I turn 60 at the end of next week.  The stark immutability of that statement, especially as rendered via written words that will live in cyberspace long after I’m gone, reminds me, and not favorably, of previous decade birthdays.  Thirty was a breeze, what with learning how to parent a seven-month-old and no time for introspection, but 40 and 50 were gut punches.  At 40 you’re halfway there (or even beyond, according to some Scripture passages), if you’re blessed, a sobering thought.  I cut myself a bit of slack for the next one; my dad’s increasingly debilitating dementia had warranted his move to a nursing home, and his slow decline had been a constant reminder of the inevitability of my own mortality, driven home with the recognition of my 50 earthly trips around the sun.  I was not in a good headspace the last two years of Dad’s life, so that didn’t help me deal with the big 5-0.  

I’d like the passage to 60 to go more smoothly, so I’m gearing up for it more intentionally.  As I thought about how to get through the next week and a half relatively unscathed, I was reminded of some guidance I had received from an old friend in the midst of grieving my dad’s death.  My relationship with singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen was, to be sure, one-sided (we never met), and it came on rather late in his life; as was the case with Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and all the old gutbucket African-American bluesmen from the 1920s-1940s, I couldn’t, in my bel canto snobbery, get past Cohen’s vocal quality, or lack thereof, completely missing the McLuhanesque truth that his tonal quality is, in many ways, his message.  When I finally subjected Cohen to the same deep-dive I had given Dylan 15 years earlier, I rose from those waters a convert. 

(For the purposes of this reflection, I recommend Cohen’s latter-day trilogy, Old Ideas, Popular Problems, and You Want It Darker, all full of Cohen’s dark humor and wry observations; the posthumously released Thanks for the Dance is interesting, but less “musical” than anything else in his canon, rather like the final album or two Johnny Cash recorded with Rick Rubin, when the former was so sick the latter had equipment set up at all times, never knowing when Cash might be well enough to croak out another song.  Those albums are painful to listen to . . . but maybe that’s the point.  On the other hand, for a chronicle of Cohen’s end-of-career resurgence, check out the glorious concert recordings Live in London and Live in Dublin, both featuring an incredible band and Cohen’s delightful repartee with the audience.)

My “friendship” with Cohen solidified, however, not through his wonderful songs, love them though I do, but through an interview conducted in 2002 by rock journalist Mikal Gilmore, which found its way into an essay, “Leonard Cohen’s Life of Depression,” collected in the author’s 2008 book Stories Done: Writings on the 1960s and Its Discontents.  I remember reading this after my father’s death and feeling as if God had directed me, as only God could do, to this bit of divine truth from the lips of a lapsed Jew recounting the several years he had lived among Buddhist monks at a retreat called Mt. Baldy Zen Center in California:

I went up [to Mt. Baldy] for the same reason by and large that I have done everything: to address this relentless depression that I’d had all my life.  I would say everything I’ve done–you know, wine, women, song, religion, meditation–[was] all involved in that struggle to somehow penetrate this depression that was the background of all my activities.

By imperceptible degrees something happened at Mt. Baldy . . . and my depression lifted.  . . . [My teacher around that time] said . . . the older you get the lonelier you become and the deeper the love you need.  Which means that this hero that you’re trying to maintain as the central figure in the drama of your life, this hero is not enjoying the life of a hero.  You’re exerting a tremendous maintenance to keep this heroic stance available to you, and the hero is suffering defeat after defeat, and they’re not heroic defeats; they’re ignoble defeats.  Finally one day you say, “Let him die–I can’t invest any more in this heroic position.”  From there, you just live your life as if it’s real–as if you have to make decisions even though you have absolutely no guarantee of any of the consequences of your decisions.

As 60 looms on the horizon, I resonate with this passage now more than ever.  If I have a snowball’s chance of transitioning well into senior-citizenhood, it will come most readily if I abandon the heroism that has been my modus operandi for most of my adult life.  From my elevation to patriarch of my immediate family following my father’s death to my de facto status as pater familias of the community which is the Demoss Center for Worship in the Performing Arts at Judson University, I have had ample opportunity in recent years to assume responsibility that ultimately belongs to God, my role in the process, however important, not withstanding.  So . . . here’s to enjoying and embracing 60; here’s to releasing the grip of heroism. For me, at least, one won’t come without the other. 

The Lord be with you!