Column on Aging

Pastors spend time in nursing home and assisted living centers. As a baby boomer, I am part of a generation that loathed and loathes growing older, as that was assigned to our parents’ generation. (Recall the motto, don’t trust anyone over 30?) To my sneering delight, the oldest baby boomers turn 72 this year. For me, aging is a daily reminder, and I took my first mental acuity test  this week to provide a baseline for the future. To use continuing education money frugally, I am in the process of an on-line course on spirituality and aging through the Oates Institute in Louisville.

Reengagement Theory points us to a great failing in our work with the aging. To the  extent is a time of wisdom, we do not provide nearly enough opportunities for that to be shared with younger people. It helps to mitigate one of the primary losses in aging, the gradual  diminution of independence and the rise of dependence.

Activity Theory may reflect a cultural assumption that everyone needs to be frenetically busy. It is obviously not good to allow people to settle into age with having an opportunity to engage in activities they enjoy or to discover new ones, but a state of placidity also accompanies aging at times, where people don’t need to be checking their calendar for the next three upcoming appointments. At the same time, we do start to disengage form some attachments and concerns. That is how the elderly have a healthier, long-term perspective than younger people often do.

Wisdom as a function of age helps us put together different strands of our life into some sort of coherent whole. Wisdom allows us to call old age  golden. Making meaning of one’s situation is part of that wisdom. When events are seen as utterly random or chaotic they inhibit a sense of hope in dealing with them.  If we are able to place them into an appropriate framework for our character and thoughts, then we “make sense” of our situation.

The limitations of age are rarely golden. Accepting limitation and renegotiating identity is a critical facet. Baby boomers struggle to appear younger, but find aging to be an assault to their identity as youthful. Already evidence is developing that baby boomers are being difficult residents in assisted living and health care situations. I do not wish to minimize the courage it takes to grow old and face such an accumulation of losses.

I want to lift up music. It seems that the music of our youth has real impact on us through the years, so music from that time brings us back to that time in our lives. In some ways, it remains our favorite music, and we tend to like contemporary artists who remind us of the music of our youth. Locally, Dave Foraker gives a great gift to  residents of facilities by sharing his “bluesified” approach to old songs. In the recent animated film Coco, music provides the key to unlock the grandmother’s fading memory at a critical juncture of the film.

Religious or “spiritual” beliefs and practices have demonstrable impact on us as we age. They are correlated o positively with many measures of health and well-being. For instance some of the fear of death is lessened by anticipating one “: beautiful reward.” Negative, difficult, stressful life events can be reframed in light of one’s religious perspective as a trial, a test, an opportunity for growth and depth in prayer. If the culture insists that aging makes us less in comparison to our fixation on youth, then standing firm on being a child of a God who can easily look through physical changes to the self within is a real power.