The Spirituality of Aging
A spirituality of aging is a way of being that reflects a deep, authentic, and compelling engagement in understanding and merging with the essence of life. A spiritual response to life is simultaneously intellectual, emotional, and biological: spirituality seeks to evoke positive states of being in which we embraced by an urgency of wonder that shelters us with deep feelings of significance, unity, awe, contentment, acceptance, and awareness. In this sense, spirituality addresses our innate need to celebrate being alive.
In losing my elderly parents I entered into a spiritual terrain that was completely unfamiliar. My experiences in being with and supporting my parents during their final years and their eventual deaths thrust me into the midst of a spiritual crucible that felt harsh and relentless.
Spirituality also recognizes the trial and tribulations of life including loss, illness, regret, grief, bereavement, and death. In this sense, spirituality helps us to reconcile the inevitable veil of tears that visits us from time to time during our lifetime. The spiritual nature of grief and bereavement is to find a way to reconcile our loss, retrieve our own authenticity, and to invite us into conversation with meaning and purpose.
All life is imbued with impermanence. That is to say, impermanence is the essential element that brings spirituality into intimate proximity with aging. Aging as a source of spiritual guidance serves to remind us of our unavoidable destiny. Though we sometimes recoil from exploring death and dying in a meaningful and purposeful way, these harsher elements of life require our attention and care since they offer deep insight in the nature of our own existence.
The spirituality of aging is an idea that may continue to gain in popularity. A new and more sensitive sensibility about aging seems to be emerging. The media are beginning to embrace various aspects and issues associated with the aging population. The more intimate and difficult aspects of aging are beginning to become more commonplace in the news and entertainment industries. For example, in the movie The Way, we are presented with a sensitive and compelling journey into the spiritual landscape of a father experiencing the loss of his son.
All spirituality represents an effort to forge a close bond with essential elements such as beauty, resilience, gratitude, and love. An essential task in embracing a spirituality of aging is to find the beauty and good in aging, while learning the lessons hidden within it’s more mercurial and painful realities. Cicero’s On Old Age is an oration that, while not necessarily focused on spirituality, deeply embraces of the sensibility of aging spiritually.
