A Personal Journey of Aging: The Spiritual Dimension
At a certain point, one’s perceptions of aging become inter- twined with perceptions of oneself. In the experience of aging, my credentials get better every day! As a pastoral theologian, I live in a creative tension between the established dogma and practice of my personal faith on the one hand, and the more generic, encompassing spiritual dimension that is presented here without any primary or specific religious connotation on the other hand.
The spiritual dimension is the energy within that strives for meaning and purpose. It is the unifying and integrating dimension of being that includes the experience of transcendence and the mysterium tremendum fascinans, the mystery that is at once overwhelming and fascinating, that renders my existence significant and meaningful in the here and now. It is also a mystery in that it is unmeasurable, unprovable, and lacks universal definition.
A review of my personal history reveals a journey of aging punctuated by a number of milestones that I regard as spiritually significant. I am these life experiences old! They made me what I am. They include my faith commitment and choice of vocation and life partner, as well as other experiences and commitments that have shaped and altered my life at all levels.
Samuel Johnson once remarked, “a hanging has a way of focusing the mind.” So does a diagnosis of cancer, especially if it is of the more lethal variety like malignant melanoma. Some 10 years ago I had such a diagnosis, followed by major surgery and a grim prognosis. As healing miraculously took place in my body and the cancer went into remission, I felt like Abraham Maslow, who described the time after his first heart attack as his “postmortem life.” So with me; every day was now a bonus, and every person in my life more previous and valued. I began to understand what Paul Tillich meant by the phrase, “the eternal now.” Life, faith, and grace seemed to break into my life with greater intensity and sharper focus than ever before. With a greater awareness of my finitude and mortality, time and its passing took on deeper meaning. I was learning and experiencing the difference between chronos, calendar time, and kairos, eschatological time that involves my ultimate destiny. Both have meaning and value and are interwoven into my life in a unifying whole.
During this period, my personal faith orientation and commitments were of particular importance. The salvific symbols and rites of my faith tradition and praxis provided powerful sources of meaning in formulating the existential order of my life at this anxious time. Keeping the door open to the transcendent was crucial for me. This meant putting myself in positions and places where such transcendent experiences could break through. Organ concerts that included music of Bach and Langlais were particularly poignant and soul stirring. Even sunrises and sunsets as well as full moons were events not to be missed, especially sunsets shared with loved ones.
C. G. Jung’s observation (cited in Martin, 1966), “That which youth found and had to find outside of itself, in the second half of life must be found within,” has become increasingly true for me in my personal journey of aging. Disciplined meditation and prayer have taken on freshness and are experienced as energizing and renewing. Priorities in lifestyle and use of time have been altered and rearranged. All of this is happening in the midst of my own continuous aging process. But with a difference. I am learning what Viktor Frankl has stressed concerning the need to keep the door open between immanence and transcendence.
My spirituality, however, does not exist in some holy haze of isolation, but in relationship and consecutiveness, especially with my family and faith community. Special and unique family rituals, for example, have been introduced and have evolved into symbolic and supportive ways of coping with transitions and crises in a universe that is saturated with a blessed ambiguity. The humour and craziness that at times characterize family festive occasions also keep us human and affectionately bonded at many levels, included the spiritual.
The meaning of time and its passing has changed for me. Time past is now more valued. Viktor Frankl maintains “nothing and no- body can deprive us of what we have safely delivered and deposited in the past.” For me, the passing of time is now not erosion but accumulation. The baggage of memories and experiences I now carry on my journey is more complete and full but, surprisingly, not burdensome. I find myself engaged in more reflection and teasing out of meanings of my life from the “storehouse of the past.” A configuration, a mosaic of meanings, begins to take shape and leads me forward into the present and to the very precipice of the future. I have discovered that my basic faith in an Ultimate Being who has brought me to the present can be trusted as I face the uncertain and shadowy future.
My journey of aging has more recently taken on a quality that I find somewhat puzzling but intriguing. It is a subtle but discernible movement toward androgyny, and it has some complementary parallels in my wife, JoAnne. It has its roots, as I can now more readily detect, in earlier stage of my life, but it was often blocked or stifled by more repressive roles and prescribed patterns. This melding of masculine and feminine sensitivities has broadened my perception of and response to life as androgynous qualities have emerged and express themselves more spontaneously. It seems that this phenomenon is related to a more holistic expression and formation of my more authentic humanness that includes the spiritual dimension, and I will be interested to continue to track it in the unfolding years of my adult life.
A physician friend of mine contends that there are at least two times in life when persons ought to be required to go off on a retreat and reflect on the meaning of their lives. One, he suggests, is when we choose our vocation; the other is in older adulthood as we get closer to retirement and experience more poignantly the narrowing boundaries of our lives. I have not yet reached the stage of retirement, but I have begun to experience more and more the narrowing boundaries. In my spiritual journey of aging, I have also come to know myself as an indissoluble amalgam of shadow and light, angelic and demonic, in the paradoxical unity of contraries that constitute my essential humanness. As I age, I have become more fully aware of a centripetal spiritual energy that canters and grounds my life and prevails over the centrifugal divisive forces that are ever present, working to spin out and scatter the fragments of my life. It is this power or dimension, rooted in a trust in an Ultimate Being that enables me to live life at every stage of the life cycle sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity.