A Moving Experience - A Call for Propetic Witness

 Moving is never fun.  It is even less fun when your time constraints are pressing. Such is the situation I found myself in just 5 weeks ago!  However, the moving experience I write of today is something I came across as I went through some papers. It was originally written as an open letter to Sister Ann Margaret O'Hara, a Sister of Providence. 

During surgery  for a mitral valve repair, Sister suffered a serious stroke. She found herself living in the Sisters' nursing home for the necessary health care supportive services. You can read her story, "A View from the Other Side" published in Engaging Aging  here .

Here is a picture of Sister Ann Margaret, and what I had originally written as an open letter to her.

Dear Sister Ann Margaret,

 Your story which you shared with such clarity and sincerity in Engaging Aging is significant in so many ways. Thank you for sharing it publicly! In exposing the vulnerability you experienced during your time of recovery from a serious medical event, you tell us clearly that you have a passion for the well-being of others, and you express hope that the telling of your story will benefit others.

 You state so clearly that blame is not with this caregiver or that, not with this or that person in authority (religious or otherwise). As you keep pointing to the role of training and the importance of every staff person being steeped in your Congregational values and charism, you tell us that something larger must be examined. Without using the word, you point ultimately to a system that needs to change. You grasp this concept so well from your background and work in systems development, an understanding now deepened and imprinted indelibly through your healthcare-related observations and experiences.

 In telling your story, you have taken the role of prophet. We talk about our call as women religious to the role of prophetic witness, and at times those words may sound vague and hazy. However, as I read your story, I was so reminded of what Walter Bruegemann tells us about the two tasks of the prophet in his book, The Prophetic Imagination. Sandra Schneiders summarized his message well in Finding the Treasure:

The first task of the prophet in speaking the vision is public lamentation. To lament is to declare, not by denunciation or condemnation but by public weeping, that everything is not all right.

 The prophet says that your oppression is not God's plan, that the system does not have minor problems, but that the system itself is a major problem.

Your story, Sister, is one of public weeping, of your saying, without bitterness,  that everything is not all right. You say clearly that the system is a major problem.

The system you describe, which is typical of even good medical model health care, is one that competent, devoted and caring people have been taught in traditional settings as the best way to do their job. These standards of safety and efficiency are taught and earnest learners take it all in and practice it, even though in that very practice, they experience grief and burnout (See Vitale-Aussem, Disrupting the Status Quo of Senior Living: A Mindshift.)

But I hear you saying, as you tell your story, there can be a better way. In fact, a major reason for telling your story is your hope for a better way. You are asking all of us, “Do you like what you see, or do you think some change is in order?” In this, you carry out the second task of the prophet as described by Bruegemann:

The second task of the prophet is to recall God's promises and so, by projecting a vision of an alternative future, engendering hope.

 

I believe that we women religious find ourselves now at a time in our organizational life analogous to 1941 when Sister Bertrande Meyers, D.C. submitted her dissertation entitled The Education of Sisters: A Plan for Integrating the Religious, Social, Cultural and Professional Training of Sisters. Meyers’ work found life in the Sister Formation Conference whose goal was to promote the spiritual, intellectual, social and professional development of women religious. “Sister Lucy” was the iconic young Sister whose integrated development was the focus of the work of this marvelous movement. The normal practice in many Religious Institutes at the time was to send newly professed members, a Congregation’s “Sister Lucy,” out to teach as soon as she was professed. In the majority of cases, “Sister Lucy” was in no way prepared, certified or licensed for her ministry. The mindshift of the Sister Formation Conference changed that to the degree that women religious are and have been recognized as being among the most highly educated of any cohort of women in our country over the past fifty years.

This movement impacted the fastest growing number of Sisters in the two decades following WWII. “Sister Lucy’s” cohort consisted of thousands of young women entering novitiates that were bursting at the seams with their numbers.

Today “Sister Lucy’s” cohort is again living in what was once those burgeoning novitiates, now in many cases, remodeled as part of Institutes’ Retirement Centers. Your story, Sister Ann Margaret, calls us women religious to look with new eyes at our understanding of aging and the manner in which we provide aging services.

What a pivotal opportunity is ours to witness to the entire world the dignity, wonder and gift of life at all stages, made clearly visible in a system that places person above task, that sees strengths over deficits, that honors dignity, security, privacy, and the right to be involved in decision-making. Sister, it calls for the mindshift that you ask for, a transformation of culture from our long-established medical model of healthcare that touts efficiency and order to one that continues to maintain standards while honoring person-first, Congregational charism and Congregational values.

Much as the Sister Formation Conference transformed Sisters’ initial and ongoing formation, the shift to transformative Culture Change in our aging services communities can transform the lives of Sisters and employees alike and provide countercultural, prophetic witness to the larger society about aging in our later years. Your story is a call from which we cannot turn away, a call for all Religious Institutes to look at the movement of Culture Change already being implemented in long-term care communities across the country. It is a call to learn the person-centered values of Culture Change, to seek the required assistance to implement this philosophy of aging and aging services in order to transform our traditional healthcare culture to one that truly is person-centered, prophetic and countercultural in its implementation.

Thank you again, Sister Ann Margaret, for sharing your story so beautifully. Thank you for your call, which I pray will spur all of us to look with new eyes at the systems we unconsciously allow to shape the actions and decisions that so impact the life of each of our elder members.

God speed in your journey to restored full health!

Imelda Maurer, cdp

"Show Me the Doll That Looks Like You"

 

Tracey Gendron, gerontologist, professor and author of “Ageism Unmasked: Exploring Age Bias and How to End It” says it best: “even the most well-intentioned efforts to educate people about age are often misleading and damaging.”

Here are two examples of damaging effects that well-meaning people can inflict on their audiences.

From a website advertising educational resources for Sisters: “As we age, it is expected that we will lose things – health, independence, loved ones and friends, and even meaning.” (Emphasis mine.)

That “it is expected that we will lose meaning” as we age is a shocking statement, a despairing statement, a damaging statement and totally unfounded. Losing meaning in life is not the natural, developmental state of our later years. But that very concept aligns with the ageist belief that our later years are circumscribed by loss and decline. 

A second example of misguided and incorrect understanding of aging in material marketed to Sisters is a program titled, “From Autonomy to Interdependence”. Now, there are some good points in that title, namely acknowledging that at some time we live in a mode of interdependence. Actually, this is true not only when we are physically or cognitively limited, it is true throughout our life. The obvious examples include depending that the corner convenience store will be open so that I can buy the gas I need to get to work, or remembering the panic many experienced when the grocery store shelves were so empty (especially the toilet paper shelf) during the COVID pandemic.

And about trading autonomy for interdependence – Autonomy, according to the Collins online dictionary “is the ability to make your own decisions about what to do rather than being influenced by someone else, or told what to do.”

So, autonomy has to do with choice. It is one of the domains of quality of life. If we have no autonomy, we have a very diminished quality of life.  With cognitive and/or physical decline, a person may not be as independent as before the onset of these conditions. But the opportunities for autonomy remain. I may not be able to dress myself, but I can choose the dress I would like for another to help me put on. I may not be able to drive to see a dear friend, but I can use Zoom, email, telephone, Facebook, etc. to stay connected with that dear friend. Or I may invite her to come, to do the driving I cannot do.

When we read and unthinkingly absorb phrases such as the two I have indicated here, we are deepening within ourselves the false and negative myths of aging.  As a result, we too would react in the same way those young Black children reacted in The Doll Study when they were asked, at the end of their session, “Show me the doll that looks like you.”

(The narrative about The Doll Study and internalized ageism can be found in the first page and a half of a longer piece I wrote. Find it here:here: