And What’s So Wrong With Being Peter Pan?
Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
April 28, 2002

Reading: Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie (Charles Scribner’s Sons 1980) pp 106-108, 173-176; 178-180.

	“Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” was one of the rallying cries of my generation, in the sixties, a cry which became an albatross around our necks as we passed that self-proclaimed threshold of trustworthiness a score and more years ago.  We Baby Boomers in the fifties and sixties were the first mass Youth Culture in Western society, but certainly not the last.  
	Social historians tell us that childhood as we know it has not always been a feature of our society, but rather is an invention of the eighteenth century or nineteenth, depending on who you ask.  Sure there were children before then – people didn’t magically skip the single digit years and go straight to teenhood after birth.  But childhood was not set apart, recognized and honored as a distinct stage of life with its own characteristic ways of being the way it did in the early modern period.  
	And as childhood was invented centuries ago, so teenhood – youth culture – was recognized and set apart in the Sixties.  What started it was affluence and disposable income.  As large corporations realized what buying power lay in the portion of the population between the ages of 12 and 20, they oriented their sales towards this new group of consumers, and advertising drove a media wave of glorification of youth which has still not subsided.  
	Now the idea for this sermon started on a chance remark I heard about a fellow I know that “he’s a real Peter Pan,” meaning that the fellow had never grown up. I realized that the same thing had probably been said about me.  I remembered back in the summer when I had klunked up the stairs to my law office in my shorts and roller blades, sweaty from my whirl out of Government center, across Fanueil Hall, through the Big Dig and up Commercial Street.   One of my thirty-something colleagues said to me, “and just what are you going to be when you grow up?”
	I ought to have answered him in the words of the song: I’ll never grow up.  But then wouldn’t that have been ridiculous: here am I not only working one job but working two.  I’m not even living up to our hippie ideals of the Sixties, much less Peter Pan.  Yet I still see myself as kind of a kid.

	Some of you might get the same kind of comments.  Children themselves are likely to hurl them.  We embarrass our children by our willingness to jump on a swingset, climb a tree, catch frogs with our hands, make frogs out of our hands.  And what are we to say of whole troops of grown men and women who dress up in silly clothes and dance about the village green waving sticks and handkerchiefs and twining Maypoles?  Are we reliving the childhoods we wish we’d had?
	Of course what we might call the Peter Pan Syndrome has more derogatory connotations as well.  The poor fellow lampooned in the song I sang is a type we have all met, and many of us here have had a bit of him in our lives – the perpetual planner, the person who puts off commitment to any particular course of action. Many of my fellow Boomers tried to achieve perpetual adolescence by drifting around from city to city to country trying out various styles of life and work.  In the academic world you have the phenomenon of the perpetual student, switching majors and pursuing degrees after degree without ever using one to land an honest to goodness job.  
	I see myself in this paradigm as I pursue a second career without ever having dropped the first.  Occupational specialists tell us that such career switching has become the norm rather than the exception – most of us will end up pursuing two or more careers in our lifetimes.  This speaks to a certain restlessness among us, an unwillingness to stay with a worklife which has proven unsatisfactory in ways large or small.  Where my parent’s generation would have simply accepted job dissatisfaction as part of living, my generation and my childrens’ generally believes that if you aren’t happy in what you’re doing, you should change.  Maybe it is stretching things a bit to call this Peter Pan syndrome, for we are all, in this fully grown up.  We have accepted that we need to work for a living, we just want the work to be fulfilling.
	Where the Peter Pan syndrome becomes a real kind of curse is in the romantic sphere.  The confirmed bachelor or the unpartnered thirty-something of either sex is often hung with the epithet “you just don’t want to grow up.” 
	These words are often spoken by a potential partner who is ready to make something more permanent of the relationship.  What they imply is that the person is afraid of commitment.  If I’m interested in settling down and you’re not, I might call you a Peter Pan.
	And in doing that I wouldn’t be far from the impact of the original story.  For to research this sermon I went not to the Mary Martin broadway and TV musical that was my own childhood introduction to Peter Pan, nor to the Sixties Disney cartoon version.  I went to the original story by J.M. Barrie, first published in 1911, and it was this from which I read this morning.  
	To a modern reader, the story has some obvious flaws.  There is rampant racism and sexism.  The Indian tribe are always referred to as Redskins and the name of the tribe, the Piccaninnies, is an old and now-offensive term for African American children.  The role of women is especially disturbing – all of them – Mrs. Darling, Wendy, Tiger Lily and even Tinkerbell – seem to live only to wait on men or boys, and take care of children and keep house.  When you read a book like this you realize how far we have come in social outlook from Edwardian England.  
	But to return to the romance theme: it looms large in the story and in fact the chief dramatic conflict in the story is not whether Peter will renounce his perpetual youth and agree to be raised by Mrs. Darling, it is whether Wendy will stay with her mother or go back to Neverland with him.  Wendy herself isn’t opposed to growing up, and one gets the feeling that if Peter entertained anything like real steady affection for her she would follow him back in a heartbeat.
	“Gay and innocent and heartless” is how Wendy, now grown, describes Peter Pan and his compadres to her daughter, and then lets her daughter go away with them anyway.   Those are two positive words and a very negative one – an unholy trinity.  Heartless reflects how cruel Peter Pan can be in the story, as he forgets his companions time after time in his own self-absorbed quest for adventure.  Is this what’s wrong with being Peter Pan?  To be really determined not to grow up, we have to be heartless.  
	It is startling to see a word so negative in a tale so sentimental in its view of childhood.  It underscores the basic message of the story that perpetual youth is not a good thing, that we should be glad we have mothers and fathers and that we eventually grow up.  Peter Pan in the end is a rather pathetic lonely figure precisely because time passes him by.  He comes back to successive generations of Wendy and her descendants and he looks more and more like a freak because he doesn’t age.
	Well, what does any of this tell us about our own aging process and how we come to terms with it?  We have many religious texts that extol the virtues of childhood.  Jesus said suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.  He also said, unless you become like a little child you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.  This is the innocence part of Wendy’s trinity.  The child is uncorrupted by sin, particularly by sexual desires and acts, and thus sets a standard of purity for all of us to aim towards to achieve the holy.
	Zen Buddhism extols a concept called beginner’s mind which says that as we start on the path to enlightenment it is good to try to achieve a tabula rasa, a clean slate.  We try to have the mind of the child and not be cluttered with a lot of preconceptions, baggage that will impede our progress towards Nirvana.  
	Carl Seaburg’s hymn we sang this morning says give me the spirit of a child and in this I think he is melding the idea of Jesus and the Zen principle.  Let me see the world with fresh eyes.  Let me see it anew.
	Life can be conceived as a long highway stretching from birth to death.  Wherever we are on the road, there is a portion of the road behind us – our history – and a portion in front of us, our possibility.  As we travel, the ratio of these two quantities changes.  For the child, the potential is much larger than the history, and for us older folks, the history is greater than the potential.  
	Now history is something we can’t do anything about.  It happened that way and we can’t go back and change it.  It also has a way of limiting our potential.  The range of options we have now is influenced if not determined by the choices we have made and what has happened to us as a result of those choices in our past.
	This is why we of advancing age feel our limitations and are inclined to envy children, who have so much of their lives ahead of them.  They have so much potential and we have so little.  Our books are almost written and theirs have so many blank pages on which anything could happen.
	Yet if grownups envy children, I think children envy grownups even more.  Grownups have all the power. To be a child is to be dependent, to be hemmed in and limited by your parents dozens of times a day, to be told you can’t do this and you must do that.  
	Grownups like J.M. Barrie look at children and see freedom, freedom from responsibilities and obligations.  Peter Pan is the paradigm of the free person; he goes anywhere he wants to and does exactly what he wants to do when he wants to do it and is not beholden to any other person and is not going to be.  But Peter Pan would not have been dreamed up by a child.  And I’ll bet if you asked most children, very few of them would say they didn’t want to grow up. Yes they want to go to a faraway place and battle pirates and Indians and live in a house under the ground.  
