Embracing the Vocation of Elderhood within a Congregation:
The Integral
Years: Psychology of Emerging Elderhood.
Much of the impetus for my study of elderhood as vocation came originally from the teachings of Donald L. Gelpi,
S.J., specifically his theology of the human person (Gelpi, 1978). Gelpi
outlined stages of faith, as identified by James Fowler, Sam Keen, and others,
and connected them to human development theories of, notably, Erik Erikson and
Carl Jung.
Gelpi showed how the stages of the
human life cycle and the stages of faith development could illuminate our
understanding of an individual human person’s growth in faith. Further, he showed how those individual
life cycles could interact through the gifts of the Holy Spirit as well as the
temperaments and God-given personality types with which each human person is
endowed. Life transformations, and shifts between stages of faith, can occur
not only in religious experience but also in moral, social-political, intellectual,
and emotional spheres. (Gelpi, 1978)
From that study I came away with an
appreciation for the individuality and complementarity of human development,
including the possibilities for a variety of experiences of God in and
throughout a life cycle. Growth in faith often bears its finest fruit not until
late middle age or early late adulthood.
Life Span Development
Erik H. Erikson, working with Joan
Erikson and others, developed a theory of life–cycle stages, which grew to
encompass eight stages throughout the lifespan, from infancy to older old age.
Each stage of this cycle represents a particular phase of psychosocial
development, including the basic conflicts the personality confronts.
Unresolved issues continue to follow the individual through life and color
later stages. The basic issues that arise at the earlier stages are
recapitulated in the senior years.
The stages, with their basic
conflicts and emerging strengths, are:
Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development
I. Infancy: Basic
Trust vs. Basic Mistrust. HOPE
II. Early Childhood: Autonomy
vs. Shame, Doubt. WILL.
III. Play Age: Initiative
vs. Guilt. PURPOSE
IV. School Age: Industry
vs. Inferiority. COMPETENCE
V. Adolescence: Identity
vs. Identity Confusion. FIDELITY
VI. Young Adulthood: Intimacy
vs. Isolation. LOVE
VII. Adulthood: Generativity
vs. Stagnation. CARE
VIII. Old Age: Integrity
vs. Despair, disgust. WISDOM
(Erikson, 1982: 32–33,
56–57)
Hope, will, purpose, competence,
fidelity, love, care, and wisdom: these are the virtues, or ego strengths,
which can be gained in each stage, as the individual human person encounters a
series of crises, or challenges, which may be resolved positively and build on
each other: trust, autonomy, initiative, industry, identity, generativity, and
integrity. Or they may not be.
Adverse outcomes may include mistrust, shame, doubt, guilt, inferiority,
identity confusion, isolation, stagnation, self–absorption, despair, and disgust.
Each of these crises and virtues and potential dangers has its primary phase
but all also recur in each stage.
These are the standard eight
stages. To them Joan Erikson added a ninth (Erikson, 1997):
IX. Older Old Age, recapitulation of earlier conflicts, possibility
of gerotranscendence. Joan Erikson speaks of elders, people in their eighties
and nineties, coming “to terms with the dystonic [negative] elements in their
life experiences in the ninth stage.” (Erikson, 1997: 114). The hope she holds
out is of gerotranscendence, (Erikson, 1997: 124) and she quotes the definition
proposed by Lars Tornstam and his colleagues:
Simply put, gerotranscendence is a
shift in meta perspective, from a materialistic and rational view of the world
to a more cosmic and transcendent one, normally accompanied by an increase in
life satisfaction. Gerotranscendence is regarded as the final stage in a
possible natural progression towards maturation and wisdom. (Tornstam)
Stage IX, Older Old Age, can been
seen as an extension or refinement of stage VIII, in facing the end–task of
preparation for death, preparation for mortality and eternity. But should this
be the task of only older old age? Perhaps that is where it most frequently and
most compellingly falls, in the course of time, but as part of the work of the
church should we not prepare others and ourselves, at all ages of life, for
mortality and immortality, through ritual – funerals, festivals (saints’ days)
– and preaching? “We proclaim his death until he comes.” (1 Corinthians 11:26)
For our purposes the seventh and
eighth stages, and the transition between them, are the most apposite. This
transition between adulthood and old age is the time Mary Catherine Bateson
describes as “Adulthood II” (Bateson) and Peter Laslett describes as the “Third
Age” (Laslett). This can be a harvest time of liberation, a celebration of
generativity and a commencement of integration – or, as the Eriksons pointed
out, of stagnation and a mounting despair and increasing disgust.
