The story has to do with graduate school. By sheer luck, I found myself in a program that specialized in classical American philosophers like William James, John Dewey, Charles Peirce, and George Santayana. I call it luck because it was not by any genuine forethought whatsoever that I went to Texas A&M University as an undergraduate, and it was desperation borne of restlessness that drove me to change my major time after time until, with philosophy, the restlessness became curiosity and even enthusiasm. But it was an enthusiasm for everything, and I really struggled with this—particularly after I was accepted into the graduate program and found myself facing the daunting task of writing a thesis. I needed to identify a specific topic to focus on, and quick. What was it going to be?

This is where I confess the part that I’m not proud of. I got way ahead of myself. I allowed ambition to solve the problem for me, rather than taking the more difficult route of listening to my life and discerning my genuine interests. I had aspirations of doing a Ph. D. at Vanderbilt University—I was told it was a prestigious department, and I had stars in my eyes about this—and it just so happened that the Head of the Texas A&M Philosophy Department at the time had strong links to Vanderbilt. The brilliant plan that unfolded in my prestige-addled brain was therefore this: I would choose a topic that would require me to work with the Head (which turned out to be George Santayana’s ethical theory), and this would be my ticket into the school of my dreams.

It did not work out. I ended up hating the topic I chose, and by the time I finished that thesis, I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. As for my relationship with the Head of the Department: not good. We were just not temperamentally suited for each other. Rather than moving me forward into my career as a philosopher, it set me back. Worst of all is the 20/20 hindsight I have now, many years later, about the treasure that was right there before me, all along, which I did not claim. This treasure: the world-renowned William James scholar who also taught in my department. William James, who has turned out to be one of my absolutely favorite thinkers—and I could have done my thesis on him. The thought had actually crossed my mind, but among other things, I suspected that the world-renowned scholar was too busy for me. Yet I never even inquired to find out if this were so. I missed my chance.

How easily it can happen. Ambition can put stars in our eyes, and we lose touch with who we are. Fixation on some end goal can cause us to stop paying attention to the journey, never mind enjoying it. Fear of being turned down can keep us simply from asking. Treasure is within our grasp, but we don’t go ahead and grasp it.
Why is this?

One of the things I value about Jonathan Haidt’s book The Happiness Hypothesis is that, through its unique blend of science and spirituality, it’s helping me better understand my own human heart , as well as to become a better student of happiness. Three of its insights—all from chapter five—come to mind.

The first is this: how it’s natural to care about such things as prestige. Desire for Vanderbilts of every kind reflect a deep impulse shaped by millions of years of natural selection, directed towards winning at the game of life; and it involves impressing others, gaining their admiration, and rising in relative rank. We all feel tempted to do this even when greater authentic happiness can be found elsewhere. Political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli recognized this hundreds of years ago when he said, “the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.”

Conspicuous consumption is an obvious example of this—the zero-sum game of “keeping up with the Joneses” that anchors the very real phenomenon of middle-class poverty—but I am particularly struck by the results of a recent experiment a group of economists set up using a beverage called SoBe Adrenaline Rush—a beverage that claims to increase mental acuity. The story here is told by Ori and Rom Brafman in their recent book, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior: “To test acuity, the researchers developed a thirty-minute word jumble challenge that was administered to three groups of students. The first group, a control group, took the test without drinking any SoBe. The second group was told about the intelligence-enhancing properties of SoBe, given the drink, and asked to watch a video while the tonic had time to take effect. These students also were required to sign an authorization form allowing the researchers to charge $2.89 to their university account…. We’ll call this second group of students the ‘fancy-schmancy SoBe’ drinkers. Finally, a third group of students was given the same spiel about SoBe but was told that the university had gotten a discount and that they would be charged eighty-nine cents for the drink. We’ll call them the ‘cheapo SoBe’ drinkers. Now, the results of the experiment were surprising. The group that drank the fancy-schmancy SoBe performed slightly better in the test than did the group that received no SoBe at all. But before we rush out to buy SoBe, with its acuity-enhancing powers, it’s important to note that the students who drank the cheapo SoBe performed significantly worse than either the fancy-schmancy group or the SoBe-free control group. Given that exactly the same SoBe beverage was served to both groups, we can only conclude that it was the value the students attributed to the SoBe that made the difference in their test scores. Strange as it may sound, fancy-schmancy SoBe made the students smarter, while cheapo SoBe hindered their performance.” And that’s the story that Ori and Rom Brafman tell. Humans are deeply susceptible to the power of prestige—so much so that we unconsciously, instinctively respond to fancy-shmancy SoBe by getting smarter and to cheapo SoBe by getting dumber. This is how vulnerable we are to the lure of prestige.

Again and again, we learn that the human heart is a complicated thing, and may we embrace this with compassion. We learn that each of us is many different selves all buzzing about like a committee—sometimes on the same page, and sometimes not. Where prestige is concerned, we can often find ourselves internally divided; and we can feel a great pull towards what is fancy-schmancy even though it may come at the expense of our true happiness.

But now, let’s turn to the second happiness insight: how people are generally inaccurate predictors of the ultimate impact of life changes, whether bad or good. In my own case, I anticipated going to Vanderbilt for my Ph.D. as a change that would bring about perfect happiness; but life would be over if I didn’t get in. This is what I predicted, and on this basis, I acted. All of us do something like this, as we face the future. Yet Jonathan Haidt asks us to consider the “adaptation principle,” which describes something we have all experienced—that people get used to conditions in their life that are constant. It becomes like wallpaper: taken for granted, just there. While people are extraordinarily sensitive to changes in conditions, after a time things settle down, and we are back to our usual state of happiness.

Jonathan Haidt explores this in an interesting way. He asks, “If I gave you ten seconds to name the very best and very worst things that could ever happen to you, you might well come up with these: winning a 20-million dollar lottery jackpot and becoming paralyzed from the neck down. Winning the lottery would bring freedom from so many cares and limitations; it would enable you to pursue your dreams, help others, and live in comfort…. Losing the use of your body, on the other hand, would bring more limitations than life in prison. You’d have to give up on nearly all your goals and dreams, forget about sex, and depend on other people for help with eating and bathroom functions. Many people think they would rather be dead than paraplegic. But they are mistaken.” They are mistaken, Jonathan Haidt says, because of the adaptation principle. “The [lottery] winner’s pleasure comes from rising in wealth, not from standing still at a high level, and after a few months the new comforts have become the new baseline of daily life. The winner takes them for granted and has no way to rise even further. Even worse: the money might damage her relationships. Friends, relatives, swindlers, and sobbing strangers swarm around lottery winners, suing them, sucking up to them, demanding a share of the wealth. […] At the other extreme, the quadriplegic takes a huge happiness loss up front. He thinks his life is over, and it hurts to give up everything he once hoped for. But like the lottery winner, his mind is sensitive more to changes than to absolute levels, so after a few months he has begun adapting to his new situation and is setting more modest goals. He discovers that physical therapy can expand his abilities. He has nowhere to go but up.”

This is the adaptation principle at work. Life changes can definitely bring pleasure or pain, but the pain or pleasure never lasts as long as you think it will, and we return to our natural and usual state of mind. I didn’t get in to Vanderbilt; OK, there was some weeping and gnashing of the teeth for a time; but then I got on with my life. My prediction about the impact of not getting in was way off base. I adapted, and moved on.
Which leads us to the next happiness insight to consider: that most environmental and demographic factors influence happiness very little. “Try to imagine yourself,” says Jonathan Haidt, “changing places with either Bob or Mary. Bob is thirty-five years old, single, white, attractive, and athletic. He earns $100,000 a year and lives in sunny California. He is highly intellectual, and he spends his free time reading and going to museums. Mary and her husband live in snowy Buffalo, New York, where they earn a combined income of $40,000. Mary is sixty-five years old, black, overweight, and plain in appearance. She is highly sociable, and she spends her free time mostly in activities related to her church. She is on dialysis for kidney problems.” Now, the question: who do you think is happier? Bob or Mary? On the surface of things, Bob, since he enjoys a string of what many would consider markers of power and privilege: he’s white, he’s male, he’s young, he lives in a beautiful climate, he’s attractive, and he’s wealthy. Yet it’s intriguing to get beneath the surface and take a look at what the research says. “White Americans are freed from many of the hassles and indignities that affect black Americans, yet, on the average, they are only very slightly happier.” “Men have more freedom and power than women, yet they are not on average any happier.” The old are generally happier than the young. “People who live in colder climates expect people who live in California to be happier, but they are wrong.” “People believe that attractive people are happier than unattractive people, but they, too, are wrong.” As for wealth—research shows that once people have sufficient money to pay for basic needs of food and shelter, the relationship between wealth and happiness grows smaller. At this point, more money definitely does not mean more happiness. Consider how it is that “as the level of wealth has doubled or tripled in the last fifty years in many industrialized nations, the levels of happiness and satisfaction in life that people report have not changed, and depression has actually become more common.” For all of this, chalk things up to the adaptation principle. All of these markers of power and privilege are life conditions that you either can’t change or which are constant for significant periods of time. And we get used to them. They become wallpaper in our lives. They disappear from our awareness. We take them for granted.

And there they are: the three insights. (1) Natural selection attunes us to prestige even at the expense of genuine, long-lasting happiness; ( 2) people are inaccurate predictors of the impact of life changes to happiness; and (3) most environmental and demographic factors influence happiness very little. Happiness is not so simple a thing. The human heart is not so simple to figure out.

But now, putting these insights together: where does it take us, especially as we consider the new year ahead of us, with all its new possibilities?

