GALLOPING, NAKED,
IN THE NIGHT

Katie Funk Wiebe

On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail, Reason the card, but Passion is the gale.—Pope, Moral Essays

My daughter Christine moved from Chicago, where she had lived and worked for 10 years, to Wichita, where I live, to be closer to family. The move was more traumatic than she had expected. One day, as we were having dinner together, she reflected that when a person moves from one locality to another, she loses her identity. Here in Wichita, no one knew the real Christine—creative, eager for friendships, highly motivated, organizer and list-maker, and lover of celebration and beauty. She was only a name, a blip on a mental screen, momentarily passing in and out of people’s consciousness. Her self-esteem suffered as a consequence until she found her niche again.

Christine put into words some of my unspoken thoughts. After finishing 24 years of teaching at a small church college, I moved from a small community of three thousand to Wichita, an urban center with a population of over 300,000, to be closer to my children. In the little town I had an identity with most people as a single professional woman. In Wichita I was unknown in my neighborhood and in my church—probably another little single white-haired woman among other little single white-haired women expected to merge without a murmur into church life.

At any transition, such as marriage, parenthood, or new job, our self-identity is up for review. Moving into the junior branch of the senior division of the Funk clan meant a change in how family members viewed my identity. I saw them as thinking Aunt Katie, teacher and writer, was now Aunt Katie, retired teacher and writer, who had joined the group of people saying publicly, “I have finished my main work in life.”

For me this transition meant sorting through previous identities to see if I could find one I could accept now. But it also meant letting go of those previous roles and self-images that had once sustained me. It meant possibly accepting a brand new role and self-identity appropriate to this time of life. That looked like a terrifying challenge.

In Looking Both Ways, David J. Maitland advises that those facing a new stage in life should not let the discomfort of this transition pass without giving it attention. In other words, we shouldn’t try to get over it like a cold, with lots of bed rest and fluids. He advises older adults to use this transition as one more chance at self-knowledge in an encounter with God. He speaks of this transition as God’s invitation to move beyond preoccupation with one’s self-image or identity (What am I now that I’m no longer a teacher?) to the search for self-knowledge. There is no way back.

I hesitantly accepted that my current discomfort with what was going on in my life existed to encourage me to find out more about myself and the passage I was entering. Struggling with holy discomfort hadn’t been on my list of things to do as I adjusted to city living. Yet I tried to keep in mind the words of an older friend that old age is the proving ground of whatever one has believed, thought, and said.

The faith issue at transitions, Maitland writes, is the death of previous self-images for the sake of the possibility of the resurrection of a new image appropriate to the new age. But the transition is difficult because what we want to know about ourselves does not exist out there fully developed, like a new version of something already familiar. It became clear to me that the new identity I was looking for was not like the update of last year’s car model. The emerging truth about myself might disturb me and take me in surprising directions.

I thought about Maitland’s words for days. The death of old self-images he was referring to didn’t mean discarding all previous identities. Rather, it meant sorting through previous roles and identities to find a new whole. I began to see that the process was like going through my clothes closet and taking a hat from one pile, a dress from another, shoes from yet another, and buying some new accessories, then discarding the leftovers. But even that wasn’t a good enough analogy, for that was merely a make-over of an old version of me.

Self-image, self-esteem, identity, or even role—these were not words I grew up with. Who worried during the Depression and war years about whether you had a good self-image or a bad one or whether you were fulfilling your role in life? Back then, there was no anguished daily measuring of self-esteem as there is today. We all knew people who were shy and withdrawn and lived on the fringes of life and also people who were loud-mouthed, mean-spirited, and obnoxious. These latter had “big heads,” our parents told us. And then there were a lot of decent people in between who probably had reasonable self-esteem. Circumstances, very often, rather than personal decisions, determined what you did in life.

Looking back, I sense that I had a fairly good sense of myself, or self-image, using today’s language. The middle child, I wasn’t given undue responsibility or excess babying. I did well in school, which helped my self-image. I could handle almost any school assignment and kept trying until I had succeeded.

I enjoyed reading; in fact, I inhaled books. I became desperate if I didn’t have a book to read, which happened too often in that book-poor community. For me, one of the most wonderful moments of my childhood was to arrive breathless at the Searle Grain Elevator, which sponsored a rural lending library program, when the most recent wooden chest of books arrived. Often, in my presence, the elevator agent pried off the lid with a monstrous crowbar to uncover several dozen books. And I was first to choose a book. The moment was awesome. Excellent for the self-image.

The teen years passed without many upheavals. I became infatuated with one or more boys periodically, but since Dad and Mother had pronounced a no-flirting, no-dating ultimatum, the infatuation remained mine to dream about, not do anything about. I printed my name beside that of the current boy I liked, crossed out identical letters, then counted off the rest to “He loves me, he loves me not.” Boys were such delightful creatures, and I think I saw myself as delightful too.

Somehow, when I was about 16, I managed to scrape together enough money to buy a royal blue velvet beanie with two feathers sweeping high. The hat rested confidently on my long, blonde, page-boy-styled hair, and the feathers danced jauntily as I walked. It attracted and aroused the passions of a young man I later couldn’t get rid of, but I took pride in knowing it had attracted him. No poor self-image at this time either.

After high school I left home to attend a technical college to learn typing, stenography, and bookkeeping. The feathers on the hat and my spirit drooped during those months. I had wanted to attend university. But the schools weren’t handing out humanities scholarships during the war years, only a few for study in military-related areas, such as the sciences. I received a small scholarship in physics when I wanted one in the humanities. I declined it.

Teachers had tried to dissuade me from going to a technical school to learn typing and shorthand. Anyone could do that. The summer of my senior year in high school I had been awarded the Saskatchewan governor-general’s medal . It told me I had potential. I had a future. But potential needed money, and my family had none. Business school and sitting at a typewriter, transcribing someone else’s words, seemed a life sentence.

I gritted my teeth as I studied Gregg shorthand and took speed typing tests to get out of that technical institute as quickly as possible. I had determined that business courses were for the less able student. And I was smart. As soon as a student’s skills were up to a certain level, he or she could leave. When I could type 80 words a minute on a manual typewriter and take shorthand at 120, I left to take myself off Dad’s hands, who I knew was sacrificing to enable me to get even six months’ education in this institution.

But that still didn’t mean much. I endured four months of being an order clerk for a meat distributing plant. My self-image plunged even lower. The good life was not coming as fast as I had expected. My job was to accept telephone orders for meat products such as bologna, wieners, lunchmeat. I have described myself elsewhere as being a “bologna god.” When it came to distributing this much-wanted type of cold cut, I had full jurisdiction.

Sitting in my cubbyhole, perched on my stool, I read the help-wanted ads and plotted how to get out of this humiliating experience, where my co-workers were rough-and-ready workers, albeit good-natured and given to much teasing. In a few months, I had located a legal secretary’s job in a downtown office. No more bologna-god life for me.

I became a bookkeeper/stenographer. I worked lawyer’s hours, which meant an extra 15 minutes at noon and shorter hours in summer when the court was not in session. I learned how to file, take shorthand for several days to have plenty to do when my employer was gone, keep the firm’s books, type accurately even with 15 carbons, and accept responsibility. I was in charge of the office when my lawyer/employer was absent. To this day I can hardly slit open an envelope without automatically turning it inside out after I have taken out the letter to make sure nothing else is enclosed.

Good self-image? Clearer identity? Yes, I think so. I learned I could handle responsibility for the entire office, even dealing with older employees. I was respected for what I could do, and in the process I gained a good deal of self-respect.

I didn’t enjoy one aspect of the work in this law office because it took me back into that aspect of life I was trying to move above—lower-class poverty. It was also my first encounter with the elderly poor. Once a month I was assigned to collect rents at an ancient tenement house our firm managed, occupied mostly by single male old-age pensioners.

When I entered the battered tin-covered building, I first knocked at the door of cheerful, chubby-cheeked Tom Wilkinson, resident caretaker. He reminded me of a weathered cherub who had stepped out of a Charles Dickens novel. He pushed his fat little legs up and down the halls hollering, “Rent! Rent!” while I, in the role of official rent collector, seated myself at a paint-chipped table shoved against the burlap wainscotting to wait for the tenants. I too felt I was from a Dickens novel.

