Spirituality and Aging

2 Spiritual Development

The previous chapter described a spiritual region of human experience characterized by identifiable qualities, occurring through several avenues of experience and accompanying many aspects of life. Awareness of this region and experience with it vary greatly among people and also evolve over time for most. Questions that guide this chapter include: What does it mean to grow spiritually? Is spiritual development influenced by personal spiritual aspirations ? Does spiritual evolution occur in stages or is it continuous or is it both? Does the capacity for spiritual experience evolve? Just as we can study a person’s physical, psychological, or social development , we can also study her or his spiritual development. And just as physical , psychological, and social development are complex topics, so is spiritual development. We begin this chapter with a brief discussion of various ways to conceptualize that development. We then consider how these various conceptions play out when applied to spiritual development. background Historically, ideas about development have been rooted in the physical life cycle of living organisms. Plants and animals have genetically programmed life spans in which they grow to maturity, enjoy some period of full maturity , and then begin to decline physically and eventually die. This is called the maturation-maturity-aging model. Does development occur during all three stages or just during the stage leading up to full maturity? Early conceptions of development held that once child and adolescent development were completed , development was over, and life was simply a playing out of early desc h a p t e r t w o     Spiritual Development  b a s i c f r a m e s o f r e f e r e n c e tiny. There was little conception that development could continue into later adulthood. In the 1970s, research on middle-aged and older adults began to show that previously unused physical and mental capabilities could be awakened and developed in adults of any age (Riley and Foner 1968), that numerous psychological traits continued to evolve and improve well into old age (Salthouse 1982), and that social environments made a big difference by demanding , encouraging, or discouraging continued development in midlife and later (Cohen 2000). Scholars began to look not just at deficits of aging but also at undeveloped potentials for development in later life. Interestingly, recorded history contains many illustrations of middle-aged and older adults having the capacity to continue to develop spiritually. Latelife spiritual development is present in historical records from a wide variety of cultures and historical eras. However, this information came from the humanities—history, anthropology, religious studies, and philosophy—and was largely ignored by scholars in the social sciences as they developed social gerontology. In the early days of the twentieth century, most people thought spiritual development was the province of religion, not science. For example, William James’s (1905[2005]) classic treatise on subjective spirituality was titled The Varieties of Religious Experience. Spirituality was not a word in common use then. The beginnings of gerontology were mostly silent on the subject. For example, there was no material on spirituality in the Handbook of Social Gerontology (Tibbitts 1960), only a chapter on organized religion, and the Handbook of Aging and the Individual (Birren 1959), which dealt with psychology, contained no mention of either spirituality or religion. By the 1950s, much of science was antagonistic toward subjective inner development, stressing conformity instead. A “secular humanist” view supported an image of principled science that did not depend on religion, which was seen as opposed to the flexibility of thought needed for science. Religions’ theological definitions of reality were seen as conflicting with empiricism. The doctrine of separation of church and state was used to justify exclusion of religion from publicly funded education and research. Spirituality was seen in that era as an offshoot of religion, which caused spirituality also to be disvalued as a subject of study. The “human potential movement” of the 1960s challenged this view by claiming that human beings had many untapped capabilities and that taking responsibility for our own development was the key to discovering and de- s p i r i t ua l d e v e l o p m e n t  veloping our potentials. This movement gave rise to an enormous “self-help” culture, which encouraged adults to exert influence on their own development . Spirituality was a major...