face to come unstuck. Like a lot of things in this Third Half of Life, I am reassessing what used to seem so important. I am not knocking ritual and tradition. I am not minimizing the enormity of the wedding vows. I am reassessing how and why it seemed so necessary for me to be so serious so often. Maybe it was necessary. Carl Jung believed that the clergy carry a necessary psychic burden within the community that no one else carries. He often treated clergy for free.


But I wonder if it would have helped if I had trusted Life provide the solemnity? After all, every couple faces days ahead where the vows they make on their wedding day will take on real seriousness. They will need to choose to love each other for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. Why not let them have one happy, light-hearted day to love each other and laugh with their friends and bask in their families’ pride?


Days like that are few and short. Why rob them of even one hour?


I have seen clergy, not in my tradition, I’m afraid, who seem to know how to put the joy and the seriousness together. I’m formulating a theory about why that is not common in mainline Protestant churches, but it’s not completely clear, yet.


All I know is that, as a Christian, I’m supposed to look to Jesus as my example. I see him at only one wedding. And for that, he brought the wine.

The Year of the Rat

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Year of the Rat 2020

I like Chinese food. I hate the placemats in Chinese restaurants. No matter how many times I study them, they always tell me that I am a rat.

The placemats show the 12 years of the Chinese Zodiac.

I look at all the other years and wish I could be a Tiger or a Rabbit.

Dragon would be cool!

I’d settle for Pig.

Snake is a toss-up with Rat. Although I can think of more positive things about snakes.

No matter how many times I eat Chinese, the news is always the same. I am a Rat. To me the Rat represents all that is unlovely, unloving and unlovable in me.

Astrology may be bunk, but it points to the truth that life has certain “givens.” The Native American poet, Joy Harjo, now the U.S. Poet Laureate, wrote, “Remember the sky that you were born under.” People who live close to nature notice the way the stars shine the night a baby is born. Two billion Christians remember a star shining over Bethlehem one night long ago.

If I count the year I was born, the Year of the Rat has come around for the seventh time. If I look at myself at 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, and now, I see so many changes in those 12 year cycles, for example:

  • At 12, I was a farm boy.
  • At 24, I was young man with a wife, a baby, and a church.
  • In the past 12 years, both my parents died. For the first time, I left a church smaller than it was when I arrived. I retired. We moved to New York City.

I look in the mirror and compare what I see with snapshots taken from those other cycles of the Zodiac. Where did the hair go? How did what hair I have left turn so white when it started so black? Where did the wrinkles come from?

In some ways, what remains the same is more mysterious than what has changed.

How can I be the same person now that I was at 12? What is this mystery that I call my “self?”

I still read and then pontificate about what I’ve learned. I still laugh out loud at jokes other people don’t seem to get. But there are other things that also persist. All of them are part of the rat.

The Rat represents all those parts of me that I have tried to shut out, poison, or trap. I can’t kill it. Most of the time the Rat just hides in the shadows. But he is there. He is always there.

In this 7th Year of the Rat, I look back and see that there is not much I can do about my past failures and limitations. The rat-like genes that gnawed away the cilia inside my cochlea now may be gnawing at my bones and my lungs.

My life is my life. It is a combination of the choices I made and things that were built in to my life from conception. But oddly, that empowers me to make the best of what my life is, Rat and all.

Accepting the unlovely Rat in me also helps me see that the Rat can be “quick-witted, resourceful, and versatile” at times.

Maybe that’s why the Chinese astrologers also say that the Rat is kind. Once a Rat accepts and feels compassion for himself, he can care for other fallible human beings.

After all, if you can love a Rat, you can love anybody.

Time Travel Safety Tips: 1 The Past

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I recently discovered that Time Travel is a thing. I mean a thing that scientists study; Mental Time Travel, that is.

It’s kind of a big deal. Scientists study our ability:

To go back in time and learn from experience.

The ability to go ahead in time and plan for the future. 

These scientists look to St. Augustine (354-480 CE) as their precursor. He said:

The past is present as memory.

The future is present as expectation.

What is happening now is also present.

In this post, I want to write about how to go back to the past. Soon, I will post about how to go to the future. And then, how to stay in the present.*

How to Go Back to the Past

Yes, traveling back in time means remembering.