One by one the men, often unshaven, shuffled toward my table in their worn slippers, wearing nondescript pants over graying long-handled underwear and no shirt, to hand me their six or seven dollars, all in one dollar bills or change. Sometimes they were embarrassed to find a young woman acting as landlord this month. They returned to their small cubicles to lie on narrow cots and listen to the radio and heat a tin of soup or beans on a kerosene burner.

That period of nearly three years after high school was fairly directionless, yet lived in a happy-go-lucky style. I had no goals because I wasn’t actually expected to have any. And anyway, a young woman’s main aim should be to find a husband.

I was treading water, waiting for romance, marriage, and family—until the Christ of the Damascus road caught up with me and asked me who was Lord of my life. Then I turned in a different direction. And the much dating, movie-going, and activity for activity’s sake became not so much wrong as meaningless. Knowing the direction one is going does wonders for one’s identity. I left the law firm and went to Bible college for two years to learn more about God’s Word and ministry.

My study of myself shifts to the time I became a wife, shortly thereafter a mother, then, after 15 years, a widow and single parent at age 38. I recall one new widow lamenting to me she didn’t want to be called the humiliating term widow. Yes, widowhood was a stepping down, back, and away from society. Earning a living for a family of four children, going to school, and looking after the children meant daily encounters with few successes and many defeats.

My self-esteem dipped to its lowest as I recognized I was viewed as “a poor widow with four young children,” with emphasis on the “poor” and “young.” Every story and novel I had read about widows and experiences I had had with them came to mind. None were good. And I shuddered to think that this might be my identity until I died.

Many widows struggle with finding a new social role as a manless woman in a coupled society. I struggled mostly with discovering who I was when I was no longer Mrs. Walter Wiebe (which is the way married women were known in those days), under my husband’s loving care and protection.

The question I am most often asked is what kind of person I would have become had my husband lived. The questioners are thinking of widows they know who have blossomed after their husband’s death. I don’t know the answer. I hope I would have grown and developed my gifts. But it is also possible I might have been content to hide behind my husband’s role and position.

With my husband’s death, I had lost my own identity as surely as if I had lost my name. Looking back to those days, I see a woman who was determined not to stay on the bottom rung but who crawled two steps forward and one step back until gradually I began to forge a new identity as a college teacher and a writer on serious topics.

Now out of these various identities, what have I learned about myself? Self-evaluation is more than accumulating a record of experiences, like a collection of salt and pepper shakers, but evaluating them and learning from them. As I rethink my adult life, I acknowledge I once looked down on anyone who was single, poor, scholastically disadvantaged, and old. I didn’t want to associate with such people lest some of what they were might rub off on me. My attitude changed, however, when I was single again, living on a limited income, vocationally disadvantaged, and socially a leftover in a coupled society.

In Peter Shaffer’s play Equus, Martin Dysart, a psychiatrist, is trying to learn why his young disturbed patient blinded the eyes of several valuable horses with a metal spike. He learns that, before the blinding incident, the boy occasionally took the horses at night to the shore and, riding them bareback and naked, raced at top speed.

The boy has been telling Dysart, “At least I galloped. When did you?” The psychiatrist is forced to acknowledge that the boy did something he had never allowed himself to do—know passion. He tells Alan’s parents, “He was dangerous, and could be again, though I doubt it. But that boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life. And let me tell you something: I envy it.”

At least for one hour when the young boy was racing along the shore, Alan was living with passionate freedom, “howling in a mist,” freed of life’s common inhibitions. The psychiatrist had lived with boredom and routine, never approaching the edge. He hadn’t kissed his wife in six years. The boy’s actions asked questions he had avoided all his professional life.

I recognize now, as I look back over my many experiences, that I have known too much fear. I have been too hesitant at times to move ahead. I have seen a ferocious lion behind every blade of grass. Something of my father’s apprehension about other people and how they might respond to me has rubbed off like indelible ink. Reading books about aging causes me to believe that many older people regret that, to keep life controllable, they lived life too cautiously, held their cards too close to their chests.

I wish now that I had had more courage to move forward decisively and been less concerned about what the church community would think of some of the vision I felt entrusted with. I wish I had written more frankly, more furiously, more forcefully. And yet I know readers have told me that they have admired my gutsiness in opening issues, reaching for truth. But only I know how much I held back—deleting words, lines, paragraphs—to keep myself in safe harbors.

If I have learned anything about myself as I look back, it is how little I have galloped at breakneck speed, how little I have known passion for truth and justice, not even as my father knew passion for the downtrodden. When he saw suffering, he hurt with the person and did what he could to help with his limited means. He anguished over the violence and killing in the world but felt helpless and sometimes concerned about what the people would think of him, an uneducated immigrant storekeeper, speaking out. I, a woman in a man’s church world, was also afraid of “What will the people think?” I very much wanted to be liked.

At times I spoke out against issues I felt strongly about, but not with the boldness of a Martin Luther King Jr., or an Archbishop Romero, or even a Maggie Kuhn (who founded the Gray Panthers). My concern about the inadequacy of either/or answers, about the cruelty of intolerance, about the chains of rigidity, was sometimes lost between the lines. Kierkegaard said, “Reflection is usually the death of passion.” Was my inherent reflective nature the leaching of my passion?

I may not have lavishly celebrated the beauty and glory of God, of God’s creation, of life and love and beauty and truth. Too often I was thinking only about getting through the day, of dealing with my unique pain. And like others I became outraged, not at important things, but at the length of boys’ hair and girls’ skirts, at the preemption of a favorite television program for sports, or at the dog barking next door all night.

Yet as I stand before my life, I know that the mark of maturity means to give assent to the givenness of one’s life—one’s experience, one’s skills, one’s reputation, one’s pain and losses, what one has or has not achieved. To do so means having achieved what Erik Eriksen refers to as integrity, a trait of the older adult.

I watch older adults who have achieved a tranquillity about life that exudes great strength, confidence, and peace of mind. They have discarded the agendas to act, to produce, to fill time, which society imposed on them in their early years. In old age they have accepted their lives as they were and kept moving on from there. They have continued growing God’s image in themselves.

I can’t live my life again. I can’t redo it. Nor did I do it alone. God graciously used all my weaknesses and strengths, all my successes and my failures. There were times when I spoke for truth with the only measure of passion I could gather. Sometimes the vision I traveled with was meager and dim, sometimes more fully focused. Sometimes I was inspired, and people wrote me to thank me for my vision.

But sometimes life moved along happenstance. I can’t identify all circumstances as God’s work or as miraculous answers to prayer. But I can say that my journey thus far has been an earnest attempt to live with and for God. And that will also be enough for this border crossing.

Society urges even older adults to adhere to a certain mold—to consume heavily even if they can’t produce as much, to withdraw gently and silently to the periphery with their hoard of the world’s goods, and generally to match the image of “old” as depicted in the media.

Yet what I as an older adult need is a continuing vision of God and God’s kingdom and the realization that change can take place year by year—but only if I accept that it can take place. Otherwise, I yield to society’s image of the older person as someone who changes only in the opposite direction, becoming more neurotic, contentious, and dissatisfied with the years. That also is change.

My life is my responsibility—not my parents’, children’s, friends’, or society’s. But with this transition I have another chance to escape bondage to past agendas, some culturally imposed, and to accept a better understanding of who I am may still become as an elder. When we move through a transition to a new role, even when we are older, we have an opportunity to find out how we can become more like God, or, in simpler terms, how we can become more holy or righteous. Old age is real living.

We all cheer for favorite teams. But it is also important to cheer for ourselves as we move through life. Every time we get the ball and head for the basket, we need to cheer our own action. It means praising God for ourselves. As I think through my border crossing, I see myself more and more in training as a cheerleader, not only for older adults, a group whose cheering squad has too few members, but also for myself. And I wonder if this age group has the secret urge to ride bareback in the night, on the shore, naked, unencumbered by the stigma of ageism that church and society have placed upon us.

—Katie Funk Wiebe, Wichita, Kansas, is a writer, storyteller, and speaker with a keen interest in her own aging and in becoming a cheerleader for the older adult. She has written or edited some 20 books, including The Storekeeper’s Daughter. This article is from the second edition of Border Crossing: A Spiritual Journey (forthcoming in 2003 from DreamSeeker Books).