Composing A Life — A Work In Progress

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Blacksburg, Virginia), May 20, 2007, by the Rev. Don Robert Johnson, a former Methodist minister, a former college chaplain, and Leader Emeritus of the Ethical Society of St. Louis. Rev Johnson will be in the pulpit twice a month during Rev. Brownlie’s sabbatical.

Readings

The American artist Chester Harding, painting Daniel Boone’s portrait, asked the old frontiersman, then in his eighties, if he had ever been lost. Boone replied, “No, I can’t say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.”

Richard Kehl

I live my life in growing orbits,
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.

And I have been circling for a thousand years.
And I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a song.

Maria Ranier Rilke

Task; to be where I am -
Even when I am in this solemn and absurd role:
I am still the place where creation does some work on itself.

Tomas Transtomer

Every time you make a choice you limit the choices left to you, until the choices are reduced to living and dying. The need, therefore, is to deal with essences.

Stanley Kunitz

To view your life as blessed does not require you to deny your pain. It simply demands a more complicated vision, one in which a condition or event is not either good or bad but is, rather, both good and bad, not sequentially but simultaneously. In my experience, the more such ambivalences you can hold in your head, the better off you are, intellectually and emotionally.

Nancy Mairs

Life is short, but it’s wide.

Spanish Proverb

Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, “Grow, grow.”

Talmud

It’s a contention of Heat Moon’s — believing, as he does, any traveler who misses the journey misses about all he’s going to get — that a man becomes his attentions. His observations and curiosity, they make and remake him.

Blue Highways

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something that one creates.

Thomas Szasz

In the book Composing A Life: A Work in Progress, Mary Catherine Bateson (daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson) summarizes life as a “work in progress,” and documents that summary with the case histories of women, including herself. The point is that living life at its fullest is an art, a dance, a song, an exploration that never ends.

Life As Creation

Today, more than ever, the basic understandings and even seeming certainties that enable us to give direction to our lives are no longer clear to us. Not only do our lives take new directions, in today’s world they are subject to continuous redirection.

Composing our lives is fluid and increasingly complex. We are having to learn to see success in a much more transitory way since life today requires continual redefinition. We live with the very real broken assumptions of continuity and the need for a new way of imagining the future.

Even if one stays in the same career, marriage, location, one has to relearn one’s craft, renegotiate one’s marriage, and transform one’s living place. Commitments must be continually refocused and redefined. The necessity of combining multiple commitments complicates our lives immensely, requiring that we recreate ourselves over and over in response to changing circumstances and the changing definition others bring to their lives.

Describing this as exploring new territory is not quite accurate, for what we are engaged in is not exactly discovery, for what we search for does not exist until we create it.

The Transition Times

Of prime importance then are the times of transition, the “betwixt and between” times that Louise Carus Mahdi and others document in the book of the same title. In most cultures, specific initiation rites identify these transition times for people, but our own culture is largely void of such symbolic aids. These “building blocks” for change or transformation to another level of consciousness are ones we largely are forced to deal with alone, and in dark isolation deep within ourselves in our culture. These threshold times, at significant stages of life, are a personal crossroads. But they have a power of their own not only for the individual but for the larger culture as well. Our common life is weakened by our failure to recognize and support individuals in these “betwixt and between” times.

This process, a work in progress for each of us, is about the art of becoming, of being. It is an ongoing process that occurs throughout our lives, manifest most clearly in times of transition. I want to mention three such times in particular: adolescence, mid-life, and aging.

Depression is a central factor in all three of these transition times, and at least as viewed by some are a major factor in regenerating the psyche and developing the personality. Every significant change in age, status, role, attitude, or personality is accompanied by the demise and mourning of a former condition.

People are terribly afraid of change, preferring, as Sam Keen wrote, a known hell to an unknown heaven. We feel we have little conscious control over the process and the results in change, feeling pulled along by a source outside us, (or more accurately) deep within us.

Adolescence is, according to the majority of those I have counseled with over the years, as well as what I can remember from my own adolescence now so many years ago, an extremely significant and generally painful time of transition.

In adolescence there is a horrendous identity crisis-centered around questions of who am I? Who am I apart from my history, my family — and, with all the change occurring in me-physically, sexually, socially — will I ever have an identity that is uniquely mine!

I experienced the second major transition time more recently myself , what is popularly called “the mid-life crisis.” In a mid-life crisis we end up burying below the surface of our consciousness the contents of the unanalyzed unconscious, this shadow side of ourselves, fearing that our very basic personality is in danger.

