Layers of living
12/05/15 05:32
According to Erik Erikson’s psychosocial stages, I am coming to the end of the stage of Generatively vs. stagnation. The question of “What am I going ot make of my life?” is being answered in the living of my life and soon it will be time to turn my attention to ego integrity. Erikson’s model gives the task of making sense of all of the different phases of life to the end stage of life.
Of course no model, such as Erikson’s, is complete. At least it doesn’t tell the entire story of any individual. Recent years have seen quite a bit of criticism of developmental psychology. While developmental models give some understanding to the processes of the journey through life, there are other perspectives. It is clear that human beings don’t all go through life’s tasks in the same order. And societal pressures shape lives in different ways in different times.
As a child psychologist, Erikson focused on the earlier stages of development. His first two stages span 18 months each. Subsequent stages are 2, 7, and 6 years and then things spread out to 22 and 25 years. The final stage is simply age 65+. With the length of lives in today’s world, that last stage can be the longest developmental stage.
I was schooled in Erikson’s model and have used it to interpret my own life as well as approach much of my work in education and curricula development over the years. Still, I am aware that there are other ways to think of life’s journey and other models for understanding how we develop. I am also aware that life is not always sequential and that people don’t always go through the stages in the same order or at the same ages.
Somehow Erikson came to mind yesterday when I read a poem by Stanley Kunitz. Kunitz was U.S. Poet Laureate twice and lived to the age of 100. He was just two weeks short of his 101st birthday when he died. He was 95 years old when he served as Poet Laureate the second time. His poem, “The Layers” begins like this:
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
I think I rather like that image of walking through many lives, some of them my own. It seems to really ring true for me. Part of my vocation is listening to the stories of others. I share their experiences through the process of seeking meaning together. A life of faith is shaped by many others.
I am constantly aware of how the lives of those who have gone before have shaped my life. I study and tell the stories of our ancestors of faith in part because those stories are critical to understanding the lives we live today. We are who we are because of the lives of those who have gone before. Being able to remember those stories and see their connection to our own helps us see the context of our lives and understand that we are providing a foundation for that which is to follow.
I often tell the stories of Abraham and Isaac, of Moses and Jesus in the first person. “When we were slaves in Egypt,” I say, in the style of my teachers. Although I am adopted into the stories of the Old Testament - my genetic lineage is probably not mainstream Jewish - I have accepted those stories as my own and tell them as the stories of our people.
Those are only some of the lives I have walked through. I have walked through the lives of the youth I have mentored in the church. I have walked through the lives of the adults I have served.
The process of preparing for a funeral is always a process of walking through another person’s life. I sit with grieving family members and friends and I listen to the stories. I read the obituary. I study the history of the time when that person lived. Then I go to work to select appropriate words to express that meaning for the grieving community. Together we walk through that life and explore the faith, hope and love that has been demonstrated through a life.
Later in the poem, Kunitz refers to all of the stories as being gathered together:
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
My tribe, too is scattered. I recognize it when a grade school classmate posts old pictures on Facebook and I recognize the names and faces of people who I probably wouldn’t know if I ran into them today. We’ve all changed a lot since the day we scrubbed up and combed our hair for our first grade class photo. I recognize members of my tribe from my college years and the years we lived in Chicago attending graduate school. Recently I officiated at a funeral for a woman who we knew as a young adult during our time in North Dakota. There are members of my tribe in Idaho and Utah and Oregon and Washington and Missouri and a dozen countries scattered around the globe.
Kunitz’s poem is titled “The Layers,” and it gets its name from a vision that comes at its end:
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
I, too, am not done with my changes. And I find it deeply meaningful to think of my life as having many layers. These days we are living - this ministry we are sharing - are becoming yet another layer in the story of our people. Like a geologist traveling through the grand canyon, we can find deep meaning in the layers. A trained eye can decipher the history of geology looking at the layers of sediment.
And the stories of our people lie in the layers of human history that we have lived.
Ah that I might “live in the layers, not the litter.”
Of course no model, such as Erikson’s, is complete. At least it doesn’t tell the entire story of any individual. Recent years have seen quite a bit of criticism of developmental psychology. While developmental models give some understanding to the processes of the journey through life, there are other perspectives. It is clear that human beings don’t all go through life’s tasks in the same order. And societal pressures shape lives in different ways in different times.
As a child psychologist, Erikson focused on the earlier stages of development. His first two stages span 18 months each. Subsequent stages are 2, 7, and 6 years and then things spread out to 22 and 25 years. The final stage is simply age 65+. With the length of lives in today’s world, that last stage can be the longest developmental stage.
I was schooled in Erikson’s model and have used it to interpret my own life as well as approach much of my work in education and curricula development over the years. Still, I am aware that there are other ways to think of life’s journey and other models for understanding how we develop. I am also aware that life is not always sequential and that people don’t always go through the stages in the same order or at the same ages.
Somehow Erikson came to mind yesterday when I read a poem by Stanley Kunitz. Kunitz was U.S. Poet Laureate twice and lived to the age of 100. He was just two weeks short of his 101st birthday when he died. He was 95 years old when he served as Poet Laureate the second time. His poem, “The Layers” begins like this:
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
I think I rather like that image of walking through many lives, some of them my own. It seems to really ring true for me. Part of my vocation is listening to the stories of others. I share their experiences through the process of seeking meaning together. A life of faith is shaped by many others.
I am constantly aware of how the lives of those who have gone before have shaped my life. I study and tell the stories of our ancestors of faith in part because those stories are critical to understanding the lives we live today. We are who we are because of the lives of those who have gone before. Being able to remember those stories and see their connection to our own helps us see the context of our lives and understand that we are providing a foundation for that which is to follow.
I often tell the stories of Abraham and Isaac, of Moses and Jesus in the first person. “When we were slaves in Egypt,” I say, in the style of my teachers. Although I am adopted into the stories of the Old Testament - my genetic lineage is probably not mainstream Jewish - I have accepted those stories as my own and tell them as the stories of our people.
Those are only some of the lives I have walked through. I have walked through the lives of the youth I have mentored in the church. I have walked through the lives of the adults I have served.
The process of preparing for a funeral is always a process of walking through another person’s life. I sit with grieving family members and friends and I listen to the stories. I read the obituary. I study the history of the time when that person lived. Then I go to work to select appropriate words to express that meaning for the grieving community. Together we walk through that life and explore the faith, hope and love that has been demonstrated through a life.
Later in the poem, Kunitz refers to all of the stories as being gathered together:
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
My tribe, too is scattered. I recognize it when a grade school classmate posts old pictures on Facebook and I recognize the names and faces of people who I probably wouldn’t know if I ran into them today. We’ve all changed a lot since the day we scrubbed up and combed our hair for our first grade class photo. I recognize members of my tribe from my college years and the years we lived in Chicago attending graduate school. Recently I officiated at a funeral for a woman who we knew as a young adult during our time in North Dakota. There are members of my tribe in Idaho and Utah and Oregon and Washington and Missouri and a dozen countries scattered around the globe.
Kunitz’s poem is titled “The Layers,” and it gets its name from a vision that comes at its end:
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
I, too, am not done with my changes. And I find it deeply meaningful to think of my life as having many layers. These days we are living - this ministry we are sharing - are becoming yet another layer in the story of our people. Like a geologist traveling through the grand canyon, we can find deep meaning in the layers. A trained eye can decipher the history of geology looking at the layers of sediment.
And the stories of our people lie in the layers of human history that we have lived.
Ah that I might “live in the layers, not the litter.”