Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It

Aging has an important spiritual purpose.

Photo by Sies Kranen on Unsplash

Our society has a bad attitude about aging. This is well established. Youth gets the glory, old age seems gory. Most of the familiar, negative stereotypes about old age – feebleness, failing organs, decrepitude – are about the physical aspects. But a strong argument can be made that the aging process involves more than physical change. While our bodies are showing wear and tear, other non-physical traits are strengthening: patience, problem-solving skills, perhaps even wisdom.

Some psychologists and religious leaders even suggest that older adults have important work to do. That work, says Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, is “to complete their life journey, harvest the wisdom of their years, and transmit a legacy to future generations.”

Schachter-Shalomi and co-author Ronald S. Miller wrote From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Revolutionary Approach to Growing Older. In it, they offer a new paradigm of aging that they call “spiritual eldering.” With our extended longevity, they write, we have the opportunity to offset our physical diminishments by developing extended consciousness. In other words, elders can become “sages,” offering their experience, mature judgment, and wisdom for the good of society.

The authors are neither the first nor the last to discuss spirituality in the lives of older adults. Many social scientists have noted that older adults tend to show increasing interest in spiritual concerns. Many have also suggested that old age has a purpose. “A human being would certainly not grow to be 70 or 80 years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species to which he belongs,” wrote the famous psychologist Carl Jung. Erik H. Erickson theorized that the eighth and final stage of life is when a person either achieves “integrity,” an acceptance of their life with all its past blessings and mistakes, or falls into despair.

What I find attractive about Schacter-Shalomi and Miller is their clear directions for how to pursue a spiritual path and their insistence that spiritual work is a critical task to tackle as the end of life draws nearer. I also respect Schacter-Shalomi’s bona fide credentials as a sage. A rabbi, teacher, and spiritual innovator, he was known for his work bridging different faith traditions. He was a revered leader in the Jewish renewal movement, which infuses traditional Jewish thought with the wisdom and spiritual disciplines of Buddhism, Sufism, and other traditions.

Three Tasks

Schacter-Shalomi saw three major tasks for older adults. Completing our life journey, he wrote, involves facing our mortality. An important step in that process is recontextualizing the past – reviewing our life experiences in order to see disappointing episodes not as failures but as sources of wisdom. Additionally, we need to forgive ourselves and others.

Harvesting wisdom means practicing spiritual techniques such as meditation, journaling, and life review to integrate life experiences, deepen understanding of self, and cultivate wisdom. The idea is to move beyond the roles and limitations society has placed on us and to connect with our deeper, authentic selves.

The final task, transmitting a legacy, follows from feeling a deeper connection to past and future generations, recognizing patterns and cycles in history and in our personal lives, developing greater capacity for balanced judgment, and finding the motivation to act as a steward of the earth and its resources for generations to come.

Consider how these tasks play out in a contemporary world plagued by ageism, a world that judges old people as elderly, rather than as potential elders.

Gerontologist and educator Jeannette Leardi tackles this problem in her recent book (which I highly recommend) Aging Sideways: Changing Our Perspectives on Getting Older. “We need to fill the spiritual void in [older adults’] lives and in our whole society that results from not recognizing the moral contributions that elders are uniquely capable of making,” she writes. “For if we don’t, we rob them, and ourselves, of opportunities to live more meaningful lives in all kinds of ways.”

All of which is to suggest that if you are not reflecting on your life and seeking “integrity” by integrating your past and what wisdom you draw from it, then you have some work ahead of you.