The Challenge of Aging on Authentic Communities
Photo on Unsplash by Joseph Pearson
In a previous 2HC blog, Encountering Loneliness on the Journey Toward Authentic Community, 2HC Lead Team member Andrew Richey provides a framework for understanding different experiences of loneliness on our journey toward true authentic community. In this blog, 2HC spiritual director Fran Love reflects on the experience of age-related loneliness from farther down the “2nd half of life” road, expressing her desire for community as a “relational home” that is full of life.
Aging, with its blessings and its burdens, will impact both our ideas and our expressions of authentic community.
Beth had been experiencing those changes since her recent retirement from full time ministry. She asked me, “What is community going to look like now? What relationships do I want to keep? Do I have it in me to initiate new relationships?”
We spoke about loneliness, our own and the general increase of loneliness among seniors. We recognized the diminishment that age-related loneliness brings to so many older people.
What causes loneliness among older populations we asked?
Loneliness, the uncomfortable gap between desire and experience
Psychologists define loneliness as “the state of distress or discomfort that results
when one perceives a gap between one’s desires for social connection
and actual experiences of it.”
Ponder this definition for a moment.
It’s not fewer friends or lack of social mobility that distresses us. It is the ache of unmet desires. As we age this gap between desires and experience can widen, leading to what I call age-related loneliness.
Listed here are a few realities aging people experience, each one impacting their desire for community and their ability to initiate and maintain it.
Fewer opportunities and invitations to engage
Stepping away from causes and work around which much of our relationships flourished
Cumulative losses, regrets, disappointments
Physical diminishment, energy drain, and degrading of memory
Financial constraints and geographical distances
The death or illness of a spouse / friend / colleague who was the social secretary, the extrovert, the one who rang the dinner bell for happy gatherings, the one who turned on relational light bulbs in every room they walked into
Two things stand out to me about this list:
These realities compound over the years
It is in our nature to be in conflict with them
Mediation experts say that people usually wield two types of responses when in conflict: the power-play and the walk-away.
The power-play antes up our fight instinct: I will age, but I will fight it. We over-engage, trying to hang on to whatever we felt we had in the “prime” of our life, however we define prime.
The walk-away precipitates the flight / freeze instinct: I will just fade away now. We disengage, not trusting our abilities or our desires to adjust to our age-related realities.
But there is another way. One that hints at another reality, and I find myself stirred deeply when I read,
And Abraham and David died in “good old age, full of years.”
(Genesis 25:8 and 1 Chronicles 29:28)
The Hebrew expression, “full of years” is better rendered “full of life.”
I want that. I want to be full of life. I want that for myself, and I want to have that with others. I don’t want to rebel against aging. I don’t want to resign myself to it either.
What I do want is to consent to the necessary losses of aging, along with its diminishments, while also choosing, with no cynicism, to accept that I can be full of life until the end of my life.
Fullness does not depend on size. Small spaces can be just as full as large ones.
The question my friend asked – What will community look like now in the realities of my aging? – is one I want to consider seriously.
It might have to start by a simple name change from community to relational home.
My relational home
I want a relational home that gives us life: where we birth and bury all the things that go with aging. And we do it with tears and celebration and laughter.
I want “friends without a cause.” We may have started that way, but we no longer need the cause necessarily to keep us together.
I want us to notice changing desires as we age together.
I want us to honor our desires and not push them away because they bring us pain.
I want us to be able to name the life-giving forces that we gift to each other.
I want us to be wildly generous with our blessings for each other.
I want us to listen, deeply, with no desire to fix the other.
I want us to love what is.
I want us to pray this prayer below and embrace the joy and goodness of it.
A Blessing for Loving What Is
by Kate Bowler
Blessed are you who are attempting to love what is here, what is now. You who recognize the wonder and pain looking at life’s rearview mirror, at those things that are gone. The person you were. The quickness and sharpness of a body that didn’t tire as quickly. The relationships and jobs and aspirations. The people you can’t get back. Blessed are you, holding the gentle compassion that wraps memories in grace.
And blessed are you, turning your gaze from imagined futures that seem to call out with an unnecessary pressure and an urgency that wants to rob you of what joys still exist. And oh, how blessed are you, drawing a tidy boundary around today and calling it home. For yesterday is a memory, tomorrow a mirage.
Blessed are you, recognizing that the rightsizing of reach and possibility is the heart’s ease of God’s good counsel. Opening your eyes to all that is here. Let its beauty seep into your pores and whisper words of peace. Receive and welcome reality in its completeness, giving over to God all that is beyond your power to change or understand or return to once again. And in the meantime, embracing and loving the life you have, the family you have, the pleasures that are yours. Right now.
This blessing can be found in Good Enough: 40ish Devotionals for a Life of Imperfection by Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie (New York: Convergent Books, 2022). You may also find it at Kate Bowler’s website: https://katebowler.com/blessings/a-blessing-for-loving-what-is-instead-of-what-could-have-been/