Stage VII. Adulthood:
Generativity vs. Stagnation
The seventh stage is characterized
by the challenge to overcome stagnation with generativity, developing the
personality strength identified as care. This generativity is not simply the
creation of biological progeny: it includes any effort to extend the scope of
one's creative energies beyond the self to the betterment of others.
“Live first for others” might well serve as the motto for this stage.
Perpetuation of something larger than one’s self – a sense of meaning and
purpose beyond seeing to the service of one's own needs and desires – becomes a
key to life.
Indeed, decades ago I remarked that
happy grandchildren were a sign of a well–lived life. The friend I said this to
recently introduced me to one of her own happy grandchildren. We can all have
“happy grandchildren” if we do not confine the set to our own progeny. This is
one of the basic insights to be gleaned from the development through the ages
of understanding the promise to Abram that his children would be as many as the
stars. “‘Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count
them.’ And He added, ‘So shall your offspring be.’” (Genesis 15:5. JPS)
Generativity is not simply about
genetic progeny. The apostle to the Gentiles, Paul, drew on the promise
inherent in John the Baptist's remark that God could raise up children to
Abraham “from these stones.” (Matthew 3:9)
“Informing the developmental
challenges of integrity vs. despair is the hope ‘that we may gain a wise heart’
(Psalm 90:12) in late adulthood and finish our life span in a manner that is a
testimony to our faith.” (Kelcourse: 17)
In Erikson’s view, we live
faithfully by negotiating life’s predictable crises and finding in them
opportunities for greater trust, a stronger will and sense of purpose, with
confidence in our competence and fidelity as we mature.
“Living faithfully in adulthood
allows us to love and care, and gives us a heart of wisdom. Through faith we
express our capacity for mutuality in relation to others and, ultimately, in
relation to God.” (Kelcourse: 36)
Generativity, Erikson writes,
“always invites the possibility of an energetic shift to productivity and creativity in the service of the generations.” (Erikson, 1982: 53)
Transition between Stages VII
and VIII
Part of the job of moving from
middle adulthood to later adulthood – that transition between Erikson’s stages
VII and VIII – is coming to accept the life one has had as the life that one
will have, and yet understanding that “it is never too late” to develop
character and undergo continuing faith transformation (or to grow in faith and
wisdom).
This phase of life allows for not
only a developmental task transition from generativity to the wisdom born of
integrative reflection on, and acceptance of, experience but also offers the
potentiality of a faith shift from one earlier stage of faith to another and
possibly accompanied by a parallel moral development. The transition from
adulthood to old age can be a fruitful time. And it can involve painful
realizations and new insights.
Stage VIII. Old Age:
Integrity vs. Despair
The challenge of old age, in
psychosocial development, is to reconcile the issue of integrity vs. despair.
This task, properly accomplished, results in wisdom. Integrity involves the
acceptance of the inevitability of the life one has had. Hence “Erikson’s
description of an elder as someone who has ‘come to the point of being able to
understand his place in the world and the life he has lived in it.”’ (Richmond:
48)
An elder, in terms of psychosocial development, is a
person who has achieved (successfully accomplished) the life task of integrity,
that is, reconciling the crisis between self–acceptance and despair, which
resolves in wisdom.
Others may indeed have rejected – or failed to
confront – this developmental task and receded into “dogmatism, a compulsive pseudointegrity that, where linked to
undue power, can become coercive orthodoxy.” (Erikson 1997:64) Others may
experience this fragile rigidity, and find themselves on the receiving end of
angry assertions, which are being brandished as a replacement for considered
argument.
Anger, anxiety, frustration,
fearfulness, and depression – these accompaniments to loss, decline in health
or personal power, and the inevitable advance of mortality – may be reflected
beyond the homes of the elderly. While it is those who are coming to the end of
their days with an unexamined or static faith who are most likely to arrive at
this place of anxiety, the factors that provoke negative emotional responses
have an impact on all elderly. Just as those negative responses do. Anger,
anxiety, fearfulness, and despair: these are the manifestations of a failure at
life’s last developmental tasks.
