Spirituality, Meaning, and the Experience of Aging

Abstract

The author draws on his work as a gerontologist and his own journey. Spirituality is a popular topic now. For example, as of October 2007, Amazon.com listed 130,595 book titles dealing with spirituality. People over 40 are primary consumers of literature, workshops, retreats, and personal growth programs concerning spirituality. is a major focus and motivator for large numbers of the people gerontologists seek to study, serve, and design programs and policies for. Yet gerontology as a field of knowledge and practice has lagged far behind its target population in terms of understanding the importance of spirituality for aging people and developing complex concepts and language about spirituality. In this article, illustrate some ways of thinking about and discussing spirituality-what it is, why it is important, and how it influences the experience of aging and vice versa-based on twenty years of research and my personal experience. hope that in presenting these views, will create a large conceptual space within which readers can approach the other articles in this issue of Generations. WHAT Is SPIRITUALITY? As it is used today, the term spirituality refers to an inner, subjective region of life that revolves around individual experiences of being, transcending the personal self, and connecting with the sacred. Conceptions of the sacred range from nondeistic ideas such as the Buddhist Void to the beyond of Meister Eckhart and Paul Tillich, to personified conceptions of God in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, to naturalistic conceptions of the sacred as residing in the planet Earth. Spiritual experience and growth rest on the development of human capacity to perceive and organize occurrences of intangible spiritual elements of various types of experience. For example, whether people experience wonder upon seeing Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon depends to some extent on how open they are to this experience within themselves. Wonder is not inherent in the falls or the canyon but is the result of a response to these places by an individual. Within the individual, this very basic human experience of wonder is then converted into perception and language and is stored in memory-and perhaps labeled as a spiritual experience. Experiences labeled spiritual are usually described by respondents in terms of qualities like wonder, compassion, clarity, stillness, silence, or expansiveness. Spiritual experiences can occur through various avenues, such as the senses, consciousness/awareness, thought, or transcendence. Spiritual practices are activities designed in part to cultivate and develop these various avenues of spiritual experience. (For more detail on these concepts, see Atchley, forthcoming.) Part of spiritual experience is based on perception of intangible or ineffable aspects of stimuli. Another part is based on the developed capacities of the perceiver-for experiencing pure being, for experiencing a level of awareness that dispassionately witnesses the I who acts, and for experiencing a connection with a being or web of being far greater than individual existence. Of course, as noted above, to perceive and categorize experiences as spiritual requires concepts and language for thinking and talking about what spirituality is. Historically, people have most often found the needed vocabulary in religious cultures-but certainly not exclusively. For example, Roof (1999) writes that a more universalistic, non-religious vocabulary of spirituality that is being used by people both within and outside religious contexts. As people develop their capacities for spiritual experience, they also usually develop their capacity for understanding a bigger range of their experiences as fitting into a meaningful spiritual context. Some people develop their spiritual capacities spontaneously and nonconsciously. But many people engage in a conscious and deliberate effort to nurture and develop these capabilities and to increase the proportion of their total experience that they see as spiritual. …

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