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LIVE ONLINE SESSIONS – Final of 3 part series hosted by The Jung Platform
September 26, 2023 @ 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Step
hen is invited by the Jung Platform – Psychological and Spiritual Perspectives to speak on the subject of Sanity & Soul and Elderhood.
3 LIVE ONLINE sessions, each for 1 hour, each recorded for later viewing and later registration.
R E G I S T R A T I O N link – you are being redirected to the JUNG PLATFORM
- 1pm EST on July 27 ~ Die Wise part 1/3
- 1pm EST on August 30 ~ Die Wise part 2/3
- 1pm EST on September 26 ~ Come of Age 3/3
Die Wise – A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul: Stephen Jenkinson’s award-winning book about grief, and dying, and the great love of life.
Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble ~ In his landmark provocative style, Stephen makes the case that we must birth a new generation of elders, one poised and willing to be true stewards of the planet and its species.
Purchase book or download author read audio book
Series Overview
Every year 60 million people die on this earth. Half of them are children under 5 years. Every day more people are born than die. Our lives are lived between these two poles. We come and go in our millions. We linger in our billions. In our corner of this world, is there much sign that we know any of this?
Not success. Not growth. Not happiness. The cradle of our love of life is death.
A wise death is everyone’s right and responsibility. The idea makes no sense in a culture that doesn’t believe in limits or endings.
Grief is taken up, if at all, as a process, an affliction, an intrusion into the natural order of things, a trauma we need 5 stages/12 steps/hallucinogens to get over.
Grief is the natural order of things.
Growth for its own sake is oncogenetic, sociopathic.
A full life isn’t a calendrical reality.
Elders – practitioners of depth by diminishment – are a sentinel species now. Their discreditation and demise are among our principal poverties.
A pandemic has changed none of this. It could have. But it hasn’t.
Session Themes
July 27th 1-2 pm EST: Grief/Eloquence
Grief is the radical etiquette of citizenship in a death phobic/grief illiterate time and place. In the same way that love is a skill, grief is a skill. It has a repertoire, it has its languages.
August 30th 1-2 pm EST: 1 hr. Sanity/Soul
Dying is not the end of wisdom, and wisdom is not exhausted by dying. Dying well is a spiritual obligation, and a moral obligation. If you love somebody, if you care about the world that’s to come after you, if you want somebody to be spared the lunacy of what you’ve seen, you’ve got to die wise. Especially in the wake of a pandemic.
How you die is the proving ground, the cradle and the grave for every conviction you have about justice and mercy, about life’s meanings, about what love is for.
September 26th 1-2 pm EST: Come of Age: Elderhood’s Spirit Work
We are awash in aged-ness. No generation has ever been older, longer. If experience was wisdom … Turns out, it isn’t. We have generational fault lines as menacing as anything tectonic. Old people are looking for the certification of elderhood. Young people are claiming each other as elders.
Elderhood isn’t a personality type. The work of elderhood is dictated by the troubles of the times. Elders are the end of ‘be all you can be’.
BRIEF BIO
Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW, is an author, culture activist, ceremonialist and farmer
Stephen teaches internationally and is the creator and principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School, founded in 2010.
With Master’s degrees from Harvard University (Theology) and the University of Toronto (Social Work), he has worked extensively with dying people and their families, is a former programme director in a major Canadian hospital and former assistant professor in a prominent Canadian medical school.Stephen is the subject of the National Film Board of Canada feature length film documentary Griefwalker.
He is the author of several books including the award-winning Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015). His newest book is co-authored with Kimberly Ann Johnson, Reckoning (2022) and he’s written A Generation’s Worth: Spirit Work as the Crisis Reigns (2021), Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (2018), How It All Could Be (2009) and Money and the Soul’s Desires: A Meditation (2002).
Stephen is also the subject of Lost Nation Road, a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the wheelhouse of a mystery train, Nights of Grief and Mystery. The world tours are odes to wonder, love letters for the willingness to know endings.
2023 World Tour Stops/ Dates & Tickets
Read more about Stephen at orphanwisdom.com/about