Working with Seniors: Health, Financial, and Social Issues

Chapter 13: Spirituality and Aging

Look around most congregations at worship and witness the courage and persistence of the aged men and women who arrive with walkers and oxygen tanks, often transported by other older people less encumbered by health problems. Sharing pews with noisy babies, children with crayons, bored teens, and distracted parents, they sing and pray, sit in silence, listen to scripture and sermons, rise and sit as they are able, share the Eucharist if Christian, and exit in friendly conversation with fellow travelers. In the hymns, prayers, scripture readings, and sermons, they hear of love and forgiveness, gratitude and hope, despair and lamentation, anger, fear, and awe. In no other community do persons of so many different backgrounds and ages meet regularly to consider the human condition and turn to the sacred for an enduring sense of meaning and purpose in life

(McFadden, 2003).

Introduction

In the last few decades gerontologists have become increasingly aware of the importance of spirituality to the well-being of seniors. Spirituality is difficult to define and describe. It is a concept that is highly personal, often private, and hard to put into words. For most, spirituality is an inward experience.

Gerontologists often define spirituality with a description that came from the 1971 White House Conference on Aging: “the basic value around which all other values are focused, the central philosophy of life—whether religious, antireligious, or nonreligious—which guides a person’s conduct, the supernatural and nonmaterial dimensions of human nature” (Moberg, 1971). While this definition mentions familiar terms and concepts that most people would agree relate to spirituality, currently there is no real consensus on a standardized meaning of the term.

Three common components are included in most definitions of the term (Bouchard, 1997):

• an understanding of self that is defined in the context of relationships to others

• an understanding of a creation story and symbols of faith

• an understanding of a greater power that is outside of the self, yet intimately connected with the sense of self