Sunday, November 15, 1998
Rev. Shirley B. Coll

"Exploring our Individuality"
Isaiah 12, 2 Thessalonians 3, 6-13; Luke 21, 5-19

A wise teacher of life once put a large mason jar on the table at the front of her classroom. Next to the jar she put some good size rocks and asked one of the students to fill the jar with the rocks. The student did. " Now ", said the teacher, " is the jar full?" Several said," yes", and then the teacher placed some pebbles on the table next to the jar - and again asked the student to fill it. The pebbles filled in nicely around the large rocks. "Is it full now?", the teacher asked.

Again it seemed full, until the teacher brought in a bowl of sand which she preceded to pour around the pebbles. " Now?", she asked. Again, the obvious answer seemed to be yes. The teacher then brought over a pitcher of water and poured it into the jar until it reached the top. "What can we learn from this", she asked. Several said it teaches us that we can fill our time with more than we think. No, said the teacher, you have missed the point of the lesson. It teaches us that only when we prioritize in life and put the most important and largest things in our life first, are we able to do all that we want to do and fill our lives with satisfaction.

Our three scriptures for this morning all refer to the "day of the Lord" that time in Hebrew thinking between the present age and the age to come. It was a time of waiting - a time of transition - and in that transition there was the expected pain of adjustment to something new.

Isaiah writes of the strength and joy that faith in God brings during times like this. If Isaiah had had a production of "The Music Man" going on in his community at the time of this writing, this passage would probably have been even more joyous. In Thessalonians, Paul writes to chastise the idle and to get them to work (it seems that there were those even in that day who seized the

waiting time to enjoy life - and Paul admonishes them.) The passage from Luke is about the suffering that is present in that period of waiting before the coming of the new age - it is not a pleasant passage to hear. When I was reading it this week I imagined that some of these images must have been very real to the people in Honduras and Nicaragua during the mud slides and havoc caused by hurricane Mitch lately. They must have felt close to the end of life, certainly life as they had known it. But even in the midst of our ordinary lives - here in this community - living through a transition is never an easy process. It is not easy when someone you love dies. We have all discovered that. It is not easy when you leave friends and move to a new place. It's not easy to be the one that is left. It is not easy to change jobs. It is not easy to find that you have an illness. It is not easy to age and find your energy leaving. None of these things represent a simple life change. They are all transitions filled with complex decisions and emotions and it is in making those decisions and dealing with those emotions that each of us continues to define who we are. And we are all different. That is one thing that becomes more certain in my mind the longer I live. The rocks, the pebbles, the sand and the water and our way of placing them in the jar are different for each one of us. I think they are also different for each of us at different times in our lives.

Retirement has a way of forcing a person to take stock of priorities and to consider choices. Those of you have reached this point in life know what I mean when I say that. We take stock at each stage of life, but in retirement as you look forward to the end phase, you are aware that this time it is not a dress rehearsal, it is the real thing. There is no way that you can turn the clock back. There are certain things that you will never be able to change. People handle retirement differently. So far (although I am fairly new at it) Paul would not be pleased with my choices. Until a few weeks ago, he would have said that I was like those Thessalonians - on the idle side.

And he would have been right - I have been primarily traveling, enjoying the company of my family and my friends, particularly my grandchildren, playing a lot of duplicate bridge and doing some volunteer work. More of the former than the latter. However, I have also been taking care of myself through lots of exercise, rest and healthy eating - not a poor choice in my mind at all stages of life - and I have been having fun - a very important priority in my life right now. I know that this very good phase will not last forever. Roy Oswald, the consultant that is working with the staff of late in speaking on the subject of ministry to seniors said that the retirement years can be broken down into three sections. He described those sections as October, November and December. October represents the people like me who have just retired. I'm in early October. October people are busy people - either active in social, political or religious causes or having fun and traveling. November people are those who have probably had to slow down a little - often they have moved to an apartment or someplace on one floor. And the December people are those in the last phase of life. Roy's purpose in using this analogy was to make the point that people can help each other make the transitions that take place between these three phases. And that is true, we can and do help each other in that way, but in spite of this, facing death - the ultimate stage - the end time - is something that looms before us in the retirement years.

As a society we do not deal with death well - and you would think that we would do it well, because all of us, regardless of our age, will die and are dying as I speak. We not only don't always deal well with death and dying, we often don't die well and we find it difficult to deal with dying people. We think of them as being in some special place that we can't enter. And we put them in that special place often because we can not face the fact that death is real. We are all different - as I stated earlier - our ways of death are different - and our ways of facing reality are different.

I can't think of the reality of life and death without thinking of my Uncle Hub who died in his early eighties some years back. He was my favorite uncle when I was growing up. He lived close by and he loved to play with children. We all loved him. He was a big, strong man and would bounce us around endlessly when we were young. Actually Hub, after finishing college, played line on George Halas' first Chicago Bears team - the first professional football team in history if I remember correctly. When Hub got sick in his eighties, I remember hearing my parents recount that this trip to the hospital was his first trip ever to such a place. I also think I remember them saying that he had never been to the doctors - but surely that couldn't have been correct. Hub was born and raised in Iowa - a man of few words - and fiercely independent. He didn't care much for doctors. On this last trip to the hospital, he was told that he was having kidney failure and that he had two options. He could have major surgery (which the doctor said held a high chance of being fatal) or he could go on dialysis twice a week for the rest of his life.. On hearing these two options, Hub asked what would happen if he went home. The doctor said that he would die within a week. Hub chose that option. You see, his wife, Margaret didn't drive. Taxicabs were not in his easy frame of reference. And he wasn't going to have her worrying about how to get him back and forth. He went home, with the support of everyone who knew and loved him. Everyone in the family, including his wife, wanted to support him in his choice.. His death was relatively painless and happened just as the doctor had predicted. Hub was a gentle giant, loving, man. His family meant all to him - this act was his way of expressing his love and his values. Our support was our way of expressing ours.

