Tag: god

The Afterlife and Psychic Hygiene

Old folks have a reputation for worrying, for longing for the good old days, for catastrophic thinking.  I don’t think I am an overly negative person (my kids might disagree), but these are surely times to try an old lady’s optimism.  I know the stereotype is that elders are backward-looking, but I don’t want to return to the days before vaccines and the Civil Rights Act.  I am, however, searching for something positive to look forward to.

For years, parents could look forward to a better life for our children; upward mobility is not so easy anymore, for economic, environment, and political reasons.  At the founding of the UN, there were hopes for world peace.  We could find comfort that we would leave the world and our loved ones in better shape than we found them.  But no more.   So how can we alleviate our worries, calm our psyches, have the courage to soon leave life behind?

In “The Stages of Life” (recommended), Carl Jung acknowledged that old people needed something good to anticipate, and he suggested that the notion of the “afterlife” could have therapeutic value for us elders, particularly as it could take away some of the fear we face as we begin “transitioning” to death:

I therefore consider that all religions with a supramundane goal are eminently reasonable from the point of view of psychic hygiene.  When I live in a house which I know will fall about my head within the next two weeks, all my vital functions will be impaired by this thought; but if on the contrary I feel myself to be safe, I can dwell there in a normal and comfortable way.  From the standpoint of psychotherapy, it would therefore be desirable to think of death as only a transition, as part of a life process whose extent and duration are beyond our knowledge.

Death as placebo, you say.  Maybe.

It is interesting to note that in the medieval period in Europe there was a general belief that life was getting worse, that mankind was declining from a golden age (Eden?) through silver and brass to iron.   Even earlier, Ovid gave a clear delineation of the ages in the Metamorphoses, from the Golden Age, which “still retained some seed of the celestial force,” through the Age of Silver, when constant springtime was compromised with the addition of the other seasons, to the Age of Bronze, and finally the corrupt Iron Age, when humanity let loose to “Violence and the damned desire of having.”  After this cycle of decline, the population is destroyed in a flood and new men are created out of the earth, and presumably the cycle starts again.  I don’t really know where we are in the current cycle, but “violence and the damned desire of having” sound familiar.  Any rewards or punishments were to be found in another life, in a very real heaven or a very scary hell.  The assumption of “progress” only became common after the Enlightenment.

Americans tend to believe (or say they believe) in an afterlife of some sort (reincarnation counts).  According to a Pew study in 2021, about 73% of Americans believe in heaven but only 62% believe in hell.  There’s optimism for you. More people over 50 believe in heaven and hell than younger people (no surprise there) and more Republicans believe than Democrats.  Maybe that’s why they are not so afraid of an earthly future of global warming and increasing warfare – as they say, “there will be pie in the sky when you die.”

But back to Jung and the idea that believing in an afterlife is an act of psychic hygiene.  Can we make ourselves do it?  As John Lennon inferred, we are past that.   “Imagine there’s no heaven/It’s easy if you try/No hell below us/Above us, only sky.”  Not believing in heaven is “easy;” believing has become very difficult – a little like trying to believe in Santa Claus again.  And yet I understand where Jung is coming from.  In his memoir (recommended) Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung has a chapter entitled “Life After Death,” in which he recalls glimpses of eternity that he got as a child and again cautions against ridiculing the therapeutic comfort that believers receive:

Leaving aside the rational arguments against any certainty in these matters, we must not forget that for most people it means a great deal to assume that their lives will have an indefinite continuity beyond their present existence.  They live more sensibly, feel better, and are more at peace. One has centuries. One has an inconceivable period of time at one’s disposal.  What then is the point of this senseless mad rush?

This led me to think about Herman Melville.  In a little-read book Melville titled The Confidence Man (written by the master just after Moby-Dick), one of the characters cautions against forcing old people up against the truth:

“Yes, poor soul,” said the Missourian, gravely eyeing the old man – “yes, it is pitiless in one like me to speak too honestly to one like you.  You are a later sitter-up in this life; past man’s usual bed-time; and truth, though with some it makes a wholesome breakfast, proves to all a supper too hearty.  Hearty food, taken late, gives bad dreams.”

And that is what facing the truths of our world reminds me of – “a supper too hearty.”  Is a belief in an afterlife an answer?  Simone de Beauvoir suggested in The Coming of Age that we all needed a project in old age, we must continue the good fight. Beauvoir says that “there is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning – devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work.  In spite of the moralists’ opinion to the contrary, in old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in upon ourselves.”  Yes.  But.  She also says (and all of this is in her conclusion to the book) that it is fairly inevitable that “illusions” will vanish and “one’s zeal for life pass away.”  And where does that leave us?

In this, as in most things, I land in Spinoza’s camp. Spinoza said that we were thinking about eternity in the wrong way; he says that we think of eternity as a matter of time rather than a matter of the moment, of awareness:

If we attend to the common opinion of men, we shall see that they are indeed conscious of the eternity of their mind, but that they confuse it with duration, and attribute it to the imagination, or memory, which they believe remains after death. (Ethics V)

Reminding myself of my own mortality (try the Buddhist Five Recollections daily), helps me do this.  William Blake puts it more poetically:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

For an example of a very old lady’s momentary heaven, you might try my short story, “Like Heaven.”  For a blog on another aspect of this subject, try, “Retirement, Death, and the Land of Cockaigne.”  And try to put into words what it is you do believe.

In Praise of Failure

I am thinking about failure these days.  This is partly because I have had a few lately, but mostly because I just finished Costica Bradatan’s very interesting new book, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility.  Bradatan sees failure as necessary because it grounds us in reality and brings us humility.  He cites Iris Murdoch’s definition of humility as “selfless respect for reality.”  (Murdoch thinks that humility is “the most difficult and central of all virtues.”)

Bradatan says failure begets humility in three phases:

  1. Humility involves acceptance of our cosmic insignificance.
  2. It puts us on firm ground, since we have been “brought down to earth.”
  3. Having lowered our anchor into the world, and regained our existential balance, we can move on to other, bigger things.

Bradatan also notes that “Humility is the opposite of humiliation – that’s the chief lesson…There is nothing demeaning or inglorious about humility; on the contrary, it is rejuvenating, enriching, emboldening.”

I certainly am interested in “regaining my existential balance,” so this got my attention.  I was also interested in the way that we often reference old age as some kind of failure.  We talk about old folks failing to thrive, having failing eyesight, experiencing organ failure.  Much about old age unfolds with small failures, a dripping faucet of losses.  I used to be able to reach that shelf, didn’t I?  Remember that word?  Walk up that hill without pausing for breath?  Bradatan does not reference old age often in his work, but he is reassuring that failure grounds us and serves us in ways that success never can.

Failure is defined in the dictionary as “unsuccessful at reaching one’s goal.” Is staying young, staying alive, a goal?  It certainly is not within our complete control. We are mortal, and we will age, whether we like it or not.   We may have some control over the rate of decline, but not over the inevitability of it – Silicon Valley notwithstanding.

And how do we handle this sense of failing?  We are bombarded with contradictory messages.  Some say we should try harder, accept new challenges, revolutionize our diets.  Others posit that we should practice a reasonable level of acceptance. David Chernikoff in his Life, Part 2, shares this wonderful quote, a prose-poem really, from Solzhenitsyn:

How much easier it is then, how much more receptive we are to death, when advancing years guide us softly to our end. Aging thus is in no sense a punishment from on high, but brings its own blessings and a warmth of colors all its own. . .. There is even warmth to be drawn from the waning of your own strength compared with the past—just to think how sturdy I once used to be! You can no longer get through a whole day’s work at a stretch, but how good it is to slip into the brief oblivion of sleep, and what a gift to wake once more to the clarity of your second or third morning of the day. And your spirit can find delight in limiting your intake of food, in abandoning the pursuit of novel flavors. You are still of this life, yet you are rising above the material plane. . .. Growing old serenely is not a downhill path but an ascent.

Uphill, downhill.  Success, failure. Do these words have any meaning in relation to human existence?  Life is a parabola according to Dante; we go up, we go down.  Almost a millennium after Dante, Joni Mitchell said life is a “game,” not a tragedy, and as the “painted ponies go up and down”:

We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look
Behind, from where we came
And go round and round and round, in the circle game.

I think there can be joy in the motion, whichever side of the circle or parabola you are on. Yes, we must “accept” the end of a season, of our youth.  We either have to change our view of failure in relation to age, or start to use another word.  “Growing old serenely,” says Solzhenitsyn, “is not a downhill path but an ascent.”

And, if we are willing, we may find happiness in the falling, the failing, the downhill path. I have listened to many dharma talks about withholding judgment on all changes, including age. Rather than judge, we are to watch, realize.  Serenely.  A good word.  Like equanimity.

One last note: my last two blogs have started with the term “in praise of” – ordinary times, failure.  One cannot neglect mentioning Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly – the most memorable of such encomiums. In it, Erasmus’s discussion of old age almost always puts it into the context of the life cycle.  Lack of decorum in relation to one’s place in the life cycle is a constant source of humor for Folly.  Folly holds up the futile attempts of the elderly to be what they are not: “They cling to life so fiercely, and try so hard to ‘seem young,’ that one old codger will dye his last gray hairs, while another will stick a wig on his pate, and still another will fill his gums with false teeth, borrowed perhaps from a pig’s jaw.”  Erasmus, too, is cautioning a level of acceptance and equanimity.

For more on Dante’s view of life as a parabola, you might look at my blogs, “Dante’s Parabola” or “A Diminished Thing.”

Old Parents and Prodigal Children

Perhaps the story of the Prodigal Son means something different when we are old.   Will we take our children back when they fail or falter?  How many times?  With or without their children in tow?  In the story of the prodigal son, we are left to think that everything ends up ok – except perhaps, for the resentment of the older and more responsible brother.  The story (from Luke 15) ends with the father telling his “good” son why he has killed the fatted calf for his wayward sibling:

 And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.  It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.

But in real life, this is seldom the end of it.  Does the prodigal son stay on the straight and narrow or does he wake his father coming in drunk every night?  Has he sired children that are looking for support?  If he runs away a second time, will he be taken in again? In “Death of the Hired Man,” Robert Frost said that: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, /They have to take you in.”

How many times?  How many fatted calves? How much money?  How much heartache?  Surely, parenthood is a lifetime job, but we protected them when they were vulnerable – who is protecting the old couple who have frayed their nerves and spent their nest egg for the prodigal son or daughter who just keeps returning?  It is surely a question for our time.

Recently, I mentioned the story of the prodigal son to a parent who has had to exercise some tough love with an adult child, but seems to feel painfully guilty about it.  She pointed out to me that the father in the story represents God, not a typical parent.  Ah, I sighed, you are surely right.  But don’t we all see that gracious parent in Luke as the model of the endlessly forgiving parent?  Killing those fatted calves whenever there is a glimmer of light?

Because, here is the thing.  It is terribly difficult to renounce parenthood.  Harder than divorce, harder even than becoming estranged from your parents.  Your children can cut you out, but it is extremely difficult to cut them out – even when you have run out of energy and fatted calves.

There was a grand essay by Rebecca Solnit in Harpers entitled, “The Mother of All Questions.”  The question she poses is whether to have children.  (She has none.) And, of course, this is a weighty question, particularly in these days of economic distress and climate crisis.  But, when most of us made the decision to procreate (or neglected to make it and just let nature take its course), we were not possessed of our full maturity or even our right minds.

So here is the harder question: “Is it ever too late not to have children?”  To cut yourself off from your children?  Or, less extreme, is it ever too late to not make parenthood a primary identity?  Not to feel like we have to have the patience of the prodigal’s father, of Job, of God, in the face of the relentless demands of adult children?  It is not a question I have had to answer in any but the most minor ways, but I have watched the anguish that prodigal sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, can cause.

Here is another strange thing.  There are few novels, plays, or poems about good parents with bad children.  There is Balzac’s Pere Goriot, William March’s The Bad Seed, and a few other horror stories – however, novels and poems about bad parents abound. (Think of Philip Larkin’s wonderful “This Be the Verse.”)  Culture is on the side of the children.  While our offspring are children, that is the way it should be.  But what about when they are fifty and we are seventy?  There is no right answer to this question, but I find myself with great empathy for those who are asking it.

For a view of differing attitudes toward parents, you could try my story “Tale of Two Grannies” or look at “Snickerdoodles.”  Neither of these tales, however, depicts the extreme situations I am discussing.  It is probably no accident that most of the stories of “bad children” are tales of horror.  Again, I empathize and only hope it is never a situation I experience.