But, it’s different from the way you remember your mother’s maiden name or the value of pi. Those memories seem to be stuffed inside some neurons in your brain.

If you close your eyes and remember:

  • What it was like to sit down at the family table
  • What your mother’s pie looked like, what it smelled like, and how it tasted
  • Then add guests from her side of the family

The visual, hearing, olfactory, and emotional parts of your brain light up the way they would if you were there eating that pie at that table with those people.

In a very real sense, you are traveling back in time.

I have been doing a lot of time traveling lately.

It’s what people do in the Third Half of Life.

I found there are right ways to do it and wrong ways to do it. I’ve been doing it wrong. I am learning to do it right. 

You may have tips of your own. I’d like to hear them.

The wrong way to do it.

If you have read stories or seen movies about people traveling back to the past, you know the danger of getting stuck there. That can happen to us.

The two great dangers of Time Traveling in the past are nostalgia and resentment or regret.

Nostalgia holds us in an idealized past. Nothing in the present or the future will ever measure up to our glowing memories of things like: 

  • A happy childhood.
  • The year you were captain of the high school basketball team.
  • Back when anything was possible, and you dreamed about backpacking in Europe, or starting your own business, or becoming an artist. 

 

Resentment holds us in the grip of past times when people wronged us:

  • When mother forgot your birthday.
  • When the coach took you out right before you could have won the championship.
  • When someone else’s decision narrowed your choices.


Regret holds us in the grip of times past when we did wrong:

  • That first lie you told your parents.
  • Missing the basket that could have won the championship.
  • Not spending enough time with loved ones who are now gone.

We all know that the cure for resentment is to forgive others The cure for regret is to forgive yourself. But how? 

I am not much given to nostalgia. But the way I am learning to travel in the past strikes me as a good way to overcome nostalgia and it helps with forgiveness, too.

The Right Way to Travel in the Past

I got these ideas from the wonderful book, How the Light Gets In: Writing as Spiritual Practice, by Pat Schneider.

Close your eyes and see a door. It is a door you know. Some examples:

  • The door to the first house you remember.
     • The door to your elementary school.
     • The door to a friend’s house.
     • The door to a house of worship.
     • The door to a bedroom.

Close your eyes and see the first door that comes up for you.

Now, open that door, and step inside. What do you see? What do you smell? What do you hear? Whom do you meet? 

You can also close your eyes and look into a deep well, and see a face reflected in the water. Whose face do you see? What do you remember about that person?

Practice this kind of remembering. You could write down what is on the other side of the door, or what you remember about the face in the well. Do it deliberately for a while and, soon, the past will arise unbidden.

When I do this kind of time traveling, there are certain images and times that keep coming up. They are almost always on the farm where I grew up. They are not idealized. They always have manure or mud in them. I remember my mother scolding me. I also remember her pie.

I open the back door to our farmhouse and see my mother in the kitchen stirring something on the stove with one hand while trying to read a book with the other. That’s definitely her.

I look into a deep well and see my maternal grandfather’s face staring back at me. It looks a lot like the face I see in the mirror.

I open the door to the bedroom I shared with my brother and remember hearing the distant train whistle blowing in the middle of the night.

Each of these are like  threads that, if I pull on them, will release moments, days, and years with all their drama and feelings. The memories seem to unfold like a movie of my own life.

The more I go back to these places and people, the more I see them without anger or shame or longing. I just look. I see myself and others as if I were in an audience watching a play on stage. I might be caught up in the story, but I never confuse my observing self with what is taking place on my mental stage. I can watch without nostalgia, resentment, or regret. I can just let these moments be. I can learn from them. I can also let them go. 

One of the most famous books of the 20th Century was, In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust. He says that his several-volume work all flooded back to him when he broke open a warm pastry one morning. The aroma reminded him of visiting an aunt when he was a small boy. She always served the same pastry.

I am not as good as Proust at traveling in the past, but I am slowly learning. By using these two practices, I travel back through the years. I learn from the past without getting stuck in nostalgia, resentment, and regret.

How do you safely travel backward in time? What do you remember?

