2 weeks Ago
Tomorrow we close on the most rancorous, divisive and possibly consequential election since 1860. Some of us are fed up with slogans, rants and causes that leave us feeling empty, their meaning drained out by media saturation. No matter the outcome, we’re going to face tremendous post-election challenges.
We may face bitter division locally and nationally, even violence. The influence of elders will be critical to help temper absolutist passions and mend fractures in our common life. A second civil war looming? South Carolina poll shows nearly half the state thinks so.
Can elders do that? Temper passions and mend fractured communities? I use the word "elder" not meaning elderly people, who are just as prone to unbending opinions as anybody else and can be strident and grumpy. In fact we’re famous for it. But elders are those whose lives are rooted in deeper soil than politics and power, whose struggles have taught them how to bend without snapping, who have processed their life experience and found lasting connection with people they disagree with.
Those are defining marks of an elder at any age. One passage in Loren Eiseley’s autobiography "All the Strange Hours" is pertinent to our politics of partisan passion. Eiseley says this: “Sir Francis Bacon once spoke of those drawn into some powerful circle of thought as ‘dancing in little rings like persons bewitched.
’ Our scientific models do simulate a kind of fairy ring or magic circle which, once it has encompassed us, is hard to view objectively.” Eiseley was speaking of his experience in science, but I know from my own experience in religion that believers claiming absolute truth are also encased inside magic circles. It must be obvious to all of us today that the epitome of fairy rings, in which enthralled partisans dance like persons bewitched, is in extremist politics.
Everything is politicized, even matters of the common good such as disease prevention and disaster relief for citizens suffering from Hurricane Helene. Every issue gets pulled into the magic circle by people dancing as though bewitched. That makes it hard, if not impossible, to view issues objectively, much less solve them.
Can elders help temper extremist passions? Step away from magic circles of groupthink? Bring into the open our willingness to not know, to set aside perfectionism? Challenge power structures and declare independence from iron-clad ideologies or conspiracy cults? Even couple our minds with originality? Yes we can. Aging for Amateurs: Learning to trust in the age of misinformation and deepfakes Elders can do that only when we are gaining the inner authority of self-discovery, the integration of the conflicting forces in our own lives, and the personal freedom of detachment from the results of our work. These three way-markers on the elder’s path are the inner work required of us, I believe, to undertake the outer work of community healing.
Look at each. Self-discovery: after a lifetime of acting and testing, for better or for worse, we should be clear by now on what our values are and how they work in the real world. We may have worked our way down to what Barbara Jordan called a “principled core that can’t be negotiated out.
” We discover a spiritual dynamic within us (“principled core” is dynamic, alive, not static) that is responsive to changing circumstances but not reactive to them. It is true to a deeper aim or pathway that leads into supple growth, not closure, and certainly not enchantment. Each of us plays multiple roles that make different demands, forge different connections, and almost make us different people.
Some role conflicts can tear us to pieces, like the struggle between being the kind of parent we want to be versus giving 100 percent to our business or profession. It takes wisdom, patience, a lot of tolerance and maybe self-forgiveness to bring those conflicts to resolution. But when we do, we are learning also how to moderate political conflicts and mend fractured communities.
Aging for Amateurs: Blessing 'a pearl of great price' in a village elder Spiritual freedom: which comes as we learn to detach our intentions and actions from results. Thomas Merton wrote in a letter to a young activist in 1966, “You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.
And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people.” It is such a different approach from that which assumes the end justifies any political means to achieve it. Merton followed by saying, “In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.
” Reflect on your own experience and ponder if that is not exactly right. Isn’t it our deep caring for a person or for specific people that draws us out of our shell, our magic circle, our bewitchment with abstractions and ideology, and into a larger stream of energy that embraces not just our individual or family well-being or that of our tribe, but the world, and that gives us a foretaste of the underlying relatedness of all things? At a time when so many seem to harbor an implacable animosity towards the world and their political opponents in a flow of perpetual blame, it is of critical importance that elders create a flow of moral courage, spiritual clarity, and mercy that mends connections, not destroys them. The influence of elders will be critical in the days ahead.
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