Jeffery Paine
Jeffery Paine has written for most major national publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, New Republic, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Wall St. Journal, Nation, and U.S. News & World Report. His books include Adventures with the Buddha, The Poetry of Our World, Father India, and Re-enchantment, which was named by Publishers Weekly a best book of the year in 2004. He was the literary editor of the Wilson Quarterly and has been judge of the Pulitzer Prize and vice president of the National Book Critics Circle. He appears regularly on C-Span, NPR, and other radio and TV programs.
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 Three Sages / Three Paths 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 AWAKENINGWhen 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. |