Review of life – reflection on
life’s experiences, taking an inventory of the past – happens for people when
they confront their mortality, or personal failure. This can occur earlier in
life, if illness or tragedy strikes or external forces intervene. In old age a
review of life’s challenges and gained strengths – or accumulated weaknesses
and disappointments – may be a prominent feature. Then the challenge will be to
accept life as it was and has been – and to welcome the future with hope.
Dag Hammarskjöld, on an early page
of Markings, his aphoristic private
journal, wrote:
Tomorrow we shall meet,
Death and I—
And he shall thrust his sword
Into one who is wide awake.
But in the meantime how grievous
the memory
Of hours frittered away.
But later he came to a resolution, a sense of gratitude and
acceptance:
“— Night is drawing nigh—”
For all that has been— Thanks!
To all that will be— Yes!
(Hammarskjöld: 6, 83)
Structural Development and
Stages of Faith
Another, quite different,
theoretical school offers complementary insights into human development.
Following the work of Jean Piaget, structural development theorists emphasize
cognitive development.
The stages of structural change are
seen as sequential, logical, invariant, and universal. “Faith in the
understanding of structural development has to do with the ability to find and
make meanings as the sequential phases of our lives unfold.” (Kelcourse: 25)
Structural theorists have found
that stability, not change, is dominant for much of adult life, and for many,
progress only goes so far. Is this a tragedy or realism? Accepting others the
way they are, where they are, is itself part of the wisdom that comes with the
transformation of the aging process into a journey into elderhood, from simply
accepting age as fate to embracing elderhood as vocation. “In a structural system,” Elizabeth
Liebert reminds us, “there is no theoretical necessity for change.”
Without sufficient dissonance to
require a new structure, the person will not change stages. Therefore, stage
change does not inevitably result from advancing age. In fact, substantial
empirical data suggests that many adults do not change structural stages after
their early twenties. Because stage change in adults is relatively rare,
permanent developmental equilibrium is quite possible, and a single transition
over the entire period of adulthood is not out of the question. Therefore,
though simplistic attempts to move people to more complex stages will most
likely prove futile, developmentally sensitive environments can create a
context that encourages change. (Liebert: 30)
Structural stages are stable,
representing as they do a whole outlook on life; and yet under certain
circumstances they may become inadequate to experience, and a new way of seeing
life may be sought as a result. “Certain predictable or unpredictable life
tasks, such as leaving home or receiving a diagnosis of cancer, may provide a
context for constructing a new meaning-system.” (Liebert: 31)
It is the work of the church, not
to push or provoke these occasions, but to receive those who experience them in
a community of welcome, of hospitality and insight, so as to assist the people
undergoing transformation, to help them bear into the world – their world – a
new and richer way of seeing that world.
Drawing upon such psychological
systems as the aforementioned, including structural development theories, and
upon extensive research interviews, James Fowler and his colleagues developed a
sequence of stages of faith development.
Fowler's Structural Developmental Stages of Faith (Fowler, 1992a: 16–17)
0. Primal faith (infancy)
1. Intuitive–projective faith (early childhood)
2. Mythic–literal faith (childhood and beyond)
3. Synthetic–conventional faith (adolescence and beyond)
4. Individuative–reflective faith (young adulthood and
beyond)
5. Conjunctive faith (early mid–life and beyond)
6. Universalizing faith (mid–life and beyond)
James Fowler puts his finger on the
desire to reach a final integrated understanding and conception of life in
faith. Yet at the same time as he identifies the stages of faith as sequential,
Fowler cautions that this is not a way to judge people who are different from
ourselves but a way to understand each other.
One reflection on the Fowler stages
of faith is the reminder that not everyone proceeds through every stage of the
sequence. Among adult congregation members will be people who have come to rest
at any stage beyond the primal. These can be of similar age and appearance.
Impatience for all to reach an idealized stage (4 or 5 or 6) will not make it
happen. Serenity, courage, and
wisdom should be the pastor’s watchwords
here.
Properly used, Fowler advises,
stage theories should not pigeon-hole or stereotype:
The stage theories should
facilitate our understanding of persons whose ways of being in faith may differ
significantly from our own. It is possible to point to persons of serenity,
courage, and genuine faith commitment who would be described, even as adults,
in terms of any stage from intuitive projective to universalizing, inclusively.
(Fowler, 1992b: 370)
Present in the same congregation
will probably be older people at different stages of faith. In other words,
most folks will not be at the same place. Each stage represents a way of making
meaning of the world and finding purpose within it. What the pastoral leader
may wish to focus on is not expectation that people will “move on” from their
current stage but preparedness to guide those people who are experiencing
transitions, to making them in a healthy and life–giving way.
Congregations and Stage Theory
Fowler points out that
congregations may not only have people within them who are at different stages
but asks an important question for further study: “the question of whether
congregations exhibit what I have called ‘modal developmental levels,’
expectable levels of development in adult faith.” (Fowler, 1992b: 382) If,
then, the characteristic level of a congregation's leaders is stage 3, “the
synthetic–conventional stage of faith and the interpersonal stage of selfhood,”
this will color the experience of the whole congregation.
“Persons best described by these
stages feel that their very selfhood is constituted by their roles and their
relationships. Such persons long for harmony and conflict–free living in the
community of faith. The maintenance of peace and the restoration of good
feelings and unity within the community frequently loom as far more important
to them than dealing with issues that might cause conflict.” (Fowler, 1992b:
375–376)
“The underlying metaphor for
religious community most commonly held by persons described here is that of the
ideal or romanticized extended family.” (Fowler, 1992b: 376) This is an
attractive, and at the same time limiting, metaphor. Continued protestations by parish
leaders, “we are a family,” indicate a strong desire to function at this level.
For parishioners at stage 3, an invitation to recognize the possibility of a
differentiated perspective may evoke anxieties about the destabilization of
identity, of self in relation to others, that might come with a stage
transition. “Persons in this stage are likely to experience a special kind of
crisis at times of loss or threat to their central relationships and roles.”
(Fowler, 1992b: 377)
Implications for pastoral
leadership include cultivating an awareness of where people are, as well as a
vision of what they might become, as a faith community, and embracing an
opportunity to practice the virtues of elderhood, including serenity, courage,
and wisdom. As colleague Robert Dietel pointed out to me (in conversation,
November 13, 2013) for a congregation to work toward this vision may require
substantial innovation and often uncomfortable effort.
Family Systems
“All happy families are alike; each
unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (Tolstoy) However, some patterns are
discernible. From family systems theory we gain insights useful here.
Congregations function like family systems. The question is: how healthily do
they function?
The same qualities that allow for
‘familiness’ (that is, stability) in the first place are precisely what hinder
change (that is, less stability) when the family system is too fixed. (Friedman,
1985: 25)
Differentiation (maturity) means
the capacity of a family member to define his or her own life’s goals and
values apart from surrounding togetherness pressures, to say ‘I’ when others
are demanding ‘you’ and ‘we.’ It includes the capacity to maintain a
(relatively) nonanxious presence in the midst of anxious systems, to take
maximum responsibility for one’s own destiny and emotional being. It can be
measured somewhat by the breadth of one’s repertoire of responses when
confronted with crisis. (Friedman, 1985: 27)
Where inability to remain
nonanxious, or to differentiate oneself from one’s peer group, would seem to
indicate a lack of the gifts of growth in faith and in maturity required in a
ministry of elderhood, the presence of these qualities would point to the
possibility of a call to elderhood. It follows that in the family system of
congregational life, as in one’s own household, there is a role for leaders,
including elders, who exhibit the ability to “maintain the kind of nonanxious
presence needed to keep the family on a course for change.” But, Friedman
warns, “Anxious systems are less likely to allow for differentiated leaders,
while leaderless systems are more likely to be anxious... It is the maintaining
of self–differentiation while remaining a part of the family that optimizes the
opportunities for fundamental change.” (Friedman, 1985: 29)
An interim minister recently
observed:
Churches don’t cling to the status
quo just because they’re recalcitrant; they cling to the status quo because
change feels disadvantageous. The fear of losing something trumps any
expectation of new benefits. In one sense, change is not just a spiritual
hurdle, it’s a challenge to something that’s hardwired biologically. (Bullock)
Transition into Elderhood
By age 55 and older, many of life’s developmental tasks have been
confronted, with lingering effects – whether in success or failure.