The next significant person in my life to die was my mother. Her death was very different from Hubs. My mother died of Alzheimer's disease in l994. She was eighty-eight when she died, but we had lost her in important ways several years earlier. She didn't have the choice that Hub had - hers was a long and extended illness. She was bedridden and did not know any of us for months preceding her death. It was painful to watch for all of us but particularly for my father who had always been sure that he would be the one to die first. Because of the extended nature of her illness, hospice was active in her care for the last 6 months of her life. They were a godsend to her and to all of us. The taught us how to be with her and they taught us how to let go. Her illness was particularly painful to all of us because we were all aware of how much she would have hated it. My mother was a very bright, vibrant, loving woman who lived life well. Both my parents were teaching us about living wills and advanced directives long before they were popular. Both were very clear about quality of life issues but all of that didn't help us with mother and there was a lot of pain in that. The only choices we had revolved around choices of care - not the kind of choices we really wanted. Times of transition before the Day of the Lord can be very difficult. The fact is that we have little control over what it is that each of us will face or what our loved ones will face.

What saves us? Our scripture from Luke says that by our endurance we will be saved.

Endurance is the ability to withstand adversity, hardship or stress. And maybe some of that is helpful - but it almost sounds like an end product rather than something we can work on now so that we are able to face our own death more realistically and more in keeping with our individual styles. Let me suggest three things that in my experience I have found helpful.

l. Make all the choices you can. It is a gift to yourself and those you love to be very clear about the extent of medical treatment that you want in the event that you are not able to make clear choices when seriously ill. No matter what your age, every adult needs to face that and to leave the appropriate papers for those who will be in charge. Important medical decisions were easy for us when mother was ill because we had her wishes on all the right forms. It saved her from an even more extended life without quality. It took away any guilt we might have had because she was the one making the decisions. It was an act of love from her to us, but then I would expect that from her. She was very special to all of us for a reason.

2. Learn all you can about how to grieve and give yourself all the opportunities you can to increase the chance that it will happen. Grieving is a process, not a product. It is a process that weaves in and out of the days of our lives beginning with the first loss we ever experience and building from there. Each new grief replaces in part an old grief and also builds on the ungrieved part of former losses. It never fully ends until life ends. It is very individual. There is no one right way to grieve and no grieving process will be the same for any of us. The process contains, among other things, both anger and tears. Much of it is unconscious and because of that it remains unprocessed. And interestingly enough, final acceptance is the same no matter whether the grieving process takes days, months, weeks or years, and when final acceptance comes, we learn that there was nothing we could have done to prevent death after all.

In writing about mourning those we love, Judith Viorst in "Necessary Losses" recounts the loss of Rabbi Harold Kushner (whom many of you know from his book "When Bad Things Happen to Good People"). The rabbi was told when his firstborn son Aaron was three that the boy had a rare disease which produced rapid aging, that his child would be hairless, stunted in growth, look like a little old man - and die in his teens. In writing about this loss, Kushner writes,

(and I think it is a passage that is easy for all of us to relate to as members of a faith community - regardless of the role we play in the community) - he writes, "I am a more sensitive person, a more effective pastor, a more sympathetic counselor because of Aaron' life and death than I would have been without it. And I would give up all of those gains in a second if I could have my son back. If I could choose, I would forego all the spiritual growth and depth which has come my way because of our experiences, and be what I was fifteen years ago, an average rabbi, an indifferent counselor, helping some people and unable to help others, and the father of a bright, happy boy. But I cannot choose."

Judith Viorst writes, "So perhaps the only choice we have is to choose what to do with our dead: To die when they die. To live crippled. Or to forge, out of pain and memory, new adaptations. Through mourning we let the dead go and take them in. Through mourning we come to accept the difficult changes that loss must bring - and then we begin to come to the end of mourning".

And that brings us, last of all, to number three. We need, when the times comes, (whether we are talking about death or about the smaller losses that come as we go through life or whether we are talking about the stages of retirement that lead ultimately towards death) - we need to accept and let go. Let go of the life that we knew and loved - let go of the familiar and allow ourselves to move into the next unknown phase. The reality of death is the end side of the picture frame that enables us to make the right life choices for ourselves. Another way of saying it is that living with the reality of death (and not avoiding that reality) has to be one of the largest rocks in our jar if we are to find fulfillment. Nothing helps as much as the reality of death to see life as it really is. God did and does provide that reality for us. And also loves and accepts each of us in our steps along the way - allowing us the freedom to grow, each making our own individual choices. This may be where the endurance comes in. For the writer of Luke says, By your endurance, you will be saved. Saved perhaps for peace and fulfillment. Saved by the power of faith. When that happens we will be able to sing with Isaiah,

(1) Necessary Losses by Judith Viorst, pg. 264

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