SOUL MATTERS

The spiritual needs of the older person

Held on Saturday 11th February 2006, Focolare Centre for Unity
Welwyn Garden City, HERTS

Talk by Professor Flavia Caretta, a doctor specialising in geriatrics and gerontology in the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery at the Catholic University in Rome.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am grateful to the organisers for the invitation to speak at this Conference. I am honoured to be here today with you to share my personal and professional experience. For the last 30 years I have been working above all with older people.

For me this occasion is a special opportunity to give back – even in a small way – the spiritual richness that I have received through my contact with these “experts in life”, as I like to call those who “having journeyed through life can show the way to others”. It is difficult to express this great richness in a few words but I will try to give you some idea of what my own experience has taught me of the value of old age.

I must add that, being associated with the Focolare Movement, I witness with wonderment to the abundance of spiritual gifts evident especially in those who gave life to this Movement over 60 years ago. They themselves are in their third age, working and contributing with an energy which puts to shame many younger people.

In my opinion, an older person is essentially faced with two choices: to turn in on him or herself and the health problems he or she may have, becoming set in their ways with fixed patterns of thought; or, alternatively, to acquire a life style based on openness to others, knowing how to welcome and understand difference, and take on board what is new.

This person, who chooses the lifestyle of openness, has already learned in earlier years how to grow old; is someone who accepts and who lives through this phase of life as a time of continuing growth, more as a process of evolution rather than involution.

In my profession I have seen that there is a great variability in the nature and time scale of the ageing process. In any case older people possess inner resources on which they can draw, little by little, as they grow old, so as to confront the continual demands for adjustment and adaptation to their physical condition and their environment.

I have observed that these resources often remain untapped, simply because older people are not motivated to draw on them.

If the elderly find themselves in an environment that makes no demands on them, with little stimulus, these resources are not exploited, whereas stimuli of a mental social, psychological or spiritual nature have the effect of activating these resources. I recall in this regard that George Bernard Shaw, as an old man, affirmed: “Physically I am declining, but my mind is capable of growth, because my curiosity is deeper then ever, my soul continues to march on”.

Even in old age, then, to shift the focus of attention away from oneself, so as to dedicate oneself to others , to the community, in its broadest sense, in which one lives, is a determining factor for the growth in humanity which should accompany every person along the path of their whole life. There is also a scientific basis to this statement:many studies in fact confirm that altruism seems to promote health and longevity.

In a few words: doing good to others results in benefit to oneself. This time of life, which could become an “empty time” thus becomes the age of “time available” to pass on skills and experience that have matured over the years, so helping to create a bond between generations.

In fact, the older person has a special capacity to safeguard and transmit values and traditions, and important elements of culture, to younger generations.
Furthermore, I have experienced that the interior life of older people becomes more refined, helped by the falling away of many attributes they possessed as young people: it is like witnessing a pruning of what has already been lived so as to bring forth or emphasise what is truly essential. The older person can better grasp the essence of what we perceive.

Indeed even in ancient times Plato observed: “the eyes of the spirit begin to see more clearly only when those of the body begin to weaken”. Older people can have a balancing role in a western consumerist society, where the quality of human relationships is often poor, where there is little historical perspective and so many values seem to have been lost.

Instead, older people can become a source of values to transmit to new generations: for example accepting the limits that are part of human life, the value of being rather than having and producing.

Certainly, old age often brings with it losses – whether on the physical, cognitive or affective levels. Yet I have seen often how older people with a greater number of medical conditions, who were nonetheless positive about living with their state of health, lived longer than those who, although being less “ill” had a negative attitude towards the situation they were in.

This shows that a person, even with a number of physical illnesses, can in reality be healthier than another, perhaps with none, if that person accepts their limits and sufferings, living their illness as an opportunity for spiritual growth.

It is sharing with others that facilitates this perspective: it is the process of sharing which gives rise to a reciprocal current of understanding, of listening, of solidarity in which each one both gives and receives.

Spiritual needs, which generally become more intense in older people, can become “gifts” in the context of reciprocal relationships.

In fact, when we take the initiative to build a relationship with another person, we must leave behind our own personal baggage so as to interest ourselves sincerely in the requirements, needs and expectations of the other person. In this way we live the “gift” of ourselves. The result is that we feel better, because love brings love and burdens that are shared become lighter, while happiness increases and spreads. It is a spirit of fraternity that makes us come out of isolation and weave a network of relationships of esteem and solidarity in which every stage of life acquires a new understanding of its own beauty and at the same time of the beauty of the other.

This fraternity is the pathway to achieve a society which knows how to recognise and value life, from its first moment to its very last.

To end I extend my heartfelt thanks to older people, to each one of them for the special gift of their “being”.

Flavia Caretta.