In late middle age, adults begin to
turn from the concerns of generativity vs. stagnation and self–absorption, and
may have gained the attendant virtue (ego strength) of care for others. This
positive task of generativity, provision for progeny, progeny understood in the
wide sense of future generations and faraway peoples, gradually gives way in
old age to a more interior struggle, a journey to integrity, as the person
reflects on experiences of life and comes to terms with them.
The challenge, to all of us who are
growing older, is this: Do we accept the life we have lived as the only one
that has been given us? Do we have the willingness to accept grace and receive
forgiveness, to be blessed however undeservingly and to be willing, further, to
extend that blessing to others?
The ongoing quest for the meaning
and purpose of life is now in part reflective. The focus is on vocation,
calling, in a new phase of life. How have we responded to the calling inherent
in our humanity, in manhood or womanhood, and specifically in our calling to
become the individual human persons we are called to be? Can we respond to that
call, now, as the persons we are, rather than the persons we had hoped to be?
It is true, as it was in ancient
days, that there comes a time in life when a man or woman is no longer
contending for the highest rung that can be reached on a career ladder, is no
longer the householder providing for the comforts of family and the raising of
children, is no longer the active executive making day–to–day decisions, but
has reached a place with different tasks and callings. These new tasks and
callings may be voluntary. As one pastoral elder in his 80s said to me: “At my
age a person knows what they are good at and that is what they do.” (Herbert
O'Driscoll, personal conversation, January 30, 2010) Others just come. And so
some, perceiving the change, step back from active executive leadership and
“take their place at the council fire” among the acknowledged elders of the
community, offering wisdom and insight gained by reflection on experience.
Some folks will have worked through
the issues of maturity as charted by Erik and Joan Erikson. Others will have
stopped somewhere along the way. Indeed the Eriksons do not hold out the
expectation that all will or even must reach the final stage of the cycle, as
if it were the top rung of a ladder, or advancement to top rank. This charting
of stages is intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive, of human
development.
Sources as diverse as the
psychologist James Fowler and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor speak of fullness as a benison of living. The letter to the Ephesians
refers to the end or goal of life as a growing in faith – until we
all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become
mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. (Ephesians 4:13. NIV)
Fullness, completion, perfection in
life, a rounding-out of one’s years, in a way still keeping faith and finding
joy, is a blessing we hope for, a goal we strive for, and sometimes reach.
In all humility we might call the
story of growth in faith a journey toward holiness, seeking completion as human
persons. Indeed, Donald Nicholl, as he taught and wrote on holiness in world
religions, quoted the saying of Léon Bloy, “There is only one sadness, the
sadness of not being a saint.”
Ordinarily we allow ourselves to be
saddened by failures of every kind, the failure to become so famous as we had
once dreamed of being, the failure to be rich or beautiful or a model of
health. All these failures, and endless others, are constant and nagging
sources of sadness to us throughout our lives. But when we reach the end of our
lives we shall realize that none of these things which have caused us so much
heartache are really cause for ultimate sadness – none of them matters any
longer. The only sadness, now, is the sadness of not being a saint. (Nicholl:
28)
There is tragedy in human beings
not reaching their human potential, not becoming in fullness of being what God
is calling them to become. In reaching toward that fullness, however, there is
joy.
When I worked in marketing, people
would ask me what I did and I would say, “marketing.” They would respond, “Oh!
You are in sales.” No, I would respond. In marketing we do not sell anything,
we create the conditions in which sales can occur.
When I became a pastor, people
would ask me what I do and I would say, “I’m a pastor.” Sometimes they would
respond, “Oh! Are you going to try to convert me?” And I might respond, “We
create the conditions in which conversions may occur.”
Of course by conversions I did not
simply mean the stereotype of instantaneous one–time experiences so often
assumed, I would mean ongoing conversion
– growth in faith, leading to a continuing and lifelong transformation of
experience of God, self, and other.
It is not that we pastors try to
convert anybody; we work to create the conditions in which conversions can
occur and lives can change and people can keep on growing in faith. These are
the developmentally sensitive environments that congregations can become, which
will allow people to find their way to broader ways of making meaning.
See also:
