The Leveson Centre for the Study of Ageing,
Spirituality and Social Policy
Is Religion the Friend of Ageing?
Peter Coleman - Third Leveson Lecture
Published by the Leveson Centre for the Study of Ageing, Spirituality
and Social Policy, 2004.
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Review of Leveson Paper Number 9 by Anne McClelland
Peter Coleman, Professor of Psychogerontology at Southampton, found
it a challenge to speak as a psychologist about how psychology could
help in the studies in which the Leveson Centre is engaged –
ageing, spirituality and social policy. To his great disappointment
psychology still hasn’t, in his opinion, really made connections
with ageing or spirituality or social policy. Two early pioneers William
James and Erik Erikson were exceptions in stressing the need not only
for reason but also for trust without which some truths of life would
remain hidden. Psychology will need to investigate today some of the
effects of religion on society – for instance, terrorism.
Is religion the friend of ageing? Overall, Coleman feels that it
does not pay sufficient attention to the growing numbers of the very
old. The Fourth Age where increasing lack of control and the negative
aspects of ageing such as loss of dignity and of role are exaggerated
can follow suddenly on the heels of the Third Age which for many today
in this country is the time when people are free to be themselves.
In the past older people tended to engage more fully with religious
practice in advancing years. Today there are big differences in what
people regard as important. Personal well-being and the pursuit of
happiness, he suggests, tend to be the goals for many today. Control
of one’s life is a sign of well-being for many but for Muslims,
for instance, such control and acquisition of worldly goods are not
what is sought. There is difference too in attitudes to death and
to the end of life.
In a survey in this country in co-operation with Saga it became clear
that ‘personal spiritual experience appears more significant
for many than communal church life’. This greater personalising
of faith entails, he asserts, greater need for spiritual education
– that is to say not just instruction (many hold reservations
about some tenets of the creed) but also open discussion with peers
as well as church authorities.
Coleman is left with the contradiction between the ‘spiritual
uncertainty, questioning and lack of rootedness’ that has come
out in many of the interviews with older people recently and ‘the
cultural ideal of the older person as the reliable transmitter of
traditional religious models of thought and practice’. He fears
for many current older people who seem to have less access to spiritual
resources than did their forebears.
A clearer distinction needs to be made, it seems to me, between religion
and spirituality, and between spiritual experience and spiritual practice.
Spiritual experience is a gift. Spiritual practice can be engaged
in at will as a discipline. Spiritual practice could be strengthening
for people of any age but elderly people, through that practice, might
find a role for themselves in the church, as transmitters of models
of thought and practice. That religion should be the friend of ageing
seems indisputable. Signs of that friendship would also be signs of
renewal for the religion and for society.
Anne McClelland is a retired Unitarian minister
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