About the Fellowship
Aging is not what it used to be. Religion is not what it used to be. People are different, both physically and psychologically, from what they were even a generation ago. How, then, should we choose to age?
An aging rabbi (we shall meet him momentarily) was dismayed when he could no longer be the workaholic he'd always been - accomplishing, accomplishing. Search as he would, he could find no models to light the way for him in his post-sixtieth birthday bewilderment. The rabbi formulated the issue: We have been granted an extended lifetime, but we don't have an extended consciousness to make use of it.
The rabbi conjectured: Suppose religion could forge a new kind of awareness that could put to good use our extended lifespan? That would certainly be a new job description for religion. The three "sages" we shall meet here are pioneering just such new approaches to later life. They each consider aging at least as important for the soul as youth or middle age. They make "growing old" not a problem to be solved but an unlikely adventure - and an adventure that, even when far from easy, one would not want to miss.
ELDERS AWAKENING
When Reb Zalman retired from teaching at Temple University in 1987, he worried that retirement would retire him - from purpose, from life itself. I can't look forward, he thought, for that's where death waits. I can't look back, or my past mistakes will haunt me. And that doesn't leave much present, where things are now breaking down anyway.
Reb Zalman undertook a 40-day retreat to gain insight about what to do.
Emerging from the retreat, he wrote From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Profound New Vision of Growing Older. If you do nothing else, the book says, try to do three things: (1) In the "October" of life (your mid-60s, say), heal your relation to your own past, to things left unresolved. For example, you could hold a (probably imaginary) banquet to honor your enemies, for their harms made you more aware. (2) In "November" (your 70s), you can better help ameliorate the society around you. He would like an Elder Corps established and sent to the world's troubled spots, to connect with their counterpart elders there. (3) Finally, in the "December" of your life, do the inner work to ensure a good completion. Sloughing off both fear and regret, you may heal "life" itself.
From Age-ing to Sage-ing is a manual for creating elders - people like Huston Smith and Thay, who can think differently - positively - about aging and, at the very moment others give up, begin anew.
When Smith's eldest daughter died at age 50 from cancer, followed a few years later by the murder of his granddaughter Serena, the apple of his eye, Smith retreated into a darkened room. Alone in that room, however, he grieved more for others than for himself. He emerged from the experience with an even greater openness and responsiveness to world religions and spirituality. When an interviewer asked him, "Have your tragedies shaken your faith in God?" Smith thought it the silliest question he'd ever been asked.
The issues that Huston Smith came to terms with in his darkened room, Thich Nhat Hanh faced in a Japanese psychiatric hospital. After the Saigon government shut down his relief organization during the Vietnam War, Thay spiraled downward into depression and was sent to Japan for electroshock therapy. Instead of undergoing the treatment, however, he tried meditation and mindfulness and, gradually, consciousness of his depression grew into a stronger consciousness of everything around him.
Some years later, acclaimed spiritual writer Thomas Merton said that simply watching the way Thay opened a door gave one an idea of what enlightenment is.
Look at these three men today: Two years ago, when Huston Smith turned 86, he told me that he had two more books in him to write. Today, those two books are written, and he still has two more books to write. Reb Zalman is now launching the Rishi Project, through which people can approach and work on social problems from the spiritual level. When he was in his late 70s, Thich Nhat Hanh began the study of neuroscience in order to better understand the workings of consciousness. Were the world to end tomorrow, the final view of these octogenarians would not be one of their looking back; rather, it would be of their indicating, unresting and unbowed, the way forward.
Their message to those who fall discouraged upon passing a certain birthday might be simply this: Take heart. It can be otherwise. In fact, it probably already is.
AGING AS A SPIRITUAL EXERCISE
With his hearing problem, Huston Smith can no longer converse and concentrate on driving at the same time. When he picked me up at the Berkeley subway station, he suggested that we "maintain the Buddha's noble silence" for the drive to his house - a mere religious allusion, yet it turned a handicap into something playful. Osteoporosis has bent his body into the shape of a question mark, but in extricating himself from the car, he said, "It's workable." Religion for him is neither a set of dogma nor a code of morality; rather, it's what makes aging and other difficulties workable. For him, it adds onto random events the sense of a holistic whole. When ill, he does not think that his body has betrayed him (as many sick people do) but that the body is doing just what it is supposed to. When the Buddha was young, he witnessed two sights - an old man and a sick man - that gave him the determination to find a way to relieve human suffering. Now that Huston Smith is old and sick, he can attest that spirituality can break the equation of age + illness = suffering.
At Reb Zalman's Spiritual Eldering workshops, participants explore where their images of aging originated. And when those images are negative, they replace them. They imagine, for example, what an ideal and enjoyable day would be now, one in which they are confident and productive. They recite Reb Zalman's "Elder Creed":
"An elder is a person who is still growing, still a learner, still with potential. . . .
An elder is still in pursuit of happiness, joy, and pleasure, and her or his birthright to these remains intact. . . ."
Novelist Rick Moody coined the term successful aging, where "successful" measures how much people can still do - work, play tennis, and so on. Less tied to physical criteria is the idea of positive aging, which emphasizes a person's satisfaction and fulfillment. Reb Zalman goes beyond successful and positive to evoke spiritual aging, in which individuals experience a liberating sense of belonging to something vaster than themselves.
A journalist recently asked Thich Nhat Hanh, "What do you hope still to accomplish before you die?" Thay was tempted to answer, But I'm not going to die. His sense of himself derives from himself as part of nature, from clarity of consciousness, from working for peace and justice, from being itself - things with no clear expiration date. At age 81, Thay is distributing everything inside himself - his knowledge, his equanimity, his aspirations for the world - through teaching and writing and peace work, so that by the end, there should be little left over.
Old age, Thay says, is one thing; the mind that experiences it is something else. As a Buddhist monk, he repeats a daily recitation: "I will grow old; there is no way to avoid it. I will become sick; there is no way to avoid it. I will die; there is no way to avoid it." But the consciousness that voices these dark truths is neither dark nor old nor sick. Consider the metaphor of the wave and the water, he says. An individual wave begins and ends, but at the same time it is water without beginning or end. Thay is aware of the "waves" - the conditions of old age, of his own forgetfulness and deterioration - but he is also "water," in tune with aspects within himself that do not age and, amid change, do not change.
OUR GREATEST OPPORTUNITY
Reb Zalman was asked, "What is our greatest challenge at this time in history? Overpopulation, or environmental destruction, or nuclear catastrophe, or ethnic conflict, or economic inequality?" All would be plausible answers. But Zalman pointed instead - purely as an example - to the United States Senate, which has no shortage of old men but precious few elders (let alone women of any age) who see beyond momentary partisan gain. And not only is this so in politics, he observes, but it also is the norm in businesses and even in universities that often replace senior staff with less costly junior faculty. Zalman's lament: All is instant production, instant consumption.
In a world cannibalizing itself, Zalman places his hope on older people, who should be less consumed by ambition and acquisition and who should possess a larger view beyond the calculus of self-serving advantage.
Writes Zalman:
"The elderly population [once] condemned to the junkheap . . . will play a crucial role in humanity's leap to the next evolutionary level. Why? In earlier ages, when people barely reached age 40 or 50, they didn't have enough time to ripen. . . ."
Now, when the average lifespan is nearly 80, we do have time. If Gandhi (who lived to 79) had died at age 39, as Martin Luther King, Jr., did, he would be forgotten today. Gandhi continued to bloom - as do Thay and Huston Smith and Zalman - at an age when their forefathers were in decay. With longevity having increased over the past century by two-fifths, today's population of seniors has (at least theoretically) two-fifths more experience to call upon.
Put that surplus of understanding to use, Zalman proposes, and it may help counterbalance the destructive forces on the planet. More than counterbalance, it may add a luminosity to human existence that previously was not known.
Jeffery Paine is the author of many books, including Adventures with the Buddha. See more here.
HUSTON SMITH
The path of continuity.
Regardless of how old you are, do not alter behavior that has stood you in good stead.
America's most popular Christian teacher, Huston Smith created the first TV programs about then-mysterious Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism on NET (the precursor to PBS) nearly 50 years ago. He adapted the series into his book The World's Religions, which today is approaching its three-millionth mark in sales. More than a textbook, The World's Religions indirectly records Huston's personal journey - a journey without precedent, for Huston practiced each religion he studied and through each, he discovered something new about himself. Now, at the age of 89, he may be practically deaf and his body frail as a leaf, but his zest for life remains undiminished. When in college, a former roommate recalls, Huston would wake up the same way every day: sit bolt upright in bed, stretch out his arms, and yell "Yes!" That "yes" now includes what old age brings.
RABBI ZALMAN SCHACHTER-SHALOMI
The path of change.
Do new things (and old things) in bold new ways, untried before.
Reb Zalman, founder of the Spiritual Eldering Institute, learned early on to turn misfortune into advantage, when as a teenager he fled Nazi-occupied Vienna and found refuge among the Hassidic Jews of New York. Orthodox Judaism provided meaning in a chaotic world, but gradually he felt it shut out too much of contemporary life. He inaugurated the Jewish Renewal movement to preserve the old sanctity of Judaism while discarding its obsolete forms. Having remodeled Judaism, he next attempted to do the same for aging, to convert it into the ennobling experience of an elder. He can make growing older seem more exciting than sex, a roller-coaster ride through mysteries unknown. Undeterred by ill health, Reb Zalman recently flew to Australia and New Zealand to meet with Aboriginal and Maori elders, to see if their wisdom can enrich us in our supposed sophistication.
THICH NHAT HANH
The path of the magician's rabbit.
What you think old age to be may turn out to be an illusion, with hardly any substance at all.
Thay (as he is usually called - it means teacher in Vietnamese) is the father of "Engaged Buddhism." During the Vietnam War, this quiet monk organized students to rebuild villages and set up schools and medical facilities. Exiled for this work, he then altered the course of American history when he persuaded Martin Luther King, Jr., to oppose the war. (King subsequently nominated Thay for the Nobel Peace Prize.) Thich Nhat Hanh's activities today are hardly typical of an 81-year-old - authoring yet another book (he's published more than 100 titles), nonstop traveling, teaching around the world, speaking before Congress, holding reconciliation meetings between Israelis and Palestinians. The recurring theme of his life, whether he was young or old, has been that the spiritual and the social can work together - and must - if enduring change is to occur.
WHY NO WOMEN AMONG THE THREE?
EDS' NOTE: When this manuscript came in, we asked Jeffery Paine to add a woman, and he replied:
"If the article were about spirituality and middle age today, perhaps most of the exemplars would be women. But there was no woman Buddhist of Thich Nhat Hanh's generation of his stature or who sheds the light he does. Ditto among older Jewish teachers, no woman has done for the treatment of aging what Zalman has done (though half the most exciting younger rabbis active now are women) . . . But for this article, well, the three figures were not chosen at random: not only no woman, no other man could be substituted. . . ."