Reflection #88 (4th August 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)
This morning’s service is the second of a two-part exploration of ‘Growing Up’. Fear not – if you weren’t here last week for the service of congregational reflections – each of the services does stand alone. We’ve been considering what it means to ‘grow up’ – what it looks and feels like as a lived experience – and how our perspective on that might change over the course of our lives. The choice of topic was in part inspired by this book titled ‘When I Grow Up: Conversations with Adults in Search of Adulthood’ by Moya Sarner.
But the two quotes I’ve put on the front of our order of service today illustrate the angle we’re going to explore in this week’s instalment: firstly the famous line from St Paul (and we’ll hear the expanded version of this later in the service): ‘When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’ And secondly a response to this line from C.S. Lewis: ‘When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.’ So we’ll be considering what it could mean to ‘put away childish things’ and the paradoxical feelings we might have about this aspiration…
I wanted to include that poem from Brian Bilston this morning (‘Spare Me, Please, from Growing Up’) because, to me, it speaks of that ambivalence that many of us seem to feel – whatever our age – about the prospect of ‘growing up’. It echoes the tension between those two quotes I shared at the start of the service – St Paul lifting up this image of spiritual maturity as ‘putting away childish things’ – and C.S. Lewis’ splendid response that when he became a man he ‘put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.’ There’s something paradoxical going on here. There is something important about ‘putting away childish things’ – but we need to unpack that a bit, I reckon – and there might be some childish things we would do well not to put away entirely…
As Moya Sarner said, in the piece Hannah read for us earlier, a lot of the traditional markers of ‘growing up’, those external life events that can be recorded by the Office for National Statistics, are increasingly out of reach, or pushed back to later in life, for the younger generations (and indeed the currently middle-aged, as I can attest). The economic and social realities of life under late-capitalism mean that it’s much harder to tick off those markers of homeowning, marriage, kids. Or perhaps it’s that more of us have broken free of those default expectations, that conveyor belt of adult life, and no longer feel it’s desirable to follow that traditional script? Maybe it’s a bit of both.
In some cultures the transition from childhood to adulthood is more formally acknowledged. There is a time, typically in the teenage years, when some kind of ritual takes place to collectively affirm this significant milestone. I was interested to read this take from the psychoanalyst James Hollis who writes: ‘each civilization evolved rites of passage designed to ensure the transition from the naïveté and dependency of childhood to adult sensibilities that sacrifice comfort and sloth in service to the common interest. When we examine contemporary culture, we find these rites of passage missing. Aging alone does not do it …. Sooner or later, we are each called to face what we fear, respond to our summons to show up, and overcome the vast lethargic powers within us. This is what is asked of us, to show up as the person we really are, as best we can manage, under circumstances over which we may have no control. This showing up as best we can is growing up. That is all that life really asks of us: to show up as best we can.’ Words from James Hollis.
But as we heard from Moya Sarner in the reading that Hannah gave earlier on: Growing up is not really a one-time thing – as powerful as such ritual moments and rites of passage might be (and they are very important in crystallising a shift in consciousness for both the child at the centre of the ritual and the community around them) – we don’t just switch from child to adult overnight. We each experience many ‘grow-ups’ through the course of our life – it never ends really – and that process of ‘growing up’ involves a number of internal shifts. I’m just going to highlight a few dimensions in which these shifts take place, those which seem particularly significant to me: around practical wisdom, responsibility, complexity, and acceptance of some of life’s limits.
First up, practical wisdom – this goes by many different names – it was singled out as the greatest of the cardinal virtues by no less than Saint Thomas Aquinas and in that context it can be defined as ‘the ability to discern the appropriate course of action to be taken in a given situation at the appropriate time, with consideration of potential consequences’. In other words: knowhow. It’s something that we accumulate over time, with a bit of luck, once we’ve been around the block a bit. But actually – it takes more than luck – in order to learn, to develop good judgement, to know and do better next time around, we need to pay attention, be reflective, integrate our experiences. When Moya Sarner rings her mum to ask what to do about a bin full of maggots – she’s calling on her practical wisdom – she knows that her mum will have already ‘been there and got the T-shirt’.
Another dimension of growing up is taking on responsibility. The bits of adulthood that Brian Bilston described as ‘duty, sense and all that stuff’. This one is quite prominent in my mind lately. Most of you know that I never left home – I’ve lived with my dad my whole life and he died just a couple of months ago – and he always dealt with most of the household affairs. So, at the age of 49, I’ve just started getting to grips with Council Tax and water meters and contents insurance for the first time. More generally though, I think of this as the aspect of growing up that’s all about realising that ‘somebody else isn’t going to sort this out’ and ‘it’s up to me now’. Also, I suppose, it’s about taking on board that our actions (or inaction) have consequences for ourselves and those around us, and we need to be reflective and aware about our likely impact on others (for good or ill). This is about much more than domestic arrangements – it’s about being a citizen – being engaged in our community – realising that there is not some separate class of people who run the world and get things done. If we want to create a better world – if we want good things to exist – we need to roll up our sleeves and get stuck in. When I was just 25 or 26, and I’d only been at this church for a year, there was a big kerfuffle (I’ll spare you the historic details of church politics) which meant we had nobody to stand as chair of the congregation. And I remember thinking ‘I love this church, and I want it to thrive, and if I don’t step up who will?’ It seemed quite preposterous that I should take on such a responsible role at such a young age. But I did it, even though I felt out of my depth, and that was a big step in my own growing-up.
Another dimension of growing up – one that seems increasingly important to me – is around acknowledging the complexity of life (particularly of living on a planet alongside over 8 billion other humans). So many issues that we have to deal with are not straightforward – instead of seeing things in black and white, we become aware of all those murky shades of grey in-between – we realise that there are often multiple valid ways of looking at a situation and it can be hard to arbitrate between them. Truths can be paradoxical. And the practical business of organising society and running the world – it’s just very complex – there are so many competing goods and valid interests to be balanced. It seems to me that the troubling wave of populism that we’re currently seeing around the world is, in part, rooted in an inability to face this great complexity and grapple with it honestly. Populist appeals to ‘common sense’ pretend that the answers are simple (but their so-called answers often revolve around flat-out denial of reality, misinformation, dehumanising, scapegoating and blame). You could also think of this aspect of ‘adulting’ as having the courage to face the fact that we live in an imperfect world – that there is a ‘tragic gap’, in the words of Parker J. Palmer – or as the philosopher Susan Neiman puts it: ‘courage is required to live with the rift that will run through our lives, however good they may be: ideals of reason tell us how the world should be; experience tells us that it rarely is. Growing up requires confronting the gap between the two – without giving up on either one.’
One final aspect of growing up I want to mention is around the acceptance of life’s limits. Psychologist Klaus Rothermund is quoted in Sarner’s book, saying ‘It’s different when you’re young, when you can still try out everything. You can do things just because you want to do them, because you can do the important things later. But when you’re old, doing the unimportant things first means you might never face the important things.’ And Sarmer reflects further: ‘This honing process, this sieving and sifting of what matters most – this is a key grow-up of old-old-age – although perhaps it has roots much earlier in life. It rests on another grow-up: understanding the fact that your life will come to an end.’
Through the book ‘When I Grow Up’, Moya Sarner interviews people throughout life’s ages and stages, getting older as she gets towards the end, and in the final chapter she interviews a 90-year-old woman who goes by the nickname of Pog. Pog says: ‘I truly do not consider that I have grown up. And I’m 90. But one thing that really pleases me, to the extent of being a bit smug about it, is the really childish pleasures. You know, where you sort of clap your hands and say, “Oh! Look at that!” And somehow I’ve still got that, and I love it. It can be completely trivial things.’
Pog’s excellent example brings us back to the paradox: one of the childish things we probably need to put away is this fixation on being entirely grown-up. Yes, it is important to grow up. To keep growing up throughout our lives. To develop in practical wisdom, to embrace responsibility, to wrestle with complexity, to accept life’s limits, and all the other aspects of growing up that we haven’t even mentioned today. But as C.S Lewis hinted: there is something to be said for retaining a bit of childishness too. Being free-spirited, idealistic, maybe even unrealistic, dreaming big, in touch with simple joys. We don’t have to put away these ‘childish things’. Sarmer endorses this view, she says: ‘whatever life stage you find yourself in, the question of being more or less grown up, of being able to continue growing up or stalling somewhere along the road, has something important to do with how we relate to the younger versions of ourselves that we hold inside us – the concentric circles in our tree trunk. Whether we can hold on to them, find a way to live with them and look after them, to keep them alive in us, so that they can keep us alive.’
And I want to close with one last excerpt from the conclusion of Moya Sarner’s book.
She says: ‘I started writing this book because I wanted to know what it meant to be an adult and to find out why I wasn’t one yet… Now that I can hear that I was asking the wrong question – or rather, that question has changed. Now the question has become not why haven’t I finished growing up, but how can I keep growing up, throughout my life? I wanted to find a definition of what an adult is, what it means to grow up. Now I understand that this definition will be different for every individual, and it will change from moment to moment for each of us, depending on the grow-up we are facing. I do now know, through this writing, through my analysis, through my patients, through speaking to so many fascinating people, that the work of growing up never stops – not if you’re lucky. Not until the very end.’ Amen.
Reflection by Jane Blackall
An audio recording of this sermon is available: