01/14/2013
A BOOK REVIEW
SPIRITUAL RESILIENCY AND AGING:
Hope, Relationality, and the Creative Self
By Janet L. Ramsey and Rosemary Blieszner
(Society & Aging Series, Editor John Hendricks, Baywood Publishing Company, Amityville, NY, 2012)
“Certainly practitioners who work with older adults need to be constantly engaged in attempts to increase their sensitivity to and empathy for the psychological and spiritual strength in the people they accompany” (24)
During my first CPE residencies at the University of Minnesota Hospitals I encountered something right out of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion; I called them “Scandinavian Farm Wives”. My visitations included a cancer unit where I seemed to encounter a number of older women who in the sharing of their personal stories would offer a litany of woes that shredded my heart. The depth and breadth of sorrows experienced were mindful of any Greek tragedy or the Book of Job; yet rather than curse God and the day they were born these women would conclude our time together with these words or similar; “But you know pastor, through it all, God has been good.” In those days I was in awe of these saints of the church and wanted to know what it was that they knew.
When as a pastor you are visiting a shut-in and you come away feeling refreshed, or you stop into that hospital room to offer words of comfort and you come away comforted then I would say you have encountered an elder saint of the church. Just being in the presence of these men and women seems to nurture the soul. I tell every young pastor to find these people; nurture a relationship, then listen and learn. watch for and to get to know—those people who they come to offer to comfort of the church I have come to believe that it takes a lifetime to truly appreciate what the gospel offers to us.
Janet Ramsey and Rosemary Blieszner have asked pastors of Lutheran churches in Germany and America to identify those saints in their congregations: 4 men and 4 women in each group. The method is an interview in which the narrative answers are analyzed. These 16 men and women are 65 years and older. They all have World War II as a backdrop of their early formation.
For many of us in ministry research papers are not high on our reading list. But I want to say this is not dry fact and figures displayed as grafts and charts rather this is qualitative research in which the story becomes the vehicle of expression. The method itself is well explained helping us to understand this narrative method derived from the works of Michael White, and Dan McAdams and others who contend that we all sort out the experiences of our life in the form or a story. The analysis of these stories has been influenced by “a feminist, postmodern turn in both psychology and systematic theology…” This perspective allows for the dialectic to move from an emphasis on the polarities such as hope or despair to the greater paradox of both hope and despair becoming the better portrayal. (This recognition of a paradoxical perspective in later life is also echoed in Wendy Lustbader’s book “Life Gets Better: The Unexpected Pleasures of Growing Older and two books AgeSong, and Love Fills In The Blanks: Paradoxes of Our Final Years by Dr. Elizabeth Bugental). It is not a counting up of how often a person attends worship, prays, and / or reads scriptures but takes into consideration the developmental aspects of a lifetime of experience and even transformation (e.g. how is forgiveness demonstrated). One can say that the participants are examples of growing older, growing wiser, and growing more complex – this is not an easily held surface idea of “faith”, but the depth and breadth of hearing, participation, often struggle, reflection and acceptance.
One of the values of this book is that it may make many of us re-examine (and perhaps re-prioritize) aspects of our ministries. The title of the book gives away the researchers findings Hope, Relationality, and the Creative Self. Spiritual Resiliency as demonstrated in the stories told was nurtured through a long standing culture of hope (I’m conscious of how the Eriksons saw this as the foundational outcome of Trust in the first stage of development) This hope is not just grounded in a family of origin, but in a combination of the experience of the church specific and the metanarrative of the Church universal. A realistic Hope is part of the Church in which we participate – this is not a saccharine optimistic all is wonderful view, but the wonderfully complex Lutheran perspective of our being Saint and Sinner in an Already and Not Yet Kingdom of God.
Relationality theologically is for some of us the heart of Christianity. God is relational as demonstrated by the Trinity (I like how this was portrayed in the novel, The Shack). God’s ongoing relationship with creation has been part of our metanarrative, which results in a personal God demonstrated both in the long practiced tradition of prayer and the Christian understanding of the “incarnation”. Change becomes an aspect of our experience of relationship with the divine, whether it be understood as epiphanies of that which already is, but has been hidden, or becomes better understood with maturity, or as process theology suggests that it is in the mutuality of the relationship that God allows God’s self to be changed. Whatever the source, the God that we find ourselves in relationship with in late life is a different God than in our youth.
Relationality in psychology is the connectedness and belonging that we understand as part of our human need. Our faith in the personal aspect of God as experienced through the incarnation of the community of faith, the body of Christ, the local congregation allows us to be part of something greater than ourselves, to be not only accepted but to be needed and valued. But the complexity of Relationality over time is that it also includes disappointment, betrayal, and loss; not once but multiple times. How do people integrate these experiences into their stories? They do it creatively.
One of the things I appreciate about this book is that each chapter ends with a paragraph titled “IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH AND PRACTICE”. The book is worth its academic pricing, solely for these reflective paragraphs on the implications toward pondering and practice.
It has been noted by others that God was in the midst of creating (being creative) when we are told that we were made in the image of God. “In Christianity, the language of imago dei—the image of God—is used to describe the Relationality at the heart of both God’s life and the life of humankind”(p.81). Our imaginations is our greatest source of creativity. We are able to see connections between God and ourselves, God and others, ourselves with others, self with self over time, and ourselves with all creation—we can imagine God creating Leviathan-a monster that is terrifying for the sport of it. We can imagine ourselves responding to the terrors of storm and flood with a proclamation of “glory”, we can imagine receiving and offering forgiveness for that which at one time we would have considered unforgivable. We can take an image (imago) developed for survival and apply it to a new situation. And when with time the imago no longer fits we are able to create not only a new image, but a new narrative. We can take the repeated circumstances of life and create new responses.
I’d like to make a connection here with Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upwards: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life; Rohr describes the first half of our life as engaged in creating our identity for the exterior world; then some form of crisis of health, circumstances, life-satisfaction or identity shifts us to an exploration and a reprioritizing of our inner life. Imagination allows us to create the space in which we can laugh at ourselves; “that this in turn leads to emotional repair and release, especially during times of stress” (p.98). I loved the finding that humor and play were often found in spiritually resilient people. Laughing at ourselves may open us to forgiveness – forgiveness allows us to imagine a new relationship – an embracing (an important metaphor in this research). Laughter and humor allows us to feel safe enough to change. Transformation is often marked by a change in the story and humor may be precisely the source of a new perspective (a renewal of Hope and a healing of Relationality) of what we prioritize as important.
“As gerontologist William Randall (2008) wrote, many older adults end up with overly constricted stories of who they are, with “closed-in, tightly edited narrative that effectively, curtails their curiosity, their interest in the future, their will to live. Sadly, this often happens just at that stage in life when precisely the opposite is what they need: a story that is sufficiently fluid and open, substantial and dynamic, to supply them with a lively sense of meaning” (Randall, W. L. Letting Our Stories Go: A Narrative Perspective on Spirituality in Later Life. Presented at the Third North American Conference on Spirituality and Social Work, p.11). One of the tasks of counselors and therapists, then, is to encourage deep, fluid, and nuanced narratives” (p.146).
The last third of the book is really about the spiritual disciplines, such as prayer and gratitude that encourages reflection; that help to create a narrative that is “sufficiently fluid and open while establishing an identity that is “substantial and dynamic” within relationships with self, others, and the divine that provides “a lively sense of meaning”.
I highly recommend this book.
