Grumpy Old Man

As I get older or just plain old - probably 76 does qualify as old –- I seem to be getting grumpier.  The question arises – if not begged (I’m still not sure what exactly begging the question is) – am I grumpy because I am getting old – an internal thing - or am I grumpy because the world is imposing a lot of things on me that it shouldn’t?  Now don’t get me wrong, I have a lot to be thankful for – a wonderful wife who is very generous with her advice- particularly when we are driving somewhere; financial security; relatively good health and a great church community we are part of. 

That being said, I find myself becoming annoyed more easily than I used to – at least in my self-assessment.  I find annoyance is right there not too far under the surface and just lurking in wait for an opportunity to show itself.  There seem to be more opportunities for annoyance to raise its ugly head these days as life seems to be more complicated.  I struggle to deal with all the modern conveniences, particularly those which come with complicated ways of operating that don’t seem to make sense to me. 

Here are a few examples to help you understand what I am ranting about this morning.  We finally broke down and got a ‘smart’ phone a few years ago.   Up until then we had an old-fashioned flip phone which was used for emergencies.   We seemed to manage quite well but decided – for some reason I don’t really remember – don’t get me started on my memory challenges – to bite the bullet and get one.  I believe we were in Maisonville Mall in London trying to get a COVID shot and there was a booth nearby – so while we were waiting for our appointment, we decided to take the leap into the wonderful world of ‘smart’ phones.  Well, it has turned out that the phone is definitely smarter than me.  I dread to get a call on it – we don’t usually give out the number – as I find it is a challenge to answer the call – we did get advice on that from someone – I forget who – that we should swipe the phone and not tap it vigorously.  I can hardly wait to try this out, but I haven’t received a call yet.  There are lots of other challenges using this smarty pants device, but I hope this gives you a sense of where I speak. 

Well, let me give you one more example.  We recently had an electronic thermostat installed.  Boy has it been fun figuring it out.  We can control it – you guessed it – on the smarty pants phone.  After some trial and error – emphasis on the error – I have it figured out but the icon on the phone keeps disappearing.  Sometimes it is there and sometimes not.  I think the phone is just trying to remind me who is in charge. 

Another area of annoyance is parking.  I am old enough – see above – to remember when parking lots had attendants who would take your ticket and tell you how much you owed, and you could give them real money to settle up.  Now the attendant has gone the way of the dinosaurs – perhaps that is my fate as well.  We have the wonders of the machines where you get to pay your money by card – if you can figure out the instructions - and hope for the best.  Recently we were in Stratford to see a performance of Macbeth and parked in a municipal lot.  You had to put in vast amounts of information e.g. licence plate number, zone number (whatever that is) and pay for the time you think you will be parking.  Now, Macbeth is the shortest of Shakespeare’s plays but who knows how long we will be parked.   Well, we probably might have managed (with help from bad language) but we/I couldn’t see the screen as it was in bright sunlight.  We gave up and luckily found a spot on the street which- Hallelujah - had an old-fashioned meter which took coins.  Moving on from parking challenges we went to the theater and tried to find our seats.  The row numbers were cleverly hidden for plain sight, and we had to guess where row D was.  It was not the fourth row back as we discovered after we made our way to the seats in the middle – to the inconvenience of others seated.  It was apparently row DD.  We tried again with no more success.  Until we found an attendant – what do you call the people who show you where your seat is – words fail me again.

In any case, I am finding life to me more complicated and my annoyance more accessible as well.  I do feel more like a dinosaur as life becomes more complex.  I realize that my annoyance is partly because I want life to be the way I want it to be, and it is less that way.  There is a self centeredness in my annoyance – why can’t things be done the way they should be - or at least the way I think they should.  I’m afraid it has never been that way and is getting less that way all the time.  It just isn’t fair – but as someone – I don’t remember who – told me many years ago – life isn’t – and they were right.  I guess I will try to be a less grumpy old man – perhaps if I prayed to that Old Man in the sky it would help.  

 

Prison or Refuge

CORDELIA

We are not the first
Who, with best meaning, have incurr'd the worst.
For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down;
Myself could else out-frown false fortune's frown.
Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?

KING LEAR

No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;
And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.

That speech by King Lear in Shakespeare’s play of the same name, has resonated down through the years with the essence of old age which, regrettably, has been lost in our modern age.  However, it seems to be even more poignant in this time of COVID-19.  Lear responds to the daughter who has remained true to him as his world has been disintegrating around him throughout the play.  Little by little, through Lear’s folly rather than wisdom, he has made assumptions and followed his ego rather than seeking the higher wisdom that is possible for people who “grow old, instead to merely sinking into the aging process,”[1] to quote Helen Luke who was an exemplar of someone who did just that, ‘grow old’. 

As noted by Luke, Cordelia has the passion of youth and wants to go out and confront the evil that has overthrown the ruling value represented by Lear.  No, no – a thousand times no, is his response showing that as a result of all his trials and tribulations, he indeed has grown old, “Come, let us away to prison.”  The question for us today is our staying in place and self isolating a prison or a refuge.  It can be either depending on how we decide to see it.  This is a time, which seems to be more suited to introverts who seem to be more easily embracing this self-isolation, as a refuge than a prison.  At least that is my experience and the experience of Lorna as we are both strong introverts.  I’m not sure how the extroverts who are used to living in a world made for extroverts, are fairing.  I would suspect it is more of a prison for them.

Lear asks some engaging questions for these times; “Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;” I don’t know for sure who are the winners and who are the losers in this time of pandemic.  I suspect that it will be the usual suspects that win - those with the resources and influence seem to be able to win regardless of the circumstances.  The team of NBA basketball players that were all able to be tested while those on the front lines of dealing with the pandemic couldn’t.  It has become more evident in this time who is in and who is out in our society during the pandemic.  The essential workers have been recognized and acknowledged.   The front-line workers, the people who deliver the supplies and food, who work in the food store, and all the health care workers including cleaners, to those who pick the crops are now recognized as essential in our society.  Many of them are the lowest paid as it is clear that their remuneration has little or nothing to do with the essential nature of their work. 

It has, unfortunately, been brought front and centre what value we give to the aged in our society.  The fragility and inadequacy of the institutions where so many of our senior citizens spend end of their lives has been put in the spot light.  If that recognition is turned into action in the new normal of our lives that may be something positive that comes out of this dark cloud of COVID-19.  I live in hope that our society will grow in wisdom as a result of this rather than simply sinking back into the old ways of doing things.  I live in hope but am not hopeful - if that makes sense.

Blessings in your journey in this time of COVID-19; stay safe and keep the distance.

---

[1] Old Age, Journey Into Simplicity

Sermon July 10, 2016 Seventh Sunday after Trinity

These are the days of miracle and wonder 

This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all, oh yeah

In his song The Boy in the Bubble, Paul Simon tells us that we are in a time of miracles.  That is true today even more than when the song was written in 1986.  It was a long distance call but today we have smart phones and the internet and all that comes with it; we have social media; and apparently we are going to have self-driving cars before we know it—actually they being tested on our roads today.  I heard on the radio this week that the first fatal accident involving a self-driving car has happened.  There will be more to come and they tell us they are inevitable; they are the future of driving.  So hang on to your hats and your steering wheels.

We do have things at our finger tips that would seem like miracles even when Paul Simon wrote that song.  I looked up the date it was composed on the internet and had an answer in less than a minute.  And yet with all these miracles around us we are in an age that no longer believes in what can’t be explained by science and technology.  Likely none of us here today can explain how the internet or most of what we use works. 

However, that doesn’t stop us from using them and considering them just a normal part of our lives.  Indeed if we didn’t have access to everything that involves computers and the internet our society would grind to a halt. 

Despite all these miracles many people dismiss religion as superstition.  They cannot believe what is portrayed in the biblical miracles such as the one described in today’s Gospel passage—the miracle of the loaves and fishes.  This modern movement to demythologize the events in the bible that could not be understood in our modern day perspective was proposed most notably by Rudolph Bultmann who attempted to demythologize the biblical accounts such as the story of the loaves and the fishes.  Indeed much liberal theology today continues with this approach.  The accounts of the miracles of Jesus and other such accounts are explained away psychologically or sociologically or even literary contexts. 

My father, who was a United Church minister, was very much in this approach to theology.  He did not accept that miraculous things such as this account of the feeding of the four thousand could have been a miraculous event as it was described.  I even recall discussing this account with him many years ago.  His explanation was that the miracle was the reaction by the crowd that was gathered. In his understanding the people gathered had food hidden under their cloaks and were moved by Jesus to share what they had with their neighbours.  As a result there was more than enough for everyone—there was even food left over.

In preparing to write this sermon I found out—another example of the modern miracle of the internet—that this was a common interpretation of the Gospel passage amongst theologians and clergy of a liberal bent. The desire or need by some people to have everything in life explained is, to my mind, a critical mistake.  The attempt to consider everything from the perspective of the intellect is a fatal mistake. As Hamlet says to Horatio, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.  Mystery which is the purview of the divine does not deal only with the intellect.  That is a part, albeit an important part of God’s creation but there is much more to creation than intellect.  I believe it is a mistake to make the belief in miracles and other mysteries of our relationship with God to be the litmus test for orthodoxy on either the traditional or liberal understanding of God.

My understanding of God’s relationship with God’s greatest creation—humankind—does not depend on the details or facts of a particular part of scripture.  We should not get into arguments or worst over the details of a particular event portrayed in the bible or other accounts of God’s relationship with humankind.  We need to understand these accounts as myth rather than demythologizing them.  By that I mean we need to understand the meaning—the capital T truth of these events.  Why did they become part of the account of the story of God’s people?    Except for the Resurrection, the multiplication of loaves is the only miracle told in all four Gospels.  What is the truth in these accounts that made it essential for those Gospel writers to include the event?  Why did it resonate with people through the ages up to today?  What is the truth of this story regardless of the details of the story?  There are in total six different versions of this event; Jesus fed the people on at least two occasions—once 5,000 men and another time 4,000 men; once with five loaves and two fish and again with seven loaves and a few fish; once with twelve baskets of remaining bread and in another five baskets.  The details may vary but the truth of Jesus is eternal.

What then is the truth of the account of the feeding of the multitude—be it four thousand or five thousand or each and every one of us today. 

The truth is that we are fed by the person of Jesus Christ each time we partake in the Eucharist.  We are fed with the food that does not perish just as Jesus offered the Samaritan woman at the well the water that is eternal and once you drink of it will never be thirsty again.  Once you partake of the food that Jesus offers you, you will never be hungry or thirsty again.  That food that is offered is there in abundance.  There is food for everyone and there is more than we can ever consume.  It is offered freely to all.  Come and taste and see that the Lord is good.  Happy are they that trust in him.  Amen.