	But they also want the comfort of parents who are there for them when they are hurt and afraid.  They need adventure, they need fun, but they also need security.
	Grownups who envy children envy their innocence, not their powerlessness.  If I were a genie and told you right now that I could make you five years old again, but you had to do what your parents told you and you wouldn’t have any spending money or sayso over how you spent your time for another eight years, how many of you would take me up on it?
	Being a grownup means being able to eat a bowl of ice cream whenever you want.  The problem is that you don’t want to as much.  By the time you get the power to fulfill your childhood desires, you’ve moved on to other desires, desires which are much more complex and require cooperation from other people.  
	Childhood desires can be intense.  When I was about seven, my family took a trip to the Great Smoky Mountains.  It’s almost always cloudy there, and on the way up Clingman’s Dome my father told me that when we got to the top, I could wash my hands and face in the clouds.  Well, I got that idea stuck in my head, and I kept my family waiting there for what seemed like hours in the parking lot for a particular cloud to move over the ridge so I could wash my hands and face in it.  
	Now from the perspective of forty years later I can say that that desire was impractical.  But it was very real to me.  And I realize that life is a dialectic between our desires and dreams and the practicalities of pursuing them.  We envy children their dreams and we are most childlike when we are dreaming our own.
	In the seventies there was a pop-psychology movement called Transactional Analysis and it took Freud’s trinity of Id, Ego and Super Ego and renamed them Child Parent and Adult.  T.A. as it was called said we all have all three components inside us at all times.  Our child in this scheme is what dreams, demands and desires.  It is a bundle of urges in search of fulfilment.  Our parent is what says no, you can’t have that, that puts the throttle on our desires.  And the adult is what tries to mediate between the two.
	All three components are essential to a healthy grownup according to T.A., and they should be reasonably balanced.  If the Child is dominant, we get the person who is consumed with trying to satisfy desires for sex, fame, money, status.  If the Parent is dominant, we get a totally repressed person. If the Adult is dominant, we get a soulless rationalist.
If the Adult is too weak, we get a struggle for dominance between Parent and Child which results in a vacillation between hedonism and repression.
	Transactional Analysis has always seemed a little too pat for me, a scheme too simple to comprehend the complexities of human behavior, but it is valuable to realize that, in Wordsworth’s phrase, the child is father of the man, or, to put it differently, that we all carry with us our own childhoods throughout life. I always considered my own childhood normal and happy, but it was only through some deep analysis that I have realized how the affinities and conflicts of that era become templates for all the loves and hates of the rest of my life.  As I struggle with some issue with my wife this week, I realize that the emotions it brings up in me are the same that I had dealing with my mother on different issues at age 12.  
	I can never change that childhood, though I can attempt to understand it better, and to understand how it shapes my relationships in the present and future.  
	For some grownups, doing child-like things may be a way of trying to reclaim their own childhood, to re-live it as it ought to have been.  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that if we are conscious that that is what we’re doing.  Maybe that’s what I’m doing in the child-like things I do.
	Maybe it’s a generational thing.  I see the remnants of the Sixties Counter-Culture in the folk music and dance scene I have been part of for thirty years, first in the south and now in Boston.  It was as if the Youth Culture, knowing that we could not hold on to youth, decided to hold onto some form of culture.
	I do child-like things because I refuse to accept that childhood is the only stage of life in which we can have fun.  I have achieved a certain amount of power, of control, of insight and wisdom by virtue of my advanced years over what I had as a child.  I see no reason not to use these to pursue that which delights me, and if that which delights me involves dressing up in silly clothes and playing loud hanky instruments, more’s the better.
	What’s wrong with being Peter Pan? He’s not real.  He’s a figment of the imagination of a grownup in Edwardian England, a repressed culture far removed from our own.  What’s wrong with getting in touch with our inner child?  Nothing.  There’s no better time to do it than now.
Amen.