One thing does stand out. Go back to Mary. We met her a moment ago; she and her husband live in snowy Buffalo, New York, where they earn a combined income of $40,000. By now, we know that all such factors are fairly equivalent to Bob’s, in terms of their power to influence happiness in life. This includes the fact of her being sixty-five years old, black, overweight, being plain in appearance, and being on dialysis for kidney problems. All such factors are constants in her life, and she has adapted to them.

Yet there are two advantages she has which Bob does not, which give her the clear  happiness edge, and here is the clue we are looking for. She is highly sociable, and she spends her free time mostly in activities related to her church. Research has shown both factors to have great impact on a person’s level of happiness, and part of the reason for this is that they are not so much constant conditions of life as voluntary activities that people choose to engage in. Because of this—because they take effort and attention—they aren’t susceptible to the adaptation effect.

One of the main things we can do, in other words, if we want to increase our happiness, is to invest time and energy in activities that lead to genuine gratification in some form or fashion. Sometimes, we are talking about activities which allow us to lose self-consciousness, connect with and express our strengths, and get into the flow of things. Other times, it can be activities that require some effort and yet the result is wonderful, as in exercise, or learning a new skill, or kindness and gratitude activities, or volunteer service. Such activities can make you feel vulnerable—you are putting yourself out there, after all—but once you do them, the good feelings last a long time.

In my case, what happened after the Vanderbilt disaster was this. Three kinds of activities that came together for me and ultimately helped me find myself again.

After I finished my thesis and defended it successfully, a week before I was to have graduated, I got a call from the community college across town, Blinn College. Would I like to teach a logic class? All my future plans were up in smoke, so why not? I took to that field, and like the sons in the Sufi wisdom story we heard earlier, I gave myself to daily labor, and to the round of the seasons. One class grew into three; three grew into five and a full-time permanent position; but most importantly, I discovered my passion for public speaking and teaching, and I realized that, for me, philosophy of religion was the bomb.

I was discovering the treasure of the field, my happiness; and it was also happening at the Unitarian Universalist congregation I started going to, with Laura, once our daughter was born. I took to that field, and I gave myself to various opportunities that arose. I served as President of the Board of Trustees; I led some fundraising programs; I led some worship and taught a few religious education courses. Through volunteerism, I was discovering talents that I didn’t know I had. And, I was also making friends.

Which leads me to the third activity which helped me recover after the Vanderbilt disaster. Figure skating. Down in College Station, Texas, at the Unitarian Church, I met my future ice-dancing partner. It all came as quite a shock. Part of this has to do with the fact that, when I met Diane in 1996, I hadn’t skated since I was a boy of 13, and last I knew, serious figure skating was just for children and teenagers. Yet what I did not know was that, during my many years away from the sport, a significant adult skating program had developed, including regional, national, and international competitions. Diane knew all about it—and did I want to go skating with her? At first I resisted—one excuse after another came to mind—but Diane and then Laura kept on prodding me, and so, eventually, I went.

As it turns out, this was the final ingredient. I took to the field of teaching, I took to the field of church volunteerism, I took to the field of adult figure skating; and as I gave myself to all three activities, some kind of weird alchemy happened, and I found a clarity within me which I had never had before. I found a yearning to combine passion for public speaking and teaching and community building and leadership and artistry and spirituality all in one thing, and that thing was ministry. I would become a minister. That was the treasure in the field that I found, but only after giving myself to years of hard work, day to day and season to season.

“I prayed for twenty years,” Frederick Douglass once said, “but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.” The treasure is out there, in the field, and it’s not about prestige, it’s not about the things we can’t control, it’s not about the constant conditions to which we inevitably adapt. It’s about activity, action, praying with your legs.

And this time, I did not let fear stop me from talking to the people I needed to talk to, and doing the things I needed to do. I even turned down an offer to attend fancy-schmancy Harvard Divinity School—with funding—to go to one that was better suited to my family and me.

When one of my friends heard this, he sent me a funny postcard featuring an orangutan wearing one of those square academic caps, with the tassel on the side. And this was the caption: WHAT? You haven’t been to HARVARD?” I laughed. OK by me.

Story Before the Sermon
There once was a farmer who lay on his deathbed in despair over the fate of his lazy sons. When he was almost gone, an inspiration came to him. He called his sons to his bedside and drew them in close. “I am soon to leave this world,” he whispered. “I want you to know that I have left a treasure of gold for you. I have hidden it out in the field. Dig carefully and well and you will find it. I ask only that you share it among yourselves evenly.”

The sons begged him to tell them exactly where he had buried it, but the father breathed his last and said no more.

As soon as their father was buried, the sons took up their shovels and began to turn over the soil in their father’s field. They dug and dug until they had turned over the whole field twice. Nothing–no treasure anywhere. But they decided that since the field was so well prepared, they might as well plant some grain just as their father had done. The crop grew well for them. After the harvest they decided to dig again in hopes of finally finding the hidden treasure. Again they found nothing, and once again prepared the field for sowing. That year’s crop was even better than the one before.

This went on for years until the sons had grown accustomed to the cycles of the seasons and the rewards of working together in daily labor. By that time their disciplined farming earned them enough money to live very comfortable lives. They grew very close and content. They had everything they could ever want or need. It was then and only then, that they realized what a great treasure their father had left for them out in that field.

December 21, 2008

Dear Mary:

It was two thousand years ago in a stable, surrounded by oxen and donkeys and your husband Joseph, when the main event was supposed to have happened: your giving birth to Jesus. The image of it is one I have known all my life, from Christmas cards, paintings and works of art, outdoor manger scenes, and even from some Canadian and American stamps I used to collect as a boy. The image of you holding the baby Jesus; the strength and protection of your arms. To this my eyes would always go, even if there were other amazements to look at, like wise men, or shepherds, or the Star of Bethlehem. There’s something special about you.

And I’m not alone in my feelings about this. Through the ages, and around the world, feeling for you has always run deep. Catholic, Orthodox, and some Anglican Christians out-and-out venerate you. In your honor, Mary, they compose poems and songs; they paint icons and carve statues; they kneel before your image; they even pray to you for intercession with your son. I know this personally, for my own grandmother was Ukrainian Catholic, and I can still remember her fervent prayers, the depths of her reverence.

But it’s not that Catholics like my grandmother, or Anglicans, or Orthodox are setting you up as some idol. They don’t see you as God. It’s just that honor is being given where they feel honor is due—you, after all, are supposed to be the bearer of a God. Even Muslims, who deny that Jesus is God, honor you. You are the only women in the Koran who is directly named; and along with Jesus, you are said to be Ayat Allah, or the “Sign of God,” to humankind.

That’s what I call special. You are important for so many people around the world. Hunger for you is great. And that’s what this letter is about, Mary. The comfort and protection of your mothering arms. Your strength. People can’t seem to get enough of it. It all begs for a closer look.

Though right at the start, I need to acknowledge that opinions differ about the exact nature of the strength I’m talking about. Perhaps it boils down to a question that Christians have had from almost the very beginning: what you needed to be like to give birth to one who was supposed to be without sin. To raise a person like this. Did you have to be without sin, too? Or was your ordinary, imperfect humanity good enough? Exactly what kind of strength are we talking about?

The question is one of perfection vs. imperfection, and Catholics in particular have opted for perfection. That’s the official position, anyway. They see you as having a miraculous kind of independence from sex and death. This is what gives you your perfection and your strength. All sorts of doctrines laying this out. The doctrine of the Virgin Birth, according to which God directly impregnated you. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which says that you yourself were the product of a miraculous virgin birth. The doctrine of Perpetual Virginity, meaning that all of Jesus’ brothers and sisters had to have been cousins, or they had to have been children from a previous marriage of Joseph’s. And then the doctrine of the Assumption, proclaimed by Pope Pius XII in 1950, which says that you never physically died, and that you ascended bodily into heaven at the end of your days. All of these are doctrines Catholics have discerned over the years, as ways of articulating your strength and explaining how you were able to be the kind of mother you needed to be, to nurture and support the perfection of your son. Your miraculous qualities made you strong.

Mary, my own mother’s family believed this, being the good Catholics they were. But I myself grew up Protestant and eventually became Unitarian Universalist, and both influences lead me to balk at all these doctrines. I never grew up thinking that life in a body and all that it implies is tinged with sinfulness. As a Unitarian Universalist, I absolutely do not. In being born, in sensuality and sexuality (whether gay or straight), and also in dying, all people possess inherent worth and dignity. I believe it.

I also believe that you did not need to be perfect to meet the challenges of raising your son. Your ordinary, imperfect humanity was good enough, and gave you the strength you needed. In fact, there’s a sense in which it’s to everyone’s advantage that you were imperfect, since the idea that God could be born through someone living just an ordinary life is scandalous in a wondrous sort of way. The thought that people could be used by God for great things despite any and all limitations is wondrous. A source of great hope.

Mary, I really resonate with this idea. That you could be strong despite your flaws and imperfections. That you could be strong exactly because of your flaws. The Unitarian Universalist in me loves this, and every day, I walk in trust that the universe will receive whatever I offer up to it, however flawed, and turn it to some good, somehow. This is the core of my religious faith, and above all, it’s the core of my faith as a parent. As a father, the responsibility of parenting would be unbearable if I didn’t believe that being good enough was good enough. Know what I mean? This belief is sometimes all I have to go on, to get me through the times when I feel I’m totally screwing things up, and there won’t ever be enough money in the proverbial therapy jar my daughter will draw on to set things right. I just have to trust that being good enough is good enough.

