Sermon Notes Jan. 31-Ps. 71

On aging:Ps. 71 January 31

A long time ago, I started using the Psalms quite seriously as a way to organize my prayer life. At the same time, I started reading the bible differently as I did a weekly study at a local nursing home. this psalm jumped out at me as one of the few examples of something in Scripture clearly written by someone who had grown old. Aging is threatening, but it is in the order of things. As the Irish will wish, may you be old enough to comb grey hair.I love the sheer psychological realism of the Psalms. We do lack energy as we age.

When is the time right. Sometimes we have bucket lists in our old age as we failed to act when younger.As we age we see what we call blessing fade away into memory and distnace..Erikson spoke of age as a time where we fight despair with integrity.Trust-The second stage of life, which begins in early childhood with learning control over one's own body, builds the sense of will on the one hand, or shame and doubt on the other. In old age, one's experience is almost a mirror image of what it was earlier as the body deteriorates and one needs to learn to accept it. Identity issues surface in both youth and age.

Two lessons for old age from that stage of life are empathy and resilience,''The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others,'' Mrs. Erikson said. ''You don't have to accept what people do, but understand what leads them to do it. The stance this leads to is to forgive even though you still oppose.''

The child's playfulness becomes, too, a sense of humor about life. ''I can't imagine a wise old person who can't laugh.” In old age, as one's physical and sensory abilities wane, a lifelong sense of effectiveness is a critical resource. Reflections in old age - foster humility. Thus, humility in old age is a realistic appreciation of one's limits and competencies.

At the last stage of life, this takes the form of coming to terms with love expressed and unexpressed during one's entire life; the understanding of the complexity of relationships is a facet of wisdom.''You have to live intimacy out over many years, with all the complications of a long-range relationship, really to understand it,'' commitment- passion when you're young-tenderness when you grow old. You also learn in late life not to hold, to give without hanging on; to love freely, in the sense of wanting nothing in return.''. Generativity expresses itself, as Mrs. Erikson put it, in ''taking care to pass on to the next generation what you've contributed to life.''-As an attribute of wisdom in old age, generativity has two faces. One is ''caritas,'' a Latin word for charity, which the Eriksons take in the broad sense of caring for others. The other is ''agape,'' a Greek word for love, which they define as a kind of empathy.

The final phase of life, in which integrity battles despair, culminates in a full wisdom to the degree each earlier phase of life has had a positive everything has gone well, one achieves a sense of integrity, a sense of completeness, of personal wholeness that is strong enough to offset the downward psychological pull of the inevitable physical disintegration..''

The Eriksons contend that wisdom has little to do with formal learning. ''What is real wisdom?''  ''It comes from life experience, well digested. It's not what comes from reading great books. When it comes to understanding life, experiential learning is the only worthwhile kind;