Off-Script: Living the Stages You Choose
Homily for October 4
Jaques has it all worked out. "All the world's a stage," he says, "and all the men and women merely players." Then come the seven ages: infant mewling, whining schoolboy, sighing lover, quarrelsome soldier, well-fed justice, the lean and slippered pantaloon, and at last "second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."
It's a tidy speech. It's also a script. And notice who's talking: Jaques, the melancholy one, who finds a sermon in everything and joy in almost nothing. He watches life from the edge of the stage and mistakes the watching for wisdom. He has decided how your play goes before you've spoken a line.
Most of us were handed a script like his before we could read it. Crawl, walk, talk, right on schedule. School, then more school. A career by this age, a partner by that one, children in the window between, a house, a peak, a retirement, and then the long slippered decline Jaques promises. We call these "milestones," as though they were carved in stone by the road, and not painted there, recently, by someone with an interest in where we're headed.
Whose clock?
Sociologists have a name for the thing pressing on you when you feel behind: the social clock. Bernice Neugarten described it sixty years ago: the shared, mostly invisible sense of what we ought to have done by now, and the low hum of anxiety when our own life runs early or late. Erik Erikson gave us eight tidy stages, each with a task to master before we're allowed up to the next. These aren't lies. They describe something real about how many lives unfold. But they were written in a particular time and place, by a culture that pictures a life as a staircase, always climbing, and old age as the top step before the fall.
That ladder is one culture's drawing of a life. It is not the only one, and it is not the truth. Other ways of perceiving hold time as a circle, a spiral, a web of relationships rather than a stairway of achievements. And the moment you notice the ladder is a drawing, something loosens. You can step off the stairs.
The unruly ones
We love our unruly elders. The raging granny with a protest sign. The woman in the red hat that doesn't suit her, delighted that it doesn't. The reclaimed crone. The curmudgeon who has run clean out of patience for nonsense. The elder who cries at anything tender. We love them because they've stopped performing. They say the true thing, wear the loud thing, rest when they're tired, love how they love, and ask no one's permission.
Here's what's easy to miss: almost none of them arrived there by accident. Jenny Joseph's famous poem, the one that gave the Red Hat Society its purple and red, isn't really about being old. Its line, at the very end, is that perhaps she'd better practice being outrageous now, so the people who know her aren't too shocked when she's suddenly old and does it for real. The unruly elder is a rehearsed role. Freedom is a muscle. It is built early, it is built now.
Off-script is not no script
Let me level with you, because this real talk, not a pep talk. Going off-script is neither free nor simple. Some of us cannot just dance off the ladder. Bodies, money, the care of children or parents, real obligations, real danger for those whose very existence is already treated as "out of order." "Just live authentically" is easy to say from a comfortable seat.
So I'm not asking you to burn the script. I'm asking a gentler thing: to notice that you are holding one, to notice whose handwriting it's in, and to take up the pen where you can. Off-script doesn't mean chaos. It means authorship: the difference between a life that merely happens to you on someone else's timeline and one you are, even a little, consenting to. You are the sacred steward of your own experience. That is as true of your calendar as of your prayers.
What are you rehearsing?
So this is not, in the end, a homily about honoring old people, though we should. It isn't only for those with grey in their hair. Every one of us here, at whatever age, is aging right now, rehearsing (on purpose or by accident) the person we are becoming. The twenty-year-old and the eighty-year-old are in the same play. The only question is whether you stick to the script.
So I leave you with the question the unruly elder answers with their whole body: what freedom are you practicing today? What small "no," what postponed delight, what unruliness or tenderness will you try on now, not when you're finally old enough, not before you're too old, but today, off-script, on no one's clock but your own?
Jaques was wrong about the most important thing. We are not merely players. We can pick up the pen. Not all of us can rewrite the whole page, and some of us are carrying more than any one person should have to hold. But wherever your hand is free, even a little, the pen is yours. Pick it up where you can.