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How a Cat and a Dog Taught Me to Be Human

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Two of my teachers died this past month. Orlando was a cat with less than half a tail. Henry was a delightful dog. 
 
Orlando, a yellow cat, belonged to Doug and MaryAnn Kerr, who live across the street from us. “Belonged” means Orlando granted them the privilege of feeding and housing him. He let them pay his veterinary bills when he got into fights.  But he roamed the neighborhood like he owned all our yards. Age finally caught up with him a few weeks ago. We are already seeing an uptick in the number of squirrels and chipmunks since he died.
 
Henry was a golden retriever. Henry lived up to that breed’s reputation for being friendly and playful . There was no question that Henry loved Jim and Cathy Stentzel more than anything in the world. We met Henry about a year after Cathy and Jim brought him home  as a very young dog.
 
Orlando seemed much the same right up until the end. We did not see much change in the 15 years we lived across the street.
 
We saw Henry only once or twice each year, so we noticed how he grew and changed and, eventually, aged. As a young dog, he ran circles around the slower humans who took him for walks. His size and stubbornness made him hard to resist when he wanted to go one way and you wanted to go another. His good-natured enthusiasm for his quest was even harder to resist. Over the past couple of years, we saw Henry slow down, take shorter walks and longer naps. But he never stopped beating his tail on the floor with joy when Jim and Cathy would arrive home.
 
It is only when Henry and Orlando died that I realized what they had taught me. When I learned of their deaths, I felt sad. That feeling of sadness amazed me. It told me something deep inside of me had changed. 
 
I grew up on a dairy farm surrounded by animals. We had a dairy barn full of Holsteins. We also raised chickens and hogs. We always had a cow dog that helped us move the cows from the pasture to the barn. We had cats running around the barn to keep the mouse population under control. The dog had a name, Queenie. My sisters gave some of the cats names. I did not learn to love animals on that farm.
 
I learned to take care of the animals because our living depended on them. I tossed bales of hay down a chute from the mow to the barn below. I climbed a silo in the dead of winter and forked chopped corn into a feed cart three stories below. I shoveled manure into a manure spreader. So, I cared for their needs. I also learned how to milk the cows, gather the hen’s eggs, feed the hogs, and how to help butcher cows and hogs and chickens so we could eat them.
 
I know people who grew up on farms and people who live on farms who love animals. I do not think farming is completely incompatible with compassion. But, I never learned how to love animals and kill them.   I chose to think of animals as commodities. I measured their value in dollars and cents per pound, like milk and eggs and oats and hay. I was like the kids who have spent two years raising a steer that wins the Grand Champion ribbon at the fair. As a reward, they get a big check from the owner of a local restaurant. Some city-bred reporter will ask them if they are sad that their steer will be turned into steaks. The kids usually say, “Are you kidding? Why do you think I went to all that trouble in the first place?” I was tough and realistic.
 
My mother’s theology further justified my attitude toward animals. When, as a little boy, I asked her if animals went to heaven, she explained that they do not because they do not have souls. She taught me to read the Creation story as a story about how human beings are special and different. We have souls. Animals do not. We commune with the Lord. Animals do not. We go to church and to heaven. Animals do not. She was in line with traditional Christian theology. I did not know it then, but those teachings hardened my heart.
 
When I was a pastor, parishioners would tell me about losing their beloved pets. I sensed that they were grieving, and I hope that I said appropriate things, but I admit that, inside, I did not get it. I understood when they grieved for a relative or a friend. I did not understand the grief they felt for a pet they had recently put down.
 
In my two years of retirement I have been practicing meditation. I supplement my life-long practice of prayer centered on Jesus with Yoga classes. I read books on Jewish spirituality recommended by my daughter-in-law, a Rabbi. I read books on Buddhist meditation recommended by Henry’s owner, Cathy.
 
I see a common thread running through these writings. I have learned what several wise observers mean when they say, “The theologians all argue. The mystics all agree.”
 
These books and practices lead me to a warm place in my heart. I believe that place is in every heart and at the heart of the universe. In that place is profound stillness and immense power. It is the Truth. It is Love. The New Testament calls it “God.”   
 
People of all faiths and no faith encounter this Truth and Love.  They may meet Love in deep meditation. They may meet Love when they hold a newborn baby. They may meet Love when they connect with a friend. They may meet Love when a slender ray of hope penetrates despair. When they speak of it, I recognize the same Love Christians meet in Jesus. 
 
We also call this Love, “Truth,” because Love shows us that all our reasons for not loving are based on lies. I can see how the “terrorists” and “bigots” twist their religious beliefs to justify not loving. A hard heart can turn any scripture into a lie that explains why it is OK to kill some people, or animals, and not others. It is harder for me to see how I do the same thing with my hard heart. 
 
Hard hearts even argue with the Bible. Yes, the Creation Story says humans and animals are all made from the same dust on the same day. But, said my hard heart, look at how much longer the author lingers over the creation of people.
 
I know the breath that God breathes into humans making them “souls” is callednephesh in Hebrew. I know that the same nephesh gives all beings life. But, said my hard heart, “nephesh” means “soul” in some places and “breath” in others.
 
Arguments did not work. It was Orlando and Henry who wore me down. Henry did it as he danced around Jim’s legs.  Orlando did it when I caught sight of him silently hunting in our hostas. I did not know that I learned to love them until after they died. Orlando and Henry changed me in the way Carl Jung said happens to us in the second half of life.
Before I retired, I did a series of sermons on the Beatitudes.  “Beatitude” means “happiness”. So, the second Beatitude always stumped me, “blessed are those who mourn, for they shallbe comforted.”  How can grief be happiness? We only grieve those we love. Now I understand. I mourn Orlando’s and Henry’s deaths. I am comforted by feeling that sadness, because it means that I am in touch with Truth and Love.

Practice Dying Every Day

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We are Moving

We are moving from Cleveland to New York City to be closer to family. That involves a lot of letting go. Letting go makes us grieve. That grief feels like dying. Moving on means heading into an unknown future with hope. That feels like dying, too.


Letting Go

We have to let go of our house. That will be tough. Henri Nouwen said giving people room to be themselves is the essence of hospitality. Jacquie built that philosophy into the floor plan of this house. This house makes it easy to be ourselves and to enjoy others being themselves.

We will be letting go of our home’s location. We are a seven-minute walk from a five-star library. We are a twenty-minute walk from a theater that shows films you cannot find at the multiplex. That walk takes longer if you stop to look in the window of the Heights Arts store next door. Our community is full of glassblowers, painters, weavers, photographers, jewelers, and other artists. Their work is on display there.

We will be letting go of our physicians at the Cleveland Clinic. It takes longer to walk from our car to the doctor’s office than it takes to drive from our house to the parking garage. My hearing loss has kept us from enjoying America’s best orchestra. But we do spend a day or two each month at the nation’s second-best art museum. (Free admission, by the way). Both world-class institutions are ten minutes away. We live next door to the world’s largest supply of fresh water. Cleveland, unlike New York,  is completely insulated from rising sea levels.

Our home equity will only cover the down payment on a place in Queens with one-third of the floor space we now have. So, we are letting go of books, tools, small appliances, closets full of extra clothes, a table saw (want to buy a table saw?).

Most of all, we will miss our wonderful neighbors. Some of our closest friends live within walking distance.

It is hard to let go of home and our stuff, our neighborhood and friends. But it is even harder to let go of my old self.

A few days ago, I pulled out file boxes that contained sermons and notes from forty-five years of ministry. I have other boxes of mementos from each of the six churches that I served. What to do? This is where I spent my life. It was my purpose, my calling. How could I throw me away?

Actually, if I can throw “me” away, it cannot be me. Who, after all, is deciding to throw it away? If I am the one making that decision, then how can I be throwing myself away?

I may be throwing away what I used to do. I may be throwing away a lot of stuff that I thought was “me” at the time. But I am in charge and I am the one deciding that I will not be moving a lot of this stuff into my new future.


Throwing Away the Old Future

The truth is, I am not throwing away the past. The past is past. I had those experiences, I did those things, I related to those people. I cannot change that past even if I wanted to.

I am throwing away my future, or the future I thought I would have before we decided to move.

