Sermon for 2 October 2005, 1st Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois

THE STAGES OF LIFE
Ronald J. Glossop

I. Introduction
A. Nothing is more obvious than the fact that living things, including human beings, grow and change. A 25-year-old adult is very different from a 5-year-old child, and a 70-year-old is quite different from a 25-year-old (even if some of us would rather not acknowledge that).
B. The fact of change is even more evident when we compare a helpless new-born baby to an adult performing some complicated task such as flying a helicopter.
C. At the same time, the changes occur gradually, so it is not easy to pinpoint the exact time when a baby becomes a child or when a child becomes an adult .
D. Nevertheless there are particular characteristics that we readily associate with these various stages we pass through. There is a real difference between being a baby and being a child or being a child and being an adult.
E. The factors bringing about these changes from one stage of life to the next are both biological within the developing human being and cultural, that is, within the environment. Our physical bodies change, and at the same time there are changes in what is expected of us.
F. These stages of human life are often figuratively compared with the parts of the day (morning when we awake, midday and afternoon when we are most active, evening when we wind down, and night when it is time to go to sleep) or with the seasons of the year (spring when life breaks out, summer when life reaches full bloom, autumn when life matures and begins to wane, and winter when life comes to an end).
F. Another issue which I want to explore a bit this morning is whether changes parallel to those that take place in individual human beings also take place in humanity collectively.

II. What are the distinct stages that we should identify in the life of an individual human being? Hinduism has focused on this issue more than any other religion. Religions generally are interested in the question, "How should we live?," but it is Hinduism which says that the answer to that question depends not only on what kind of person you are but also on which stage in life you are in. The goals of adults are not the same as those of children.
A. For Hindus, starting at the point where you are old enough that you could even begin to consider this issue, the first stage of life is that of the student, which begins about the age of 8-12. It lasts about ten years. During this period one's chief responsibility is not only to learn as much as possible from studying mathematics, physical science, social science, history, philosophy, and literature but also to develop good habits of thinking and behavior. The aim of the student is to be completely ready to move on to the next stage of life.
B. In the second stage, typically beginning with marriage, one's aim is to be a productive and dependable adult.
1. The three areas one should focus on are one's family, one's job or occupation, and one's community. It is during this period that one should be satisfying one's desires for pleasure, for success in one's work, and for adequately discharging one's duty to the larger society.
2. Hinduism is well aware that many people find it difficult to move to something beyond this mature-adult stage, especially when modern medicine has made it possible to extend "middle age" beyond what it used to be. Whether one wants to go on to the third and fourth stages depends on whether one can find values beyond those of pleasure, success, and duty which are the ones embodied in this second stage.

C. The third stage of life for Hinduism is retirement from the time-consuming activities necessary to fulfull the goals of the second stage. At this new stage one can engage in self-discovery and contemplation of one's place in reality as well as the nature of that reality. Are we anything more than ephemeral soon-to-be-forgotten blips in the vast scheme of things? A hundred years or more from now, will our having existed make any difference to anyone?
D. The fourth stage of life for Hinduism is to become a sannyasin, that is, "one who neither hates or loves anything." The sannyasin is a person who no longer wants to be a "somebody," that is, a single prideful historical physical person who happens to display a particular passing combination of features at a particular time and place. The sannyasin wants to identify only with the eternal Self which persists beneath the particular "illusions" of an ever-changing physical reality.
E. This Hindu view of the fourth stage of life is likely to be appealing only if we accept the Hindu metaphysical view that there is a mental eternal Self or Soul which is the only real reality and that the physical universe is only an illusion, only a dream of God (to express it in terms more understandable to those reared in the Western tradition). At the same time one must remember that for Hindus Brahman-Atman or God-Soul is not something totally alien and separate from our own minds but rather that reality of which the non-particular aspect of our minds are part, like drops of water in an ocean of water.

III. Our thinking about the stages of life should not be confined to the Hindu viewpoint. Let me share with you some of my own thoughts on the six stages of life.
A. The first stage of life is being a baby, a stage of complete dependency on adults for food, shelter, and love. At this stage any questions of responsibility must apply to the parents or to the adults who are taking their place. The transition from being a baby to being a child is marked by being able to get food into one's mouth, being able to talk, learning the meaning of "yes" and "no," and being able to walk.
B. The second stage, childhood, can be viewed as extending from about 2 years of age all the way up to puberty. Primary features include becoming able to take care of oneself (feed oneself, dress oneself, move around by walking and then running), learning how to talk and sing and read and count, then learning about how the world works both from books and from experience, learning how to conduct oneself outside of the home and in the presence of a much wider group of other persons, and learning particular skills such as how to play various games, how to use devices in the environment (such as telephones, radios, televisions, and computers) and tools (such as eating utensils, knives, scissors, and crayons and pencils). During childhood the responsibility for learning these new things gradually shifts from the parents, teachers, and other adults to the children themselves.
C. One of the most important and most dramatic changes in the life of most persons comes with puberty, with the physical and mental changes brought about by the presence of sexual hormones. In this third stage, girls become young women, and boys become young men. Totally new feelings and physical features mean needing to deal with new kinds of problems not previously encountered. At this time we also gradually begin to become much more independent economically and intellectually. We begin to have our own money to spend as we want, and we begin to be able to think and decide for ourselves rather than just believing and doing what we have been told to believe or do by someone else. Another way of putting this is to say that at this point in our lives we begin to acquire more knowledge and more power. But these changes can bring about much anxiety because we don't yet have enough experience and information to know whether we can trust our own judgments. Furthermore those new sex hormones can influence our thinking and behavior much more than we realize, and the need to be approved by our peers can also have a stronger impact on behavior than we anticipate.

D. The transition from puberty to full maturity, the fourth stage, can also be very difficult, and here it is the cultural environment that makes the situation difficult. In the period of the few years from 20 to 35 we have to make life-determining decisions with regard to both our future family situation and our occupation, decisions which also may have a great impact on our relation to the family in which we have been reared as well as where we are going to live (like maybe in a different country). Furthermore, if we have gone away from home to take a new job or to go to college or to serve in the military, we may need to make these crucial decisions without much opportunity to confer with our own family or trusted friends. Even this period of full maturity is likely to be more stressful now than it was just a few years ago because of the lack of job security, the possibility that the occupational demands on spouses will require the married pair to go in different directions, the big conflicts that can arise between family responsibilities on the one hand and occupational opportunities on the other, the general acceptance of divorce, and the possibility of unanticipated responsibilities for taking care of aged parents with medical difficulties.
E. Another big change in life comes with the fifth stage, retirement from one's job. Because of adequate pension programs, social programs like social security, and modern medical developments this shift is much less stressful than it was in the past. Nevertheless when people have been accustomed to doing a certain kind of job and living in one place and having a gradually increasing income every year, the time of retirement can be challenging, especially if the spouses in a family have different ideas about how to take advantage of the new opportunity to do something different. Of course the biggest concerns have to be some unanticipated severe medical condition (cancer, Alzheimer's disease, heart attack or stroke) and a general deteroriation of one's capabilities to take care of oneself and one's residence.
F. The final transition that can come in our lives is to the sixth stage, what I call the stage of our "last days." I am thinking here of the situation where people know that they have only a very limited time before death. This obviously doesn't happen to everyone, but it can happen to anyone. It is an evident truth that everyone is going to die sometime, and intellectually even teen-agers know it. As we get older, the time we can expect to continue to live is shorter, but death can still seem a long way off. A real shift in our situation occurs, however, when a doctor says, "You have a condition which makes it very likely that you will not be alive a month from now." That "concentrates the mind" on the fact that the end of life is near. If we are wise, we will have thought about the end of our lives and the significance of that end before that shift to a "last days" stage comes.

IV. I mentioned earlier that I want to talk about the stages of life with reference not only to individual humans but also to humankind collectively.
A. I would say that the long period of human history from the beginning of homo sapiens sapiens about 130,000 years ago up to the time of the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago is parallel to the first baby stage of individual humans. During that period the life-style of our human ancestors was not fundamentally different from the chimpanzees to which we are so closely related genetically. We were almost totally dependent on what nature haphazardly provides. Our survival was a matter of instinct and luck more than cleverness.
B. With the agricultural revolution, humanity moved into its second stage which parallels the childhood of individual humans. We began to learn how to use tools. We began to learn how to read. We began to learn more about how the world works, including how seeds can be planted to produce grain and how that grain can be preserved over long periods if it can just be kept dry. We learned how to domesticate animals. We began to be aware that not everything that occurs in the world is the result of supernatural forces over which we have no control. We learned that we could at least to some extent make use of our experience of nature to accomplish our goals.

C. Paralleling the great change that takes place in individuals during puberty is the transformation in human life that came as the result of new scientific knowledge and the industrial revolution. The first glimpses of that rational, critical approach to the natural world occurred with the beginning of science and philosophy in Greece about 2600 years ago. This reliance on reason got a boost about 700 years ago with the Renaissance and the return to the classical knowledge of the Greeks and the Romans. This new critical understanding of the world really took off 350 years ago with Enlightenment, the culmination of human reliance on science and reason which still continues today despite the efforts of some religious fundamentalists in this country and elsewhere to go back to pre-scientific ideas. The transition from traditional religion and superstitution to the use of science and reason plus the resulting increase in humanity's knowledge of nature and of the power to control nature seems to me similar to the great change in the knowledge and power of individuals that comes with puberty in the life of individuals. Like individuals in that third stage of life, humanity collectively is not quite sure about how to make good use of all this new knowledge and power. Like teen-agers we collectively are conscious that our knowledge and power are much greater than what we had just a short time ago, but we are also a bit frightened by the possibilities.
D. Like individual humans in that stressful fourth stage called full maturity, humanity collectively is now entering the period of making life-determining decisions for the future of the species in a situation where we are reluctant to trust the traditional religions which we have inherited from the ancient past. The whole world needs the new kind of guidance and inspiration that we get here in this Unitarian-Universalist church each Sunday.
E. We are living at a crucial point in human history. It is an exciting time to be alive and to contribute what we can to this collective history. The role of our Unitarian-Universalist denomination in this situation is indispensable, and our individual lives take on meaning partly because of our involvement in this significant larger movement that will continue even when we personally are no longer here to witness it.

Return to First Unitarian Church of Alton - Selected Sermons Page