I don’t know. Did you have to be perfect to do true justice to your child Jesus? To be strong enough for him? What’s clear is this. I’ve read stories in the Christian scriptures that hint at your parenting style, and I’m impressed. You really knew what you were doing. Here’s one story that springs to mind. It’s the story of Jesus turning water to wine at the wedding in Cana of Galilee. There you are, at the wedding with Jesus, who by now must be around 30 years old. He’s never performed a miracle before, and let’s assume that he’s wanting to be very careful about choosing the right first miracle, since the first of anything can be a predictor of everything else to follow. The first miracle has got to be special. It’s got to be right. And Mary, you know this. You also know that people can get so anxious about getting things right the first time that they might never even allow for a first time—to them, no time will ever seem special enough, nothing will ever seem good enough. So when you learn that the wine has all run out at the wedding party, you see that this is your opportunity to do a little mentoring. Light a little fire under your son, the brilliant rabbi. So you go to Jesus … and nudge him. “There’s no more wine,” you say. Jesus catches your drift, senses the pressure you’re putting on him, and he replies, rather testily, “Woman, what concern is that to you? My hour has not yet come.” In other words, Mom, stop trying to rush me! Stop pushing, already! Jesus is not very nice as he says this—calling you “woman” is just not nice—but you know that the bark is worse than the bite. I’ll bet you even rolled your eyes. You are the Mom, after all. And the rest is history. Jesus turns the water to wine, and this really was the perfect first miracle. It really was. It couldn’t have happened at a better, more joyous time (during a wedding party)—and the central message it telegraphs, essentially, is that the power of God (or whatever Mystery that that word “God” stands for) is everlasting abundance. Everlasting abundance that people can tap into even in the midst of moments of scarcity and loss. Even after the worst has happened. Even after all that, the best wine can still come. Don’t give up hope. Don’t give in to despair. Mary, this is a great message, and you are the one who nudged Jesus into making it. You helped get him unstuck. You were part of a great mentoring moment.

That’s got to be one of the reasons for why people can’t get enough of you. It’s about your awesome responsibility as a parent, and the great job you did, perfect or not. There’s also this: the way other people have experienced your parenting and protection, long after your physical death (or, as the Catholics would have it, long after your bodily ascension into Heaven). Here’s what I mean. I was reading the other day about the history of a country named Portugal and its political struggles, particularly in the early 1900s. The country’s monarchy had been ousted and replaced by an almost totalitarian regime, and this regime was determined to eradicate the country’s Catholicism. Religion, it thought, was pure superstition, and destructive, and wrong. Tolerance towards religion is just part of the problem, and only makes things worse. So this regime closed the churches down, and it confiscated their property. It banned religious holidays, as well as the teaching of religion in schools and colleges. Its actions were so aggressive that even people in rural areas—people who are usually unaffected by the quicksilver fads of urban sophisticates—took notice and went underground with their spirituality. Things got very, very bad. This is when you came in. The story goes that, in 1917, you appeared in a vision to three children from the rural village of Fatima. You encouraged them to stay hopeful in their religious faith, to pray for sinners, to keep on saying the Rosary. You appeared any number of times, and it is said that in your final appearance, on October 13, 1917, the crowd was far more than three children—something like 70,000 people, including newspaper reporters and photographers. Eyewitnesses said that it rained heavily that day, but at one point, the clouds broke and the sun took center stage, at which point it spun like a disk, radiated flames of scarlet, yellow, and purple, and then plunged towards the earth in a zigzag pattern, finally returning to its normal place, and leaving the people’s once wet clothing completely dry.

That’s the story. And whatever the reality happens to be, at least one thing is clear: religion in the hearts of the people is irrepressible, and it’s going to break through the walls put around it, every time. Whatever political or intellectual regimes do or plan to do, you, Mary, are not going to allow them to carry the day. You are a defender. People hunger for your presence, and you show up. And not just in Fatima, but all over the world, over the course of centuries. That’s what the record shows. I’ll grant that all we might be talking about here is some kind of communal hallucination—many explanations presuming nothing supernatural have been put forward—but what’s definitely real as real can be is that you are in people’s hearts and minds. You are there. And when the threat to religion or to life is great, they draw on you for strength, they take comfort from you, their imaginations soar with and through you.

Dear Mary, again and again, people go to you for strength. Some people might say that you were docile, and compliant, and weak, but I don’t believe it. You were strong enough to parent Jesus and give him good guidance and mentoring, and you’ve been strong enough in the hearts and minds of Christians through the ages to appear to them as a protector in times of tribulation. That’s what I call strong.

Yet there is one more thing that comes to mind when I consider people’s fascination for you, and it has to do with a different kind of strength. The strength it takes to step into the unknown. The strength it takes to be vulnerable and let go. The strength it takes to step back from broken dreams, and let them die, and still know that you are OK. Mary, you understand all about this. Blessed among women, you were condemned to witness your son’s execution on the cross. That’s what I call a broken dream. You know all about broken dreams. You know all about what it takes to step back from a dream, and let go.

This is the real reason for why I am writing this letter to you today. Perhaps the influence of my Catholic grandmother is stronger than I knew, and really, this letter is a prayer. For, you see, I’m praying for the strength to move into the second half of my life, and to let go of all my sadness and regrets. I know it’s not as dramatic as the death of your son on the cross, and yet there it is. I’m firmly into mid-life now, and with this has come a strange pressure building and building in my life, one that is pushing me to perform what I guess is itself a kind of miracle. Forgiving the fact that my body is changing and is not like it used to be; forgiving the fact that I was not able to accomplish everything I wanted to; forgiving the fact that all the brilliant, beautiful Christmases of my childhood will never come back again; forgiving the fact that precious people have died out of my life, and I will never be able to share with them who I am as an adult. This miracle of forgiveness. Water into wine. I need to perform it. I need to. It’s so I can make peace with my regrets. It’s so I can draw from my past in a healthy way. It’s so I can truly appreciate all the wonderful things I have right now: my family, my friends, my job, my health, my future. It’s so I can move forward, and keep on moving forward. It’s so I can believe that the best wine of my life will indeed come last, never fear.

Mary, I need a nudge from you, just like you once gave your son. I need you to light a fire under me, I need you to help me know that there’s no perfect moment for forgiveness, that there is no better time than now. Mary, in this Christmas season, I am praying to you for strength, for myself and also for so many others who are where I am right now, in one way or another. Whatever the age. Whatever the situation. Experiencing life changes. Facing the unknown. Feeling vulnerable. Strengthen all of us. Nudge all of us. Light that fire. And if we should snap back at you like your son did, and say, “Woman, what concern is that to you?” I know you’ll understand that the bark is worse than the bite. Just roll your eyes. You are the Mom. You’ve been there, done that. You know. Just show us the way to the most amazing kind of strength there is: to be hurt and yet come back; to be broken and yet to be whole; to endure ruined dreams and yet still dream; to give up so much, and yet, in the end, find more than you ever used to have. Water into wine. The best wine saved till last.

Mary, I thank you for your life, and I bless your name. Be with all of us this Christmas time.

I am yours, sincerely,

Anthony

A favorite reading this time of year for many Unitarian Universalists comes from religious educator Sophia Fahs, who wrote, “For so the children come, and so they have been coming. Always in the same way they come, born of the seed of man and woman. No angels herald their beginnings. No prophets predict their future courses. No wisemen see a star to show where to find the babe that will save humankind. Yet each night a child is born is a holy night. Fathers and mothers—sitting beside their children’s cribs feel glory in the sight of a new life beginning. […] Each night a child is born is a holy night—a time for singing, a time for wondering, a time for worshipping.” This is what Sophia Fahs says, and in this way, she reminds us about our Unitarian Universalist First Principle: That all people have inherent worth and dignity. Birth—any birth—is a revealer of this mystery, and no angels are needed, no prophets, no stars. Our worth and dignity is INHERENT, and with every birth, the point is made again and again.

This morning, I would have us consider how this is also true about death. How it is a revealer of the mystery of inherent worth and dignity as much as birth. Death, like birth, is an integral part of what it means to be human, and it is from our simple humanity that our inherent worth and dignity flows. Not just from part of our humanity, but from all of it. The entire paradox of our being, which is a being-towards-death. “For everything there is a season, and time for every matter under heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die.” One time takes nine months and involves a lot of hard pushing coming into the world; and the other time involves its own kind of hard work, much pain and vulnerability in the leaving. Both times tell a story about the drama of life and its basic value, which nothing can take away.

All people have inherent worth and dignity. Affirming this fully requires us to make our peace with death, allowing us, in turn, to discover how it is that even this fearsome part of our existence can be a teacher, and lead us into dimensions of meaning that cannot be fathomed in any other time of life.

But first we have to make our peace with it. That has to come first.

And how do we do that, when death in our culture is taboo? Sociologist Goeffrey Gorer says that the subject of death has become as unmentionable today as sex was in Victorian times. “Death is the last and greatest taboo,” adds psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, and this is evident above all in the clear discomfort people have when they find themselves in the presence of one who is terminally ill, or near death. Culture spends plenty of time telling us all about how to defy death, and presents multiple options for life extension. Culture whispers in our ear, “Age is a treatable condition,” and it agrees wholeheartedly with writer W. Somerset Maugham when he says, “Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. My advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.” That’s our culture. It tells us all about how to handle ourselves during this occasion and that occasion; but as for the occasion of death, our culture is no help. Death is taboo. So we don’t know what to say. We don’t know what to do. The note to someone who is dying never gets written, the call never gets made, the visit is repeatedly put off. Or we do write the note, we do make the call, we do take the time to visit, but we end up isolating them even further, and intensifying their pain. They want to share their sadness, or their fear, but the anxiety is too much for us, and we shut them down, saying, “Oh, you’ll be fine. Don’t talk that way. Think positive. Try harder.” They want to know that they are still the person they always were to us—that in essentials, we still love them—but we may fidget in their presence, talk to others in the room like they are not there, stand or sit a little too far away. They want a taste of normalcy in the midst of all the craziness—talk about the weather, talk about politics, talk about neighborhood gossip—but we don’t follow their lead and decide instead to force a heavy existential conversation about life, the universe, and everything. They simply want to be seen in all their wholeness and fullness, but we act as if the only valid thing about them is their dying, we trap them with our concern, we oppress them with our compassion. We just don’t know our manners—because for our culture, the source of manners, death is taboo.

We just don’t know any better. Death has become for us, today, unknown territory. “Most of us,” says health journalist Virginia Morris, “reach our thirties and forties without ever having seen a death or helped someone through a terminal illness. We may not have even heard about anyone’s death in great detail—the gradual decline, the fear, the treatments, the pain, or the intimacy that can occur in the final stage of life.” That’s what she says, and it is no help whatsoever to see actors pretending to die on TV, or in the movies—whether perishing in some violent way, or dying yet still looking beautiful and in control. This is not real death. Death is messy. How do you make your peace with something you aren’t even directly familiar with? Death has disappeared, for the most part, into hospitals, nursing homes, and other similar institutions, in sharp contrast to only a short hundred years ago, when death usually happened at home, under the care of family, friends, neighbors, and often some spiritual guide, such as a minister or priest. People knew death back then, but now, not so much.

All of this only intensifies our natural fear of death. Fear grows in darkness. Fear feeds on ignorance. It becomes seemingly impossible to talk about. But this is exactly what we need to do, and sooner rather than later. Says Virginia Morris, “Hanging on the edge of a precipice, engulfed by terror, is not the time or place to learn about emergency rock-climbing procedures; you have to learn them before you start the expedition. Likewise, we have to learn something about death now, while we are still healthy. […] No one said it would be easy. But by bringing death out into the open, by witnessing it, talking about it, learning about it, and trying in whatever way we can to accept it as an inevitable part of our lives, we can be better prepared, we can make better decisions when the time comes…” That’s what Virginia Morris says, and it is in connection with the issue of end-of-life decisions that the need to face our fears sooner rather than later is particularly crucial. During end-of-life care, doctors take their cues from their patients. If we have not worked through our fears, we will freeze up at the bedside of one we love; and while they might have asked that we spare them from any aggressive intervention procedures, when we are there at the bedside, full of our fears, overwhelmed by practical issues and considerations we had never once tried to think about before, we can find ourselves making decisions that will cause us regret later. In our pain we may hear ourselves saying to the doctor, “I don’t want to hear anything bad. I want you to fix her.” In our pain and confusion, for which we are so unprepared, we don’t know when enough is enough, we don’t know when to let go.

This is horrible. There has got to be a better way.

Which brings us to our reading from earlier, about the man voluntarily sitting down on his own grave. Doing this NOT with an attitude of morbidity but with one of honest affirmation, and as a result finding his life here and now deepened and enriched. It is a marvelous demonstration of living into our Unitarian Universalist First Principle, which, given everything I have said so far, is clearly a countercultural principle, calling us to reject culture’s taboo on death, calling us to go against the grain, calling us to refuse holding death at arm’s length, calling us to proactively prepare for the inevitable.

It begins by turning on the light.  If fear grows in darkness, turn on the light. To this end, I highly recommend reading Virginia Morris’ book, entitled Talking About Death. It was inspired by her experience of her father’s death, just three months after giving birth to her own son. At one point she says, “When I was pregnant, I studied, practiced, and tried to imagine labor and delivery. I talked about it with friends, heard about their experiences, and got untold amounts of advice. But when my father had a life-threatening illness, I did nothing of the sort. I didn’t look things up or ask questions. My family didn’t even acknowledge—not in any meaningful way—that my father was going to die until he was almost gone.” This is what Virginia Morris says, and in great part, it’s the ironic contrast between her thorough preparation for her son’s birth and complete lack of preparation for her dad’s death that spurred her on to writing the book. When both rites of passage are equally momentous—both a part of what it means to be human—why should practicing for one be considered prudent while practicing for the other be shameful? Among other things, the book explores the up-close reality of dying, as well as suggestions for enabling a truly good death. It talks about how advance directives (as in a living will and a power of attorney for health care) are absolutely important but not sufficient in themselves to address all the complex and emotionally wrenching choices that arise when a life is in the balance. It even looks at the issue of manners I touched on earlier, how to be a truly comforting presence to one who is dying, as well as to his or her family. It’s about turning on the light. “The thought of death will always fill us with dread … but the fear is less paralyzing, less blinding, when we have knowledge…”

Turn on the light. Do this, and then next of all, talk. Talk about death with your loved ones. Talk about it when you are healthy, so that the subject won’t be so hard to broach when you are sick. Talk about it so as to clear away any vagueness and confusion about your end-of-life wishes, or the wishes of another. This is what Virginia Morris did with her mom, after her dad died. She says, “My mother always said that she wants to be ‘unplugged’ when she’s ‘at that point,’ and she has even said that she would like to be ‘done in’ if she is ever ‘like that.’ But the two of us never ventured much beyond these comments, and [I realized soon enough that I needed to clarify things.] So the two of us talked, and talked, and talked, and we discovered a number of things along the way. First of all, I realized that my mom, like many people, is not afraid of respirators and feeding tubes as much as she is afraid of being a burden. She does not want her children, or anyone else for that matter, to have to care for her. […] That was what she was thinking about when she said, ‘Do me in.’ [But] then I asked her about Dad’s death. Did she view that as a burden? Did she see his care as a drain? Would it have been easier if he had taken a vial of pills, which he had actually stored away for just such an occasion? No, she said, of course not. We talked about what caring for him had meant for us, what was hard about it and what was rewarding, and if there were any aspects of it we wished we hadn’t had to do, which there weren’t. We agreed that his care had not been a chore for us, but an honor and a privilege, a gift that has stayed with us.” That’s the conversation between Virginia Morris and her mom, and I have quoted it at length because it demonstrates how a willingness to talk and talk and talk can make all the difference. Without it, Virginia Morris would never have known that the real problem for her mom was not so much certain medical procedures as it was the fear of being a burden, and as for her mom: she might never have connected the dots in her mind, might never have realized that her children caring for her would be just as important for them as was caring for their dad. A gift. A time of giving and forgiving and letting go. We need these realizations as well, with the people we love. We need these kinds of conversations too.

Turn on the light, talk it out, and then do this: open your heart to your own death. Invite the thought of death in. It will surely bring sadness. Absolutely. The thought of all the loss, the thought of leaving; how this will impact the people depending on us, how the party will go on without us. Inviting the thought of death will bring sadness, and it will also trigger fear: fear of losing control, fear of the unknown, the fear of the caterpillar who cannot possibly know ahead of time the great changes in store for him, and what comes next. Sadness, fear, depression—and yet, our will to live nevertheless remains. We foresee the end, and the end gives meaning to all that comes before. It is as philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once wrote: “Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.” To the degree we allow ourselves to live with the thought of death, to sit on our very own grave and see ourselves from that perspective, our understanding and appreciation of what we have and of the life that is before us grows.

“I have done this many times now,” says Virginia Morris. “I imagine how I might respond if I were told that I had a terminal illness. I think about how I would react if I were caring for my husband, refusing further treatment for my mother, saying goodbye to a friend. I think how I might feel, whether I could act, and what I might regret. I walk through the process, and as I do, I sob pitifully into my pillow. Then I lie still, exhausted but not sleepy, staring out the skylight above my bed at the darkness beyond. I roll onto my side and see the bright red numbers on my clock. Then I creep quietly down the hallway, going first into one room and then another, so that I can gaze upon my sleeping children. I stroke their soft hair, listen to their gentle breathing, pull up the covers, kiss their cheeks, and draw in their sweet scents. Then I go back to bed, oddly fulfilled. Cold from the trek, I snuggle close to my husband, feel his warmth, love him enormously, and fall asleep.” That’s what she says. The end gives meaning to all that comes before. Meaning throughout the lifespan, from first to last. Even in the face of death, people’s worth and dignity remains, is inherent, IS.

Making peace with death. Turning on the light, talking things out, opening our hearts, and then this, finally: trust. Affirming our inherent worth and dignity by trusting the rhythm and flow of the life we are given, woven seamlessly into the larger life of the natural world. The natural world holding us in its embrace, and we love ourselves even as we love it. We see nature as a revelation of the sacred, and we see it in ourselves. “I am not ready to die,” says Unitarian Universalist poet May Sarton,

But I am learning to trust death
As I have trusted life.
I am moving
Toward a new freedom
Born of detachment,
And a sweeter grace—
Learning to let go.

I am not ready to die,
But as I approach sixty
I turn my face toward the sea.
I shall go where tides replace time,
Where my world will open up to a far horizon
Over the floating, never-still flux and change.
I shall go with the changes,
I shall look far out over golden grasses
And blue waters….

There are no farewells.

Praise God for His mercies,
For His austere demands,
For His light
And for His darkness.

Dear Expert in the Law: I’m writing this letter today because, recently, I had the opportunity to look again at one of the most famous parables in the Christian scriptures—the Parable of the Good Samaritan—and this time, it struck me with particular force that the center of the entire story is really you. Your thirst for eternal life. Your anxiety to justify yourself as having already “earned” it. What Jesus said to you, and how you might have actually heard it. Then his concluding invitation: “Go and do likewise.” Your learning and your growth are the real story here, and as I reflect on it, I see so much that relates to my here-and-now world. Your story speaks to mine, as well as to the story of the congregation I serve in Atlanta, Georgia, though we are separated by thousands of years and thousands of miles. Thus, this letter.

I’ll start by acknowledging how your fellow Jews needed you. Devout Jews needed “experts in the law” because there are 613 commands that come out of the foundational texts of your religion, the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Five books, collectively called the Torah, conveying 613 laws which devout Jews are to practice so as to bring God into every aspect of daily life and to maintain right relationship with Him. Rules about talking, eating, walking, bathing, dressing, buying and selling, honoring one’s parents, no lying, no stealing, and on and on. A lot of rules, yes, but devout Jews saw themselves as privileged to have this kind of structure in their lives, one which gave them a rock-solid spiritual identity and kept their minds constantly on God. And yet, because of all the rules, no wonder people needed an expert. At the very least, just to remember them all. And then there were times when circumstances seemed impossibly complicated—circumstances in which multiple rules seemed to apply but also seemed to conflict with each other, and so people found themselves wondering how to balance the differing obligations in tension. Sometimes it wasn’t just an internal struggle but one between people, people who differed—sometimes violently—on what they saw as fair. In all such moments, they needed you: an expert in the Law.

Not that we do not require experts in the law today. Plenty of devout Jews these days who aspire to infuse their lives with God rules. And then there’s everyone else, us, whose lives in one way or another are, at one and the same time, both organized and complexified by rules of some sort or another. My congregation, for example. Its legal existence articulated through ByLaws. Its purpose defined through a mission statement, together with a statement of ends describing all the basic ways in which we want to bring positive change to people’s lives. Then what are called Executive Limitations, which basically hold us accountable to our highest hopes, and call us to stay within proper limits in our work together. Then its Covenant of Healthy Relationships, together with all the other guidelines, procedures, principles, precedents, and on and on, which help us get on the same page, and which we sometimes fight over. Some will think that there are way too many rules. Yet it sounds like a lot only because we are a large community, and the larger a community gets, the more explicit it needs to be about rules. Smaller communities, families even, have just as many rules, but many of them are tacit, unspoken, taken for granted, and usually you realize them consciously only when you blunder into them—and suffer the consequences. Not a helpful thing in a community as large as the one I serve.

But you know all about this. You are an expert of the Law. And it was as an expert that, one day, you decided to test the upstart rabbi that your neighbors must have been gossiping about. This teacher, saying shocking things. This Jesus of Nazareth. “Teacher,” you said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” As you well know, he gave this question right back to you, and I’m struck by your answer, which Jesus himself liked very much. Basically you said “love to God and love to people.” “Love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself.” I’m struck by this answer, for two reasons.

Reason #1: How the emphasis is on doing right things, not believing right things. Too many people today think that believing “10 impossible things before breakfast” is the pathway to eternal life, the hallmark of authentic religious faith, and I refuse to lose that word—“faith”—to such a poor definition. I refuse to put my mind (with all its questions and curiosity) in one box, and my faith (which sustains my heart and gets me up every morning) in another box. For me, faith is all about action. Or, rather, it’s all about acting in trust that my effort to connect with the Spirit of Life—to create, to worship, to study, to meditate, to appreciate, to forgive, to serve—that any and all such acts will lead to something positive, no matter how frail or flawed the effort seems to me. Acting in trust that my effort to love another person, no matter how small, will somehow make a difference. Faith is all about action, and keeps us acting, keeps us from getting paralyzed by our fears. What is eternal life, anyhow, if not a quality of life right here and right now? Eternal life as a richness in each moment, as a timelessness of meaning, a sense of poise and courage in the face of adversity, a sense of triumphant abundance, a sense of release from all that knots up our spirits. Brings to mind a story by a classic 20th century writer named Dr. Suess. How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Wish you could see it—in particular the part where the Grinch realizes that Christmas doesn’t come from a store—means perhaps a lot more. The moment when his heart grows three sizes, the true meaning of Christmas comes through, he finds the strength of ten Grinches plus two. That’s it. That’s how the eternal breaks into life. That’s how we inherit it.

But now let’s turn to the second reason for why I like your answer to the question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Short and sweet: it implies something very positive about humanity and its place in nature. Take the part about “love your neighbor as yourself.”  I’m reading this book with my congregation right now—called The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt—and in the third chapter, the author talks about how large, relatively peaceful animal societies become possible. Amidst all the variety in the animal kingdom, we see it only among humans, termites, naked mole rats, and hymenoptera (which is a name designating one of the larger orders of insects, including ants, bees, and wasps). Talk about strange company! Nevertheless, it’s only here where we find individuals living in large cooperative societies—individuals reaping the benefits of an extensive division of labor. In the case of termites, naked mole rats, ants, bees, and wasps, the explanation is found in a mechanism known as “kin altruism,” a reproduction system in which a single queen produces all the children, and everyone is literally brother and sister to each other, and “love your neighbor as yourself” happens quite naturally. All are part of one big family; all share a common parent.

Of course, human reproduction is NOT a matter of a single queen producing all the children. For us, the way to “love your neighbor as yourself” isn’t through kin altruism. Rather, it’s through existence of a deep instinct for what scientists call “reciprocity.” As in, “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” An instinct that explains why it is, when someone does something nice, you reflexively want to return the favor even though you might not know them from Adam. Why it is, when people are sent Christmas cards from complete strangers, a great majority will go ahead and send a Christmas card in return anyway. It’s true! Reciprocity is hardwired in us. Part of our nature as human beings. And I think that that is cool. I know—“you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” is not actually on the same level as the Golden Rule, but it puts us on a path that takes us to it eventually. The instinct for reciprocity is a start in the right direction, and everything needs a start. Above all, the start is nothing supernatural. Nature puts us on the path of ethics and spirituality. It means, ultimately, that even our highest aspirations for heaven are rooted in earth. The earth is truly and fully HOME.

But it’s not all peaches and cream. Nature gives us predilections for hell as well. “Natural selection, like politics,” says Jonathan Haidt, “works by the principle of survival of the fittest, and several researchers have argued that human beings evolved to play the game of life in a Machiavellian way.” Part of this has to do with something we see in your story, where, right after you answer your own question about how to inherit eternal life, you ask Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” You do that because you have overestimated your own virtue. You already think that you’ve earned eternal life, and that there’s nothing else lacking. In effect, you are daring Jesus to prove otherwise.

The tendency to see ourselves as in a “rose colored mirror.” I do it too. We all do. There is evolutionary survival value to this, very definitely; “evidence shows that people who hold pervasive positive illusions about themselves, their abilities, and their future prospects are mentally healthier, happier, and better liked than people who lack such illusions.” True enough. But there’s a downside as well. Jonathan Haidt puts it this way: “Such biases can make people feel that they deserve more than they do, thereby setting the stage for endless disputes with other people who feel equally over-entitled.” In other words, disputes over who is doing more of their fair share of the work, as in spouses estimating the percentage of housework each does, and estimates totaling up to more than 120%. Disputes like this. Disputes over who is more wrong, more to blame. Disputes over who understands and applies the rules more fairly. Our biological-based penchant for overestimating our own virtue gets us in trouble, time after time, and in effect blocks the reciprocity instinct within us. We stop listening to the other person and imagine their action to stem from, if not malice, then no reason at all, nothing that would make what they did at least understandable. We stop listening, and we get resentful, we get enraged. Because others are not doing unto me as I deserve, well then, the worse for them! They better watch out! So much for “love your neighbor as yourself.” So much for eternal life.

The rose colored mirror gets us into trouble. It causes people to spin their case in their own favor, furiously, protesting innocence all the way. Russian author Leo Tolstoy said it like this: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” Dear Expert in the Law, this is what you were doing—trying to put the spin on Jesus, and he knew it. He saw exactly what you were trying to do. And this was the launching point for his famous Good Samaritan parable. This is what was in back of his mind when he said those words, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead with no clothes. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.….” Did it shock you to hear that this is what the priest and Levite did? Especially when they, if anyone, should know that the way to eternal life is love to God and love to people?

It probably didn’t shock you. You are an Expert in the Law, after all, so you understand why they felt justified in staying away. One of the 613 commands of the Torah says that people should stay away from corpses, which are considered spiritually unclean. In the case of the priest, if he had come over to help the man, and the man turned out to be dead, he would have contaminated himself and would no longer be allowed to officiate religious rites at the Temple. Not permanently—but he would have had to go through a lengthy, arduous period of decontamination to get back to ritual cleanliness. Thus his reason for staying away.

But for Jesus, the reason was not good enough. It was just something that the Priest and Levite used as a basis for spinning the case furiously in their favor. They looked into the rose colored mirror, they thought only about how they are commanded to preserve their religious purity, and in the end, this blinkered form of idealism made it OK for them to commit what was, in truth, a horrible sin. Being in a position to help someone in dire need, and not doing it. Not loving a fellow human being and, in this way, not loving God. One of the Hebrew prophets, Amos, puts this in perspective when he speaks for God and says, “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. […] But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” That’s what Amos says. Where established law and genuine human need are in conflict, choose compassion, as far as possible. That’s what you do.