It is put simply by Wendell Berry:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Or stated by Mexican poet Octavio Paz in these words:

With great difficulty, advancing by millimeters each year, I carve a road out of the rock. For milleniums my teeth have wasted and my nails broken to get there, to the other side, to the light and the open air. And now that my hands bleed and my teeth tremble, unsure, in a cavity cracked by thirst and dust, I pause and contemplate my work: I have spent the second part of my life breaking the stones, drilling the walls, smashing the doors, removing the obstacles I placed between the light and myself in the first part of my life.

At mid-life a basic reorientation of one's attitudes and goals is called for. Yet many of us come dangerously close to falling into the trap of seeking to change only the contexts and circumstances that seem to close in on us — a different spouse, a different job, or a different place.

In this period the conscious becomes sterile, life seems to have run dry, enthusiasm waves or disappears, and we fall into some stupor, questioning the very purpose and meaning of literally everything.

For me, it seemed as a nightmare without end. One must let go of the habitual and overcome the fear of the unknown, the other, the different of which we are anxious or even repulsed.

When our battle with the years leads to stagnation, when our convictions become platitudes, our ideals starchy habits, our enthusiasms automatic gestures-the very origin of life seems suspect-and a profound depression hits us. The seeming sinister deep within us makes us want to run away, but life calls us down into the depths.

Jung said it beautifully:

Everything young grows old, all beauty fades, all heat cools, all brightness dims, and every truth becomes stale and trite. For all these things have taken on shape, and all shapes are worn thin by the working of time; they age, sicken, crumble to dust-unless they change. But change they can, for the invisible spark that generated them is potent enough for infinite generation. No one should deny the danger of the descent, but it can be risked. No one need risk it, but it is certain that some will. And let those who go down the sunset way do so with open eyes, for it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods.

Yet every descent is followed by an ascent; the vanishing shapes are shaped anew, and a truth is valid in the end only if it suffers change and bears new witness in new images, in new tongues, like an old wine that is put into new bottles.

In the aging years, particularly in a culture that values youth as ours does, a whole set of physiological factors are complicated by the cultural negatives about aging. The task of simplifying life, identifying what matters most, may reach its most critical test while energy levels, physical limits, chemical imbalances make us pay attention, while our own identity again becomes the focus.

No wonder traditional cultures aided the adolescent, the mid-life adult and the aging person with rites and initiations. When one’s whole world seems to be collapsing, our sexual being re-emerging, the question of life and death confronting us again, then this transitional period is full of major conflict and crisis. Psychotherapy may have been for many of us the only vehicle in our culture offering us aid, helping us to remove the boulders burdening us, shining light in the darkness, and helping us to find new priorities, new ways to function and a new life.

Our culture has robbed the adolescent, the middle-aged person and the aging person (as well as others) of the support of rites of passage. Traditional societies generally have these rites manifest in three ways:

rites of separation from the larger group and the past;

rites of threshold that reflect the loss of former identity and a struggle to transformation; and

rites of reincorporation, where the person finds re-entry into the society as a “new person.”

Long ago I read Thomas Sanchez’s wonderful Native American novel, Rabbit Boss. He details the passage over a four day ceremony, with first a fast, then a dance and ceremony, of celebration of a girl into womanhood. It was at the time that my oldest daughter was approaching puberty, and when I read the beautiful rites of passage for the young Indian woman entering puberty I longed for such a communal celebration for my own daughter. Since none existed, we did have a family celebration for her, but our general culture tends to ignore or even deny this wonderful time of change.

Finding a community that honors this transition and creation journey is essential, so many come to this place and this people for support.

The birth of a new self is at the center of life’s journey. Somewhere along the way, we must bury our old selves and find a transitional space where we can live while we create our new selves. During this holding environment we learn to face our own dragons, to endure this time of transition. But a struggle it is! We have to recognize that there is more than one layer to ourselves, that we have within us many different layers or levels. So Stanley Kunitz in his 80s said, "We have to live in the layers, not in the litter".

It may be subtle or abrupt. Answers are not to be discovered, but created; not found but made. One thing is certain in this process. This is our individual life and journey. No cookie-cutter model will do. And we have to listen to our own inner selves most of all, no matter what the advice or warnings others may offer. We have to insist on being unfettered, rejecting tapes put deep into our psyches, overcoming habits that were molded deep in our past experiences, leaping over barriers and circumstances that have been placed before us by ourselves and others. So writes Mary Oliver in The Journey:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend your life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.

It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life that you could save.

The good life is about a process and not just a goal. Our goal is to urge and support each life and all life to flourish, to be fulfilled, so that we will be able to reach the point spoken of in the poem Love After Love ( by Derek Walcott):

The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other's welcome,

And say, sit here, Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you

All your life, whom you ignored
For another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

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