Friday, May 25, 2018

"Diminishment" is a terrible word to use to descrie older adults.


'The winter season of our prayer life is a mixture of blessing and diminishment that also describes the winter season of our life.' Those are words from the Retreat Director I heard just this morning.

This prayerful woman has been leading a group of almost 50 Sisters in a retreat whose theme has been "The Seasons of Our Life". Of course I cringed when I heard her use that "D" word. It was another instance of how all of us are exposed to the prejudices of ageism, how we internalize them, absorb them absent any evaluation, and in cases like this, further propagate these internalized prejudices to other victims.

What pained me most in hearing that "D" word used as allegedly describing later life was for my other Sisters gathered there, all of us clearly in the second half of life. At a subconscious level, at least, taking such words in without evaluating them results in a sense of "being less"; it may also generate unexamined feelings of shame for being "diminished", for being old.

The GOOD NEWS, the whole truth about the aging process is waiting to be preached!  The solid data from the fields of gerontology and of the psychology of aging MUST be used as the grounding for a spirituality for all of us in the second half or second third of life. This grounding is the only approach that will provide a spirituality of aging that holds integrity.

Without a marriage of sound gerontological and psychological data with a paired grounding  in  Scripture, we are left with messages about aging and spirituality that, at their worst, are harmful to our self-concept of our future selves  (and therefore harmful to our well-being along several dimensions), and, at best, offer only pious piffle.

Where is that person who is going to preach the GOOD NEWS, that is, the WHOLE TRUTH to my sisters?


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