The rose colored mirror. It makes it so easy for people to appear, to themselves, far more virtuous and innocent than they really are, and to spin their case in their own favor, protesting innocence all the way. Jesus challenged you, and he challenges all of us, to take a long hard look at ourselves. “Why,” he asks, “do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” Why indeed.

But Jesus is not done. He’s got more to teach you. Later on in the parable, Jesus describes how a Samaritan helps the man by the side of the road and so behaves in a way that leads to eternal life. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus says to you. How infuriating. For this is what you know: Samaritans are the historical enemies of the Jews. All your life, you were taught that their faith is wrong. That their society is wrong. The very thought of them makes you burn. For you, the mere phrase “good Samaritan” is an impossible combination of words. On your own, you would never put those two words together in a sentence. But Jesus did. Jesus was telling you that someone you viciously and virulently hated—someone you didn’t even see as fully human—was worthy of eternal life, and not you. At least not yet. How difficult it must have been to hear this. How outraged you must have been.

Dear Expert in the Law, I applaud your courage in addressing Jesus. I’d be scared to death to test him. In his time, Jesus always took people to challenging places, and he never pulled his punches. He still does that today, when people read his words, and they are open to them.

In the end, this is what I think he was trying to get at. Samaritans are beaten up in their own way, by the society that surrounds them and vilifies them. And so, just as the Samaritan in the parable helped the man by the side of the road, would you be open to seeing the Samaritans around you with new eyes? Jesus was suggesting that, to “go and do likewise,” you didn’t have to wait for a circumstance identical to the parable but that you could start immediately, right that moment. Bring to mind a social group you have grown up to distrust, or hate. At the very least, bring to mind a person you are angry at, whom you feel is treating you wrongly, unfairly. As you do this, notice how your heart hardens. Notice how you immediately start to spin the case in your own favor, imagining yourself all right and the other all wrong. Above all, own up to it. Acknowledge the rose colored mirror. Acknowledge the log in your own eye. Then do your best. Try to walk a mile in their shoes. Try to understand. If the way to eternal life is anywhere, it is here.

I want to close this letter with a story, which captures some of the essence of what I’ve been talking about. I hope you find it interesting. It comes from a contemporary spiritual teacher named Ram Dass, and it describes his effort to deal with a kind of Samaritan of his own time.

Once there was a spiritual man named Ram Dass, and he lived in a turbulent time called … the Reagan era. He looked around, and he could find nothing that he liked. But his aggravation happened to settle on a particular target: Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s Secretary of Defense. When Ram Dass thought about it, he realized that, in truth, Caspar was no worse than many others. But there was just something about him that got under his skin. So this is what he did. He got a picture of Caspar and put it on his home altar, together with pictures of spiritual heroes like the Buddha, Christ, Ramana Maharshi, and Hanuman. He included Casper right along with the rest. Each morning, when he’d light his incense and honor his heroes, he’d greet each with tenderness, and he’d feel waves of deep love and appreciation towards them. But then he’d come to Caspar’s picture, and his heart would constrict, he’d hear coldness in his voice when he’d say, “Good morning, Caspar.” Each morning he’d see what a long way he still had to go. But this is what he thought to himself. He thought, “Wasn’t Caspar just another face of God? Couldn’t I oppose his actions and still keep my heart open to him? Wouldn’t it be harder for him to become free from the role he was obviously trapped in if I, with my mind, just kept reinforcing the traps by identifying him with his acts? Do what you do to another person, but never put them out of your heart. It’s a tall order. But what else is there?”

And there it is, dear Expert of the Law. How shall we inherit eternal life? It’s all in the doing. What else is there?

I am yours, sincerely,

Anthony

The holiday season is now fully upon us, and with it comes time spent with family. Seeing the relatives. Some combination of grandparents and parents, uncles and aunts, cousins, brothers, sisters, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, nephews, nieces, children, grandchildren, great grandchildren. Traveling over there to see them, or them traveling over here.

Consider some quotes about family:

“The family: that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to” (Dodie Smith).

“The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together” (Erma Bombeck).

Those are the quotes, and let’s pause for a moment to notice some of the central images: family as “that dear octopus”; family as “a strange little band of characters trudging through life; family “trying to figure out the common thread binding us together.” All such images speak directly to our topic this morning: navigating religious disagreements with our relatives, especially those involving our born-again fundamentalist relatives. How difficult this can be. The stories abound:

An aunt whose born-again niece and nephew specifically pray for the welfare of her soul during the dinnertime grace while she is visiting-although the aunt’s soul feels just fine….

A brother who, out of the blue, asks, “Are you an evolutionist?” and then goes on a huge diatribe about how evolution is not good science but superstition….

A mother who insists on the entire family attending her fundamentalist church’s Christmas Eve service, even though her son and daughter-in-law clearly squirm at what her church teaches….

Any of these remind you of your own stories? It’s the “strange little band of characters trudging through life, trying to figure out the common thread binding us together.” It’s “the dear octopus.”

Let’s take a look at the varieties of religious disagreements in families, and then explore options for dealing with them effectively.

Starting with this insight: that religious disagreements are sometimes not on-the-level; they mask something deeper. The argument may sound like it is all and only about religion: whether or not the Christian scriptures are the literal word of God; whether or not there is such a thing as eternal hell; whether or not all religions possess some truth. That’s what the argument sounds like, and we can get so focused on that, we miss out on the deeper factors that, in truth, energize and intensify what’s going on: historical factors, social factors, interpersonal factors, psychological factors, and so on. Invisibly fueling the fire-so if we ignore them, solutions at the surface level can only be temporary. The spite will never end. Religion is a multi-layered venture; as we experience religious conflict in our families, we need to be listening for the deeper layers as well.

One of these layers we have already heard about, in our reading from earlier. The author, Unitarian Universalist Doug Muder, talked about the anxiety towards social change that underlies the Religious Right’s loyalty to “absolute values,” or the non-negotiable system of roles and obligations they aspire to live within. When we religious liberals call this a valid spiritual choice, just one among others, we relativize what is for them absolute. They feel disrespected and misunderstood. We remind them exactly of what they are fighting against. “Religious conservatives are not being busybodies,” says Doug Muder, “when they worry about moral breakdown: Fundamentalists worry about moral breakdown because they see their own lives, families, and communities breaking down.” That’s what Doug Muder says, and he follows up with a quote from a study of conservative Christian families which says, “Whether the issue is divorce, materialism, sexual promiscuity, racism, physical abuse in marriage, or neglect of a biblical worldview, the polling data point to widespread, blatant disobedience of clear biblical moral demands on the part of people who allegedly are evangelical, born-again Christians. The statistics are devastating.”

This is one of the deeper layers that we need to listen for, beneath the surface arguments. Basic compassion requires it. Anxiety about what the world is coming to; fear and confusion about how it is that traditional families are fraying apart. As for a second deeper layer to listen for: it’s something more basic. I’m talking about communication skills. Or, rather, the lack of them. Consider, for example, the bad habit of focusing on intentions and ignoring the impact of words. As when a well-meaning relative insists, “I’m not disrespecting you; I’m trying to save your soul. Can’t you see that?” The words have explicitly religious content, but the real problem is the underlying communication pattern, which we see occurring in non-religious contexts all the time. As in, “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings; I was only trying to say that you’ve gained twenty pounds and your favorite dress no longer fits.” The assumption is that because the intentions were all innocent and good, you should not feel hurt. In fact, now that the intentions have been clarified, all your hurt feelings should instantly disappear. But this is ridiculous. People have a right to feel their feelings, whether one’s religion or one’s body image has just been insulted. You just can’t focus on intentions and dismiss the impact of one’s words. You just can’t have one without the other. HOW one says something is just as important as WHAT one says.

Beneath the surface disagreements: layers and layers. Anxiety about social change, poor communication skills; and also this: family dynamics. For example, the sibling rivalry that simmers beneath the relationship between two sisters, which gives their religious disagreement particular intensity since one of the sisters has “fallen away” from the family faith while the other has stayed with it. On the surface, the argument sounds like it’s about religion between two mature adults; but at a deeper level the sisters are just like pre-teens competing for attention from Mom and Dad. A variant of this is the spouse of the sister who has stayed close to home, who champions his wife against his errant sister-in-law even as his wife pretends ignorance and says not a word.

It’s family dynamics. And there are so many varieties. The son who uses religion as a means of winning independence from his family; the more obnoxiously he asserts his differences and, as a result, calls the family wrath down upon himself, the more independent he feels. Or this pattern: parents trying to preserve family identity and continuity through time, which they see as inextricably connected to a particular denomination or system of beliefs; and this is what inspires their unceasing and seemingly endless efforts to convert you back into the fold. Or this: the aunt who follows the beat of a different spiritual drummer and takes severe heat from everyone else-but it’s really not so much about her spiritual choices as it is the fact that the family needs a collective punching bag, and the person who stands out too much gets to be the scapegoat.

All is not necessarily as it seems. Appearance can hide reality. Arguments about religion can serve to express deeper tensions even as they conceal what’s really going on. For this reason, in the face of family disagreements, it can be so helpful to take a curiosity stance towards what is going on. Not to allow yourself to get caught up in all the sturm und drang, but to step back and wonder: what’s really going on here?

On the other hand, sometimes appearance IS reality. Religion IS what the arguments are about. Here’s at least two examples of this.

One has to do with what it means to have a public religious identity. To what degree is this a matter of sharing specific beliefs? Maybe this Thanksgiving you found yourself with a relative, talking about your Unitarian Universalism, and this is a person for whom being a Christian is all about accepting official church doctrines about God, salvation, Jesus, and so on. For them, without right beliefs, you can’t be a part of a church. This is what they know. So you go ahead and share your Unitarian Universalism, saying that there are no official church doctrines about any of those things. There ARE shared beliefs-for example, that there are many ways to religious truth and not just one, or that human nature has an inherent positivity and value to it-but these are all general, not specific. About specific things, Unitarian Universalism allows you to believe what reason, conscience, and intuition declare as truth. Beyond this, you talk about the spiritual practices and disciplines that unite Unitarian Universalists, such as communal worship; leadership and service; lifespan religious education; good stewardship of time, talent, and money; and commitment to healthy relationships. Disciplines like these. This is what you say: and your relative looks at you like you are a Martian. That’s not religion! Religion, for them, starts and ends with believing the right things.

This is a genuine disagreement, a genuine argument. In fact, it might lead you directly into a second disagreement, over what it takes to be religiously sincere. Sincerity, for religious conservatives, is tied to their absolute value paradigm. You are sincere only if you give up your right to choose your social roles, your obligations, your beliefs. You are sincere only if you submit. Thus their rejection of the religiously liberal way, as Doug Muder points out: “[Religious conservatives],” he says, “understand us to be advocating a superficial and nihilistic way of life. They think we want to choose our own moral codes so that we can pick easy ones that rationalize our every whim. They believe that we want the freedom to define our relationships so that we can walk away from anything that looks difficult.” That’s what Doug Muder says. The argument is about sincerity, and whereas we will object that the conservative has misunderstood us completely, they will reply that they understand us better than we understand ourselves. And it goes from there. Back and forth, objection and reply….

And there you have it. The variety of religious disagreements in families. Sometimes perfectly straightforward and on the level, and sometimes not. It’s all part and parcel of the family as “dear octopus,” the family as that “strange little band of characters trudging through life.” But now the question is, Where to go from here? How to stand up for ourselves even as we do our best to stay in healthy relationship with the other?

I think it begins with the basics. Don’t allow yourself to be treated like a doormat. You have the right to say no to anything when you feel you are not ready, it is unsafe, or it violates your values. You have the right to be treated with dignity and respect. You have the right to be in a non-abusive environment. You have all these rights, and more, and so to stand up for them, you set compassionate limits. You can be compassionate but firm as you say, “I care about you and I know you care about me. But do you remember my last visit, when, at dinnertime, your children openly prayed for the sake of my soul? That made me feel very uncomfortable and unwelcome. I know that the intentions were all good, but I still felt like my spirituality was being disrespected. Can we talk about this? What can we each do to make the next visit more satisfying for both of us?” This is setting compassionate limits. It’s a strategy that comes from Leonard Felder, Ph. D., author of the fantastic book When Difficult Relatives Happen to Good People, and he goes on to say, “Instead of your reacting like a frustrated child, I’ve found with hundreds of counseling clients that when you take charge and offer these ‘compassionate limits’ you will sound and feel like a competent manager and a worthwhile adult. You will be preventing the usual power-struggle with this negative relative and instead turning your conversation with this person into a creative brainstorming session that uncovers positive alternatives.” That’s what Dr. Felder says.

“I care about you, and you care about me. How our next time together be more satisfying for both of us?” Such directness, very often, can make all the difference. But what about that extra-grace-required relative whose communication skills are null and void? What if the dysfunctional family dynamics are seemingly set in stone? (This brings to mind the old Yiddish saying that goes, “If you’re waiting for your relatives to change … you should live so long.”) Again, Dr. Felder’s advice is solid: “Don’t set up an unrealistic expectation that the situation is going to be easy. Instead, set for yourself a realistic small goal that will allow you to feel successful. For example, if a ten minute phone call or a two hour visit is the most you can handle with a particularly unpleasant relative, don’t volunteer for a sixty minute phone call or a seven day visit that is bound to turn out badly. Or if your relative has a habit of giving you too much advice, set a new realistic goal for your interactions, such as: ‘I’ll listen to one piece of advice and say, ‘That’s interesting. I’ll consider it,’ without getting into a big debate or war this time.’ When it comes to difficult family members, it’s good enough to just keep your interactions brief and civil, while remembering to say to yourself, ‘I don’t need to change this person’s basic personality-I just need to stay healthy, calm and relaxed no matter what he or she does.’” That’s what Dr. Felder recommends.

There is, finally, a third strategy to keep in mind, and this one is especially relevant when the religious disagreement is more on-the-level and less rooted in subterranean factors and forces. It’s this: Figuring out the common thread that binds us all together. Perhaps you and your relative disagree vehemently on the nature of religious identity. For you, the word that sums up the religious life is “commitment;” for them, “commandment.” For you, freedom is at the core; for them, obedience. For you, religion is mostly about right behavior; for them, religion is mostly about right belief. All these differences; but in the midst of them, is there truly no common ground?

This is where it becomes critical for religious liberals like ourselves to articulate why freedom and choice are spiritually central to us, and not some cop out. After all, we don’t want to be guilty of bad communication habits ourselves, as in requiring our relatives to read our minds. We need to say who we are. Say, along with Doug Muder, that “We give our members the freedom to doubt and encourage them to question their beliefs not so they will see all beliefs as whimsical and contingent, but quite the opposite: We find that hard-tested and hard-won beliefs are more likely to withstand the challenges of modern life. A marriage whose every assumption and duty has been freely negotiated is not a house of straw, but rather a house whose every brick has been carefully laid. The freedom of liberal religion is an invitation to engage with the most significant issues of human life and society, not an excuse to fall into a shiftless and vacant hedonism.” In other words, what we share with our fundamentalist relatives is exactly this sense of the religious life as rigorous and not easy. We share with them “loyalties that go beyond self and the convenience of the moment. [We share with them a rejection of] the materialism of popular culture. [We both] seek something more substantial than the momentary satisfaction of desire or the endless striving after status” (Muder).

All these things represent common ground upon which to build, at the very least, a respectful agreement to disagree. In the end, your relative may never budge, and neither may you, but at least you will sense in each other an overriding seriousness about the quest for meaning and truth in life. And that can represent a start to dialogue that’s mutually civil. A very good start.

Our reading today is an excerpt from an article by Unitarian Universalist Doug Muder called “Who’s Afraid of Freedom and Tolerance?”

Like most religious liberals, we Unitarian Universalists imagine ourselves to be nice people. It is those in the Christian Right, we believe, who want to force their moral code on everyone else and use public resources to proselytize for their faith. We, on the other hand, believe in tolerance, free choice, and letting people be what they have to be. What’s so scary about that? If the rank-and-file of organizations like Focus on the Family or the Christian Coalition feel threatened by us, we think, it can only be because they have been duped by their unscrupulous leaders.

Not necessarily.

True, preachers of the Christian Right have said a lot of unfair things about liberals, both religious and political. But conservative Christian fears have not been created ex nihilo. As overstated as those fears may at times become, they have a basis, and we would do well to understand it.

Many books have been written recently about the Christian Right. One that does a particularly good job of getting inside the movement’s worldview, particularly that of its working-class members, is Spirit and Flesh: Life Inside a Fundamentalist Baptist Church by James M. Ault Jr…. Ault, like George Lakoff and several other authors, locates the heart of the Christian Right worldview in its overall vision of family life-not just in the positions it takes on a handful of specific “family values” issues like abortion or same-sex marriage.

[According to this overall vision of family life,] a child … is born into a network of mutual obligations and depends for its survival on the fulfillment of those obligations. As it grows, the child takes an ever more active role in upholding that network. At no point in the process is the individual in a position to stand outside the network and choose whether or not its obligations apply to him or her. The only choice the individual has is whether to fulfill his/her obligations or to renege on them. This is what fundamentalists mean when they say that moral values are “absolute” rather than “relative.”

We may think that we’re being tolerant when we grant that the Christian Right lifestyle is a valid choice. But merely by describing it as a choice, we move the discussion onto our turf. Ault explains: “Liberally minded people often do not realize . . . that rather than respecting fundamentalists’ views, they are denying them by insisting that religious beliefs or ethical standards be seen as personal, private [commitments] we must all tolerate in one another…. ”

In one sense, fundamentalists have every right to fear and resent religious liberals. […] Every person who defects from the regime of timeless roles and obligations makes life more difficult for those who try to keep it going. From their point of view, freedom is a kind of plague we carry….

But (as the Billy Joel song puts it) we didn’t start this fire. The medieval extended family-rooted in a particular place with inherited, inflexible roles-has been slowly coming apart since the advent of modern capitalism…. It is a trying time, and the anger of the Christian Right is understandable. “Whenever an old order dies,” writes the liberal Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, “anger is always loosed upon the whole society.”

Here ends the reading for today…

Story: The Table Where Rich People Sit
Author: Byrd Baylor

Sermon text not currently available

And then his adult children. Painfully aware of the early warning signals of their father’s need for help. Shocked that the great man who had always seemed supremely in control and competent is slipping. Losing their role as dependent children, which brings its own kind of pain and grief. Bringing their concerns to their father, and the concerns are not received well-received with denials that anything is the matter, received with a heavy dose of guilt meant to kill the conversation before it goes any further. Don’t go there. As if the children want to-especially as it dredges up old patterns and unhealed childhood wounds. A daughter banished. A son who could never say no. Resentment makes things harder than they already are.

It’s one story among many. Some, thankfully, are not nearly so painful. Others, unfortunately, are far worse. But the common ground is the role-reversal that takes place between adult children and their parents, as well as this: the need for mutual understanding: the children understanding what parents are going through in their later years, and parents understanding what’s going on with their children. If you are about to enter into this role reversal in your own life, whether you are the parent or the child, my hope is that this sermon will encourage you and support you in your process. And if this role reversal seems years away, still, it’s never too soon to be thinking about this. In both practical and profound aspects. Someone once said that we see the entire spectrum of the human condition within the four walls we call home, and it’s so true.

I’ll begin with this observation: that role-reversal is burdened by layers of complexity. Things are already complex, before any specific role-reversal takes place.

One of these layers of complexity has to do with economic trends in the modern West, which have troubled the status of the elderly in our society. Before the rise of the factory in the nineteenth century, the household used to be the center of economic production, in which the elderly were easily integrated, and were guaranteed the opportunity to make valuable contributions. But then the center of production shifted away from the household, often towards massive, bureaucratic organizations, and there, integration is not so easy. Couple this with compulsory retirement at sixty-five or earlier, and the result is a clear loss of social status, together with a loss of income. The retired must reinvent themselves, on their own terms; and reinvention is no automatic thing.

It’s a question of integration. Being seamlessly integrated in the flow of society. And it’s troubled in yet another way for the elderly. Economic conditions of the past two hundred years have morphed the rooted extended family into the mobile nuclear family. Today we take for it granted that you go where the job is. You leave the town you grew up in. You leave Mom and Dad behind, in order to build a career. To keep doing that, you may have to move again and again. But how do your parents fit into this picture? When families were rooted in one spot, everyone under the same roof, or near by-yeah, it might have been crowded, but relationships and care were daily, easy matters. Now, you drive in or fly in to see Mom and Dad during the holidays. That is, if the schedules of both working spouses agree. This is the picture I’m drawing: 21^st century families, mobile, frazzled, overwhelmed. How does regular relationship with and care for parents fit in?

This is the larger economic story that burdens any specific, personal story of role-reversal. Larger economic trends which have troubled the status of the elderly in our society, and which have also made things difficult for adult children to maintain relationships with their parents. Some call the pattern here that emerges “ageism”-a kind of systemic prejudice parallel to sexism and racism. The ageism of modern life. Our “throw away” culture in which we discard whatever is old and worship what is new. Ageism is real, and it is rampant. And while this in itself deserves its own sermon, here I will say only this: that we do not find ageism just in modern times. Negative images of the elderly abound throughout Western history. Physical decline portrayed as detestable, as compared to the beauty and freshness of youth. And accompanying the physical decline? Moral decline. Repulsive moral traits attributed to our seniors: “But, methinks, our souls, in old age, are subject to more troublesome maladies and imperfections than in youth.” The speaker is essayist Michel de Montaigne, writing in the sixteenth century. “Besides a foolish and feeble pride, an impertinent prating, forward and insociable humours, superstition, and a ridiculous desire of riches when we have lost the use of them, I find there more envy, injustice, and malice. Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face; and souls are never, or even rarely seen, that in growing old do not smell sour and musty.” That’s what Michel de Montaigne says. How unfair and hateful. Just a sampling of what’s out there. Symptom of the kind of fear that aging creates in people-and where fear abounds, so does projection. People projecting all sorts of stuff on the elderly, because of fear.

Which leads to one more factor that complicates and burdens the specific role-reversals we find or will find ourselves engaged in. The challenge of making our peace with aging and death. Being chased by our fears-or turning around and facing them head on. It’s the critical psychological and spiritual task of the second half of life. In middle age, coming into the realization that one is truly mortal-going through the harrowing journey of mid-life that can take a person through disillusionment,  a sense of general discontent and failure, efforts to recapture lost youth, loneliness, feelings of burn-out or breakdown, change in vocation and lifestyle, depression. All of this can be going on in the psyche of the adult whose parent is now in old age, the child who is in truth no longer a child.

As for the elderly parent-they are dealing with fear, too, but at a completely different level. For the adult child in mid-life, mortality has become real; but for the parent in old age, the sense of a truly limited lifetime pervades, is experienced directly and powerfully through the loss of old friends, through the loss of a spouse or partner, with declining physical stamina, with declining health, with feelings of inferiority and low self-worth. This is the harrowing journey of old age, and it echoes something that the writer of the Gospel of John in the Christian scriptures said: “I tell you most solemnly, when you were young you put on your own belt and walked where you liked but when you grow old you will stretch out your hands and someone else will put a belt around you and take you where you would rather not go.” It’s all substance to the spirituality of aging: a surrendering, a giving up, and beyond all possible imagining: a receiving. Drawing on unrecognized, as-yet unknown inner resources and strengths to accept the impossible, to do without the indispensable, to bear the intolerable. Creating meaning not through some of the lifespan, but through the whole of the lifespan. Living into our Unitarian Universalist First Principle, especially as it implies that there is an aspect of inherent worth and dignity to people that can’t be actualized and known until our final years-the best saved for last.

But the way there is hard. Both adult children in mid-life and aging parents feel taken to where they would rather not go. Both feel the belt pulling them forward. And the particular irony in all this is as follows: that adult children could be so helpful by surrounding their aging parents with strength and courage to take the journey that is theirs to take! Yet to face their aging parents is only to be painfully reminded of their own mid-life journey, and so their temptation is to withdraw, to stay away. As for aging parents-how helpful they could be, in modeling for their children how to face aging and death with courage and grace! How helpful, for them to lay out an explicit plan for their long-term care that is both physically and financially workable-parents who don’t expect their children to read their minds, who see what is coming and, out of compassion, refuse to put anyone in the position of having to make uninformed, ungrounded decisions. Ultimate acts of parenting-yet this requires facing up to the facts. Giving up denial. Burning through denial. It makes you so vulnerable. It’s so hard.

When my daughter learned that I was going to be preaching on this topic, she told me that she would come, ready to take notes. I laughed-and then I went, “oh.”

It’s so hard. Layers of complexity to the role-reversal. Layers and layers. The elderly not well integrated into modern life, because of economic developments. Social prejudice. Adult children and parents both engaged in the journey of making peace with aging and death, but in ways that, ironically, can block the other’s progress. All this and more burden any individual instance of role reversal. It’s all there in the background, when adult children begin to see early warning signs of a parent’s decline: like an increased demand for attention, too-frequent fender-benders, or increasing forgetfulness. For my Mom, it was lack of attention to clothes, lack of attention to personal hygiene. This, from a woman who, all her life, had been fanatical about details. The signals can come early and give adult children fair warning, or they can come suddenly, in crisis form, as when a perfectly healthy and independent parent suffers a debilitating stroke. Either way, the role-reversal begins.

And so now we turn to the question of choices. Choices to make, as the role-reversal begins.

One is simply this: the choice to be informed ahead of time, before a crisis forces action. Don’t wait. Don’t put yourself in that position. Here’s a wonderful book to take a look at: How Did I Become My Parent’s Parent, by Harriet Sarnoff Schiff. The subtitle reads: When your aging relative needs your help; how to act, what to say, when to intervene-while keeping your own life intact. The book lives up to this. It covers in detail all the other choices I am about to lift up, and many others.

The next choice: choose to plan ahead. As Harriet Schiff says, “The real problem is the complete lack of preparedness for their new situation which most aging parents have to face. They simply have not thought about the what-ifs. Many of them still feel so young in spirit that preparedness is something for others, not for them. Unfortunately our bodies and our spirit do not remain synchronized as the aging process goes inexorably forward.” That’s what she says. You know, there is this great story about the great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He and another judge used to take walks every afternoon. On one of these outings, a beautiful young woman crossed the street in front of them, and Justice Holmes, who was then ninety-two, stopped short and gazed after her in frank admiration, said to his friend, “Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be seventy again!” The fact is, many of us are or will be as full of spit and vinegar as Justice Holmes was. But this doesn’t take away the need to plan ahead, just in case. Again, ultimately it’s a matter of compassion. Making decisions about the care of one’s parents is fraught with difficulty. An adult child can for years wonder if they did the right thing, if there was something else that could have been done, or done better. And families have been known to split apart, when plans for taking care of Mom or Dad, coming from different children, compete.

Choose to be informed ahead of time, choose to plan ahead, and choose to talk about it. The father in our drama from earlier pretends that he has no earthly idea what his children are talking about, when they try to broach the delicate subject. How much better it would have been if the father helped that conversation along. Few conversations are as difficult. Harriet Schiff puts it this way: “How do you sit down with people who are dressed for golf or planning a trip and say, ‘Now, we’ve got to look down the road. You may not be tomorrow what you are physically today. Who wants to hear this? Who wants to say this?” And yet it must be heard. It must be said.

Conversation is key. Sometimes it’s a matter of children asking their parents what they want, so that interventions avoid being heavy-handed and aren’t more about the emotional needs of the children than the real needs of the parent. Have we even asked Mom what she wants? If she is still capable of maintaining her independence, wouldn’t allowing her that independence be the greatest gift of all? On the other hand, there are times when the conversation needs to take a “tough love” form, where an adult child is feeling overwhelmed by unrealistic demands and a sense of entitlement to unlimited access by the aging parent. Here, a careful negotiation needs to take place. The adult child affirming his or her love for the parent but, at the same time, helping them understand the pressures they face in their own life, all the tasks and responsibilities they are already juggling, and laying down some sustainable ground rules.

So many choices. Choosing to be informed, choosing to plan ahead, choosing to talk about things, and so much more. Adult children choosing to recognize and explore their grief in losing their role as dependent child, which is an incredible grief to endure and comes with a sense of sheer unreality. Adult children also choosing to work through old hurts and resentments. As in the drama from earlier: A daughter banished. A son who could never say no. Resentment making things harder than they already are.

Choices. One