From Your Minister
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When I was a young adult, my inner and outer life resembled a Taoist poem I had memorized (and now only partly remember). It began, “There’s no path in front of you; that’s the track of your own foot…” and ended, “I speak of the road the butterfly cuts.”
The road the butterfly cuts—loopy and unpredictable, stopping often to languish in the depth of a flower—felt like an accurate description of both what I did with my time and of my sense of who I was in the world of that era. Every day felt both rife with possibility and overwhelmingly full of things I thought I should know but didn’t. What did I want to do with my life? What gifts did I have that I wanted to share with the world? Who were my people? Was there “a person” for me? Where was my place? All of those questions were manifested in a daily journey through exquisite heights and torturous depths.
Most young adults are fabulous at connecting with other people, interacting with others as mirrors and windows, and I was no exception. A 15-minute wait at the bus stop might result in a new friend or love interest. Plans were perpetually open; the places I lived were full of someone’s old friends coming through town, spur of the moment road-trips and impromptu dinner parties. I hope that this is still the same for young adults. Those late-night, soul-searching conversations and adventures of every variety were critically important to my journey.
Gradually, life fell into patterns. While in my heart and mind that butterfly might still be cutting around the cosmos, I mostly settled down. From the outside, it might even look as if I had a plan for my life. At some point, relationships and work experiences started to be counted in years, not days or weeks or months. At still another point, they began to be counted in decades.
The Hindus have named four stages of life, and though the descriptions were created for males in India long, long ago, I have felt the truth of them myself. The first stage, when the butterfly soaks in all life as one giant classroom, is the student stage, Brahmacharya. The second stage—this one I’ve been in now for a few decades as I raise a child and devote primary attention to work—is Grihastha, the householder stage.
What comes next is called Vranaprastha, the hermit stage. Traditionally, if I were a man in India I might have gone to live in a hut in a forest to meditate and study sacred texts. As a woman in the United States, I may be different in honoring the urge for more depth and less tending-of-things by, say, downsizing my living space and simplifying my life in other ways. The final stage of life for Hindus is the “wandering recluse,” Sannyasa, who renounces all attachments.
For me, that Hindu roadmap of the spirit’s life journey is the most helpful one I’ve encountered—even as I acknowledge that it was designed for a religion, culture, and people far different from me.
In the world I inhabit, we tend to label the stages with less interest and more judgment. The student stage is pretty much the same, but then we call the householder stage “settling down,” and we pretty much expect people to get there as fast as they can and stay there as long as they can. We locate people’s value in this stage of life, measuring their worth primarily by productivity (work) and consumption (goods).
That we see the world this way is a clear measure of how much capitalism affects every cell in our collective body. And what a loss! Because for the Hindus, the life of the spirit has not yet really even begun.
The ascetic stage—relinquishing what has been and focusing elsewhere—is generally called by two names in the west—midlife crisis and retirement. Midlife crisis (as if we were going to live to 110 or 120!) is often used disdainfully to explain divorces, sudden impulses to quit a longstanding job or acquire some flashy new possession. It is shorthand for a restlessness that boils over, suddenly sensitive to “settling” as a negative thing.
And the word retirement implies that people are simply going to go languish somewhere, perhaps on a divan, sipping beverages and remembering the past. Neither encapsulates the spiritual urge to trim to essentials, to cultivate a focus on being rather than doing.
Regarding the final stage identified by the Hindus—“wandering ascetic”—western culture is particularly cruel. Rather than honoring relinquishment as a wisdom path, consumer-based cultures see this transition with pity and sadness. In contrast, one of my mentors, Rev. John Cummins, is now in that final stage and embracing it with consciousness. He lives in one room in a nursing home now, which he refers to as “Thoreau’s cabin.” He receives visitors with grace and kindness, but his focus has clearly shifted away from the mundane things of this world.
The maps we consult affect how we see our journey. The four Hindu stages of life give me a sense of direction as I go on my way. I am grateful for all who have gone before me, whose lives I study for clues as to what lies ahead. And I am wildly curious about how my own journey will continue to unfold.
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