We've Just Begun
When I was ten, I had two basic ideas about what it means to grow up. First, I thought that when your birthday arrived and you turned another year older, you had to leave behind forever the key markers of your bygone years. In some instances, this might be hard. For example, at ten-years-old, I reasoned that it was probably time to give up playing with Barbie dolls, lest, and perish the thought, anyone mistake me for still being nine.
On the other hand, I wisely recognized that moving up a year could also bring with it some added bonuses. For example, now that I was ten, I could finally, according to our household rules, get my ears pierced, and my best friend and I could ride the train downtown without any adults. These were no small milestones.
My second idea about growing older was this: I was fairly certain that, after all the growing and landmark-passing of my childhood and teenage years, when I reached the age of twenty-five, I would finally be done. Not done living, of course. At ten, I had bold plans to get very old and live well past 100. But done, surely, with the tricky business of growing up. Done with school and homework, done with ballet lessons, done changing shoe sizes, and most important, done learning tough lessons and new things.
In short, twenty-five was the magic age at which I thought that we humans would be fully formed and all grown up. In fact, before reluctantly giving them up, I assigned all of my very mature Barbies the age twenty-five. I’m not sure where this idea came from, but in the words of A.A. Milne, I thought with certitude, once I was in my mid-twenties, I would be clever as clever and from then on remain the same forever and ever.
Perhaps you will not be surprised to hear that, by the time I actually reached twenty-five, my view of aging had changed somewhat. When the quarter-century mark rolled around, far from being perfectly grown up, I was just starting to realize how much more growing up I had left to do. Sure, I had a college degree, and three years of work in the “real world.” And yet, right at the age when my younger self expected to be done with life’s lessons, I had just decided to pursue a new vocation – ministry – that would require me to go to seminary and start learning all over again.
Further, I had begun to realize something larger – a fact of life that went beyond recognizing my personal need to go back to school. At first it was in the form of a question: If twenty-five is not the magic age, I wondered, then what is? At ten, I had thought the goal of life was to cross into the land of grown-up-ness and to live on from there in the bliss of fully formed adulthood. But by my own empirical evidence, I realized this was simply not the case.
For sure, by my mid-twenties, I had reached legal adulthood. The signs were all there: I could vote; I could have a beer with my friends after work; and I could pay my own bills.
The thing is, I wasn’t nearly done after all. And, it began to dawn on my twenty-five-year-old soul, I never would be. Far from the six-year-old in our second reading, I was feeling more like an infant at one, a person only just begun. Maybe you have felt this way once or twice as an adult too.
There is, of course, no magic age when we are all grown up, is there? There is no milestone so momentous that passing it means we are done learning or that we can coast from here on out. (Not even, my recent experience confirms, graduating from divinity school!)
Let me be the first to admit that embracing this truth is not easy – or at least it wasn’t for me. Because, wouldn’t it be nice to have it all figured out by the time we reach the age of, say, twenty-five? Haven’t we had enough life experience by then to know what is what? Surely, surely, we must eventually reach a point of being all grown up? Or not.
Think with me for a moment, though, about the flip side of all of this: if we are never fully done growing up, then our lives will always continue to deepen. They’ll grow richer in meaning as we grow older in years. Wherever on life’s timeline we find ourselves, there are always new places for our souls to journey and directions for our spirits to unfold.
We have only just begun.
If you are still wondering where I am going with this philosophizing about the existential crisis of turning twenty-five, let me say that it actually feels like a fitting story to share with you on a Sunday morning here at church. After all, religious community is the prime place in which we – ministers and lay folks alike – seek and nourish spiritual growth. If, as I have come to believe, we are never fully done with growing, then our congregations – our spirits’ homes – should work to recognize and embrace that growth all along the way.
In recent years, our denominational association has changed the name of its Religious Education Department to “Lifespan Faith Development.” Lifespan Faith Development. It is a semantic change for sure, but one which also contain an important suggestion: namely, that we can and should learn our whole lives through. It is also seems fitting, then, that when we re-evaluated and updated our comprehensive sexuality education program a few years ago, its name was changed to “Our Whole Lives”! Our whole lives.
Both of these name changes seem to interpret our third UU principle, which promotes the encouragement of spiritual growth, as I believe it should be interpreted – to apply to UU’s of all ages.
Now, on the face of it, lifespan faith development seems rather intuitive, doesn’t it? It’s not hard for most of us to recognize the naiveté of ten year-old Mara’s belief that, upon reaching her mid-twenties, she would be all done growing up. If I asked any of you whether you’d like to keep learning new things throughout your life, I suspect you might say “yes.” And, indeed, the Wright Tavern program here provides an impressive example of congregational commitment to continued faith development and spiritual growth.
But even if we chuckle at the childish notion of staying the same age forever, even if we acknowledge the possibility of continued growth, and even if we attend religious education classes ourselves, I think that, on a personal level, truly embracing lifelong learning can still be hard. Intellectually, we may grasp the value of such ongoing growth, we may even seek out opportunities for it, but emotionally and spiritually, it can still challenge us at the deepest inner levels.
Why is this? For starters, I think there is a strong voice in our culture that says that most everything important in life happens when we’re young. We’re encouraged to savor the glory days of our teens and twenties. Remember, you’re only young once. This is the same voice that encourages us to change our appearance in order to look younger. And let me confess: this is also the voice that, in a moment of weakness, made me wonder if I was truly getting over the hill when I turned 29 earlier this month.
In terms of education, most of our formal schooling happens from the time we are toddlers through our late teenage years. And for many of us, even in churches with robust lifespan programs, when we hear the acronym “RE,” we think of children first, and only later adults. Of course I believe that our education as children and teens is terribly important. I also agree with a colleague of mine who says that one of our churches’ most important jobs is to raise children.
But at the same time, I don’t want to fall into the trap of expecting all of our best learning to happen before the age of twenty-five. Admittedly, I am in the young adult demographic. But nonetheless, I am with Morrie Schwartz, the wise soul from our first reading today, when he said to Mitch, “all this emphasis on youth – I don’t buy it.”1 You see, like Morrie, I believe that education—both religious and otherwise—needs to engage and address all the stages of our lives.
We have only just begun.
At this point, I should probably tell you that my belief in the importance of lifespan learning is not just an abstract idea developed for a seminary paper. It is grounded in the real life experience of two family heroes: my Great Aunt and Uncle – Helen and Fred Adler.
Fred died two and half years ago, and Helen passed away last summer. Though they are no longer with us physically, my family continues to feel their profound influence in our lives. I’d like to share with you a bit of their story.
Born in the first decades of the 20th century to Jewish immigrant parents and raised in a small working class town just outside Pittsburgh, Fred and Helen fell in love as teenagers and eventually married. They raised three children and lived most of their adult lives in Delmar, a suburb of Albany, New York. Fred and Helen, whose marriage would go on to last more than 60 years and whose names are often strung together in family lore as though they had just one name “FredandHelen,” believed strongly in the importance of education.
Helen was a revered high school English teacher in the Albany-area, and both she and Fred loved reading and intellectually engaging conversation. As a teenager, I remember long phone conversations with Helen telling her about the books I was reading in high school – she always affirmed my inner bookworm – and also securing her blessing on my college application essay.
But though she worked every day educating high school students, Helen—and also Fred—believed that learning was not limited to the traditional school years of kindergarten through twelfth grade. In fact, once they retired in the early 1980’s, they put this belief into practice by helping to found a program called the Humanities Institute for Lifelong Learning, or HILL for short.
This program allowed retired folks in their community to take college level courses from some of the best university faculty around. Fred and Helen did everything from recruiting professors whose work they found interesting to setting up lecture rooms. And of course, the program had an added bonus – they got to attend the courses themselves!
Today, thirteen years after it began, Fred and Helen’s HILL program continues on and attracts approximately 1000 participants every year. It draws fascinating speakers, one of whom, a witty and wacky psychology professor, spoke at Helen’s memorial service last September. And, though never a HILL student myself, I have my great aunt and uncle and their program to thank for an important lesson. Learning, they showed me with their lives, is as possible in one’s seventies and eighties as it is in one’s teens. As long as we are living, we are never done with learning and growing.
We have only just begun.
Permit me now one final observation. There is something more to lifelong learning, I think, than just ensuring access to education for people of all ages. It is essential, of course, to acknowledge that we are not done learning once we finish high school or college and not done developing our faith once we graduate from Sunday school. And it’s crucial too, to create related opportunities.
But in doing so, we must also seek to affirm and honor the blessings of each age and each stage on the human journey. As Morrie Schwartz wryly notes, our culture celebrates youth. But in religious community, we can and should celebrate every age. This is our ongoing spiritual work.
Why?
Because every year offers a new chance to build meaningful relationships and to engage with the work of creation.
Why?
Because every life stage builds up our stash of precious wisdom.
Why?
Because every age is sacred in its own way.
Let’s return for a moment to our first reading of the day because I think Morrie puts it better than I can. “Mitch,” he tells his friend, “it is impossible for the old not to envy the young. But the issue is to accept who you are and revel in that. This is your time to be in your thirties. I had my time to be in my thirties, and now is my time to be seventy-eight. You have to find what’s good and true and beautiful in your life as it is now.”
Finding what is good and true and beautiful in your life as it is now.2 Accepting who you are and reveling in that. This, my friends, is the work of spiritual development. This is the learning process which, if we are open to it, lasts for all of our lives.
After all, wherever we are on the growing-up journey, we’ve only just begun!
Amen.
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1Mitch Albom, Tuesdays With Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson, New York: Doubleday, 1997, p. 120.
2Albom, 120-121.