One of those futures was based on the irrational belief that the old days would come back again. My father and grandfather sold our workhorses before I started school, but they kept the sleigh and most of the horse-drawn farm implements. I suppose there was not much of a market since all their neighbors were moving to tractors, too. But I also suspect that they wanted to be ready just in case tractors did not live up to the salesman’s promises.

I realize that I had an irrational belief that those sermons would be part of that future. Suppose retirement did not work out for me and I had to go back to preaching every Sunday? Just bringing that thought to the front of my mind helped me see how crazy it was.

We will be giving up another kind of future, however, that was reasonable and probable. For example:

  • In July, we almost always camped at a campsite called “Heart’s Content” in the Allegheny National Forest. If we were not moving, I would be looking forward to camping there this year.
  • Every August, I celebrated my birthday with friends across the street and from the next block. One of them also has an August birthday. If we weren’t moving I would be doing that again.
  • Every Labor Day weekend, our neighborhood holds the world’s best block party. If we weren’t moving I would be looking forward to that party.

Practice Dying

This is where our move becomes a way to practice dying. When we die, we not only have to let go of all our relationships and our stuff, we let go of our future, too.  That’s why letting go of such a large part of my future now feels like dying.

But, I have done this before.

Two years ago, I decided to retire. For forty-five years, I knew where I would be and what I would be doing on Christmas Eve and Easter morning. I also knew where I would be and what I would be doing every Sunday morning. Every week, every month, and every year had a predictable rhythm.

Then I retired. I not only did not know what I would be doing on Sunday morning, I was also asking, what will I do this week? Today? Right now? That change felt like death.

So how did I find the courage to retire? It was because I had practiced other small deaths.

In those forty-five years, I moved from one church to another five times. Five times, I was pastor of one church one Sunday and then became pastor of a new church on the next Sunday. One Sunday, I had looked out on a congregation in which I knew everyone’s name and everyone knew me. A fair number of them even liked me. The next Sunday, I looked out on a congregation in which I knew no one’s name. They did not know me and the jury was definitely out on whether or not they would like me.

I could go through those small “deaths” because I had “died” over and over again as I grew up.

  • My preschool-self died when I attended my first day of Kindergarten.
  • My preadolescent-self died as those hormones began to kick in.
  • My teenage-self died the night of my high school graduation.

Whoever “I ” am made it through those changes to my body, environment, and identity, even when those changes felt like death.

But looking back, they all felt like rising to a new life, as well.

These experiences, I now realize, were a way to practice dying. I was letting go of past routines and relationships, and of the future I thought I was going to have. That is what my final death will be like.

On the other side of those “deaths”, I always found new places, new relationships, and new routines.  This person that I continue to call “me” always found a new future on the other side of all those losses. I hope death will be like that, too.

Trusting the Future

In the end, faith is about trusting the new future enough to let go of the old future. We do not have to let go of our memories.  But we do have to let go of the old future.

This is not optional. Even if we stay put, our bodies change, our relationships change. The world changes and we have to adjust to what we often call the “New Normal”.

I have no idea what the new normal will be for us six months from now. I do not know who Jacquie and I will hang out with, where we will go to church, where we will buy groceries. I only believe that it will be OK.

So also, I have no idea what lies on the other side of the end of my life. I only believe it will be OK.

 

 

Retirement Grief

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Reading Time: 1 minute

I found this journal entry that I wrote on April 19, 2016, ten months after I retired. I’ve edited it for readability, but I offer it hoping it may help someone else. It is, after all, part of living the Second Half.

Grief at Loss of Profession

I realized this morning that I am feeling grief. I suspect that I am like a spouse who has nursed their beloved through a long last illness. At first, I felt only relief. but as time goes on, I have more and more good memories and just as the widow or widower feels the loss of their “other half,” so I feel the loss of the job that meant so much to me.

Just writing this allows the feelings to flow.

The widower who has watched his beloved suffer says, “I would not wish her back”.

No, nor would I ever want to go back to the stress I felt trying to care for a church that was undergoing so much change, and they felt with me. But I loved my job. I loved being a pastor, preaching, caring about people, thinking about the big issues in life, starting things that would continue without me. I loved the Church.

This is a good discovery.

A year later, I can say that the grief is much less, although not gone entirely. Grief is, after all, a measure of how much someone or something has meant to us