In the midst of the usual busyness of my day yesterday, I had some time to sit with my colleagues in my office and catch up. It has been a busy summer. Our Minister of Christian Nurture has been going non stop, with her son’s marriage at the beginning of the summer, shortly followed by the death of her mother. After taking care of the business and making appropriate plans for worship and care, there was time for a couple of Katherine stories. Katherine Musgrave, mother of our colleague, was an amazing woman who lived to the age of 95 and remained very active throughout her life. She was in her late 80’s when I met her and I was immediately charmed. We had planned to stop by her home while on a vacation in Maine for a short visit. The short visit grew into dinner, breakfast the next morning, attending church together, a short tour around the community a picnic and time for a short paddle at their lakeside camp. Along the way we were thoroughly charmed by this amazing, energetic woman who was interested in so many aspects of life.

Of course it would be impossible to tell her story in the blog and I only know small parts of the story to begin with, but a couple of snippets might give a bit of a picture of how she provided inspiration to so many.

Katherine lived fully up to the end of her life. Quick to speak of the “evils of retirement,” she simply never did. She taught at the University of Maine, became an online educator at an age where many of her peers avoided computers, did nutritional counseling in conjunction with a local clinic, and had a regular spot on a local radio station where she advised people on healthy eating and healthy living.

Among the papers that her daughter was sorting were notes from a lecture on nutrition that she gave Thursday evening. She died the following Saturday. She lived a pretty good testament to her theories about not retiring.

Thinking about Katherine and her life got me to remembering Erik Erikson’s developmental theories that I studied when I was in my twenties and to which I have returned in some of the classes I have taught over the years. Basically, Erikson developed a developmental model with eight stages of human life. Each stage features a conflict in need of resolution. The first stage is Trust vs. Mistrust. In the first couple of years of life a child needs to learn to trust and much of the child’s energies are focused on testing how trustworthy his or her world is. At the other end of the scale, Erikson’s model proposes that the late adulthood task is Integrity vs. Despair. He says that the challenge for those of us in this stage of our life is to take a realistic look at the whole of our lives and figure out how all of the different experiences relate to one another. This task requires great honesty. If we are not able to accept all we have done and been, we drift away from integrity into despair.

Of course this is a gross oversimplification of Erikson’s theories and even if I spent more time explaining it, there are problems with the theory. All developmental psychology assumes that humans undertake life challenges in sequence, and the sequence isn’t always followed. In real life, we are often dealing with multiple stages at the same time and people don’t always accomplish tasks in the same order. Often we need to go back and visit a psychological challenge that we have mastered because new realities and new experiences challenge old concepts. Trust isn’t something that is achieved and held forever. It is, rather, earned over and over again throughout one’s life. This is true of all of the stages.

Still, there is much truth in looking at our lives through Erikson’s model. In that model, I’m somewhere near the end of the challenge of Generatively vs. Stagnation and entering into the stage of Integrity vs. Despair. Looking back at my life, I realize that it, like the lives of so many others, has been a long and varied journey. The little boy who loved climbing and being up in high places, who spent his summers in tree houses, who used to go to the library and check out as many books as they would allow each week, and played in the icy cold river at every opportunity somehow grew up into a grandfather who writes essays and preaches sermons and administers a mid-sized church. It isn’t that the little boy somehow disappeared. It is part of who I am. There was a phase in my adolescence where I was so focused on learning to fly an airplane that the process consumed much of my every waking hour. I hung out at the airport on the possibility that if I couldn’t get a lesson, at least I might get a ride and if I couldn’t get a ride perhaps I could wash a windshield or help tie down an airplane. I mastered the skill and earned my private license at the earliest possible age. But flying never became my career and it didn’t become my life’s passion. When the demands of raising a family became a higher priority than flying, we sold our share in our airplane and I have never regretted that decision. Still, that part of my life is a piece of my identity and has contributed to the whole of who I am.

My passion for canoes and building boats wasn’t caused by my love of airplanes and flying, but somehow it grew out of that love. When I built my first canoe, one of my goals was to teach myself about woodworking so that I might one day build my own airplane. I no longer aspire to build an airplane, but the joy of building something with my own two hands has never left me.

I’m just beginning this task of integrity. There is much work that remains. It seems a bit like sorting through the accumulation in my library. It has got to be done, but I’m easily distracted from the work. For now the challenge is to honestly and lovingly embrace all of who I am while I search for the harmony and hidden wholeness that pulls all of the different pieces together.

I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.