Swedish sociologist Lars Tornstam proposed a theory of gerotranscendence, the notion that with age comes a radically different life outlook reflecting a cosmological shift in perception. Tornstam argued that when activity aging theory eclipsed disengagement theory something of vital importance was lost. Disengagement theorists highlighted an inward reflective tendency emerging in later life that denoted a change in how older people saw the world and their places within it. The problem, said Tornstam, was that these older individuals had limited resources for cultivating the new perspective that was emerging in their lives. Activity theory, he argued, for all the good it did, tended to devalue the spiritual growth of the older person, equating religiosity with social withdrawal.
From his large-scale quantitative and qualitative research – a Scandinavian version of the Kansas City study – Tornstam also found a pronounced age-related change. His subjects accepted a more nuanced sense of right and wrong, had greater tolerance for ambiguity and paradox in moral reasoning, and were able to detach themselves from the narrower cultural views of their earlier decades. In short, these individuals experienced ‘‘a new feeling of cosmic communion with the spirit of the universe,’’ an age-triggered self-transformation that Tornstam called gerotranscendence. The Swedish sociologist argued that this was a naturally occurring transition that would be more strikingly evident if our societies (including their religious institutions) gave older people sufficient encouragement and support to make this spiritual passage to a unique late life outlook.
It is around the same time that Tornstam’s articles started appearing in American journals that the spirituality and aging movement began to grow in the United States. The New York State-based Omega Institute started organizing Conscious Aging conferences in 1992 with a host of high-profile figures such as counterculture guru and spiritual author Baba Ram Dass (who had recently discovered his own aging and written a book about it), Jewish mystic Rabbi Zalman Schechter-Shalomi, social activist and Gray Panthers founder Maggie Kuhn, and other visionaries who championed the role of both the sec- ularly wise, politically active senior and the spiritual elder. Though Tornstam was not part of this cast of conscious aging advocates, his research-based theory and Erikson’s model of development supported the views espoused at these conclaves.
In the field of aging, concurrent with this movement, the American Society on Aging (ASA) launched a new constituent unit, the Forum on Religion, Spirituality and Aging (FORSA), which grew quickly in membership. From Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi’s book, From Ageing to Sageing, a number of Spiritual Eldering Institutes were established to do what Tornstam suggested was missing, namely, to nurture older people’s capacity for reaching a new level of development so that they might play new roles in society as spiritual mentors to younger generations.
Scholars, advocates, and religious leaders did not cause people to suddenly want to become spiritual elders. This trend reflected a worldwide revival of religious interest, if not zeal, that also swept into the older population and into the field of aging. The trend has also had a profound impact on expanding mainstream older learner programs to include training in yoga, meditation, and Tai Chi and numerous courses on comparative religion, mysticism, Chinese medicine, ancient and modern mythology, and so on.
