The Encore Round of Call

Marjory Bankson, former President of Faith at Work, has written a new book titled Creative Aging, for what used to be referred to as “retirement years,” but now we know as the start of a whole new cycle of elder call. Below is the full interview with Marjory. Her book, Creative Aging, may be purchased through our website here.

Lumunos: What excites you about creative aging?

What excites me about post-career creativity is that it seems to arise from a deeper spiritual stratum – a layer of soul compressed under the pile of ego expectations and responsibilities that come from too much good work and family needs in the career stage. Creative aging speaks of the generative period between 60 and 75 which is almost new in our time. When social security was inaugurated during the New Deal, actuarial tables predicted death soon after the age of 65. Today, women can expect to live beyond 80 and men just a few years less. With better education and healthcare, Boomer women entered the workplace in large numbers during the 80s and 90s and gained much experience with organizations and public policy. Men, too, have the energy to explore activities they didn’t have time for in earlier years.

Now, as the early Boomers reach traditional retirement age, they are wanting to be useful without feeling used. That age group has changed social structures of education, family and work. Now they are changing the terrain of retirement with encore careers and global awareness. With the financial meltdown, there is more impetus to change patterns, create new work and explore part-time employment as well as volunteer service. And surely part of my excitement is that this generative period is my story too.

In my own story of these generative years, there is a new kind of freedom for projects that take concentration and skill, like jazz improvisation. I'm doing more local teaching events around the issue of call – particularly for people who are moving beyond career to explore some of their inner yearnings. I'm mentoring three clergy groups and preparing for another show of burial urns and painted prayer shawls. I'm also part of the group which is dreaming a new form and venue for the Sacred Circles conference which has been "cut loose" from the National Cathedral. But most of all, I'm working on this book. Writing has always been important to me, but now I can give it the focused attention that will make it more useful and accessible.

I'm grateful for good health and good friends; for a vital church community at Seekers and for enough financial security to enjoy these precious years beyond age 70.

Lumunos: Are you working with the Call cycle when you teach about Creative aging?

Yes. If anything, the Call Cycle is even more relevant for the generative years because the motivation for working is more about spiritual wholeness and discovery than it is about doing what we do well. In the first round of call, we discover our identity in a larger story, in God’s creation story. During the second round of call, which I associate with career consolidation, our aptitudes and skills create a pattern which may bring success and recognition, but over time can feel confining and repetitious.
 
At a younger adult stage, the questions of call will focus around our skills, gifts, values and desire for family and community. When we have explored the inner and outer dimensions of that work (which I think of as ego expression), a kind of stasis or stagnation sets in, as though we have finished what we are here for. A typical mid-life complaint is to wonder “is this all there is?” As we approach midlife (at 50) or retirement, many people fall into depression or, as Erik Erikson calls it, “stagnation.”
 
With luck, that vocational call will provide an economic and experience base for the next round of call which can be more experimental and adventuresome. Sometimes economic need is a spur to new experience. I know of a sheltered, middle-class mother who went to work for the US Postal Service at age 57 in order to get healthcare for her son – and learned of a whole new world among her co-workers. It’s the encore round of call that I want to explore now.
 
Often a new call arrives with a hint of death on its breath. Until that happens, we unconsciously act as though we (and our loved ones) would live forever. Glimpsing our mortality (in the form of illness or death of a loved one) is a wake-up call, an invitation to dig deeper, explore unknown parts of our lives. Jungians would say that creative aging is a time to explore the shadow side which we have often projected out onto others. This generative period is not so much about fulfilling our potential as it is about meeting the needs that we see around us. So yes, the questions are different.

Lumunos: What are the aspects of creative aging that are most difficult for people in our youth-oriented culture?

People in our youth-oriented culture seem fixated on success, be it financial or using one’s training and education for special recognition. I suspect that busyness, speed and a cult of newness keep us tied to the expectations of others and distract us from the inner work of knowing what actually makes us feel satisfied. Until we can turn off our cell-phones and pagers, and listen for the deeper currents of human connection, we will keep running. The gift hidden in physical aging is that life is more than accomplishment, more than doing and success. One author called it moving “from success to significance.”
 
The significance we crave is what Marge Piercy celebrated in her poem, “To Be of Use.” Maybe we need the experience of some success first, before we are ready to look beyond that for more meaning. As in the creation story, maybe we need to know “it is good” before we can enter into the ambiguity of good and evil, darkness and light, failure and success, beginnings and endings as the rhythm of renewal that is built into creation. I find that paradoxical realm a creative soup for spiritual completion and satisfaction.

Lumunos: What are some spiritual disciplines that we develop along the way that can help us age creatively?

 
The practice of gratitude is a good place to start. It sets a framework of learning that will make life an adventure to be relished instead of a problem to be solved. Gratitude is closely tied to hopefulness, which I would separate from wishfulness. Hope keeps possibility alive and that makes space for newness. It helps us to keep our eyes and ears open for divine presence and guidance in every situation. Gratitude also helps us soften the rigidity of our expectations and its inevitable corollary, disappointment. It’s like spiritual yoga.
 
If we are lucky enough to find a few others who are also conscious of aging as a blessing instead of a curse, we will enjoy the journey more. We all need regular reminders that life itself is a gift and that death is not the end of the story. I find that sense of community at Seekers Church, where my weekly mission group gives me a place to reflect on my life and look for the growing edge where God is at work, changing me. Others find it in study groups or work groups like Habitat for Humanity. Spiritual disciplines simply mean the practices that keep us sane and hopeful when all the evidence points toward disaster and disintegration.

Lumunos: Why this book, now? What is being called forth in you to teach this?

I think it’s the incredible gift of being alive at this time in history. Never before have so many Americans reached retirement age with a social consciousness, advanced education and such good health. My question is what is this generative stage for? Why are we alive, now, with these social and spiritual assets? The first clue is to ask what we are longing for. What kind of world do we want to leave behind. And the second is to ask what piece of that picture belongs to me; what is the new work I am being called into. The generative stage of call incorporates earlier rounds of experience and it opens us to a conversation with forces larger than ourselves.

Lumunos: Who are your teachers and mentors in the process of creative aging?

 
My own father comes to mind first. He was a family physician in private practice for his entire adult life. At age 65, he closed his practice and spent a year considering options for service: a Presbyterian mission, Peace Corps, emergency room practitioner, etc. Finally he found the right spot doing locum tenens on different Indian reservations for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He would be in a different place for three to six months, setting bones and delivering babies for people who often traveled a hundred miles to the clinic. He often said that generative decade was the most challenging and creative period of his medical practice. Although he was not public about his spiritual life, I could tell from his regular letters that he was learning new things about himself and feeling useful by choosing into different cultural situations.
 
MC Richards, the potter who wrote Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person, was also a teacher for me. Although she had a PhD in English, she became an itinerant artist-in-residence after the publication of her book (at age 50). We became friends during that time, as she gradually put down roots in a Waldorf community for mentally challenged adults. She lived there and taught agriculture and art. For part of each year, she also taught with Matthew Fox’s institute in California. At 70, she followed her muse into painting and consciously chose to stay away from classes on technique. Instead, she let images arise from her imagination and gave birth to new poems all the while. By keeping her life simple (no car, no house, no insurance), she tended the fire in her soul and shared that with students right to the end of her life. She simplified her needs so she could be free to create and relate to others who were different from herself. I want to be that free and useful if I can.