Charles V. Gerkin, DD

SUMMARY. Four models of understanding aging persons and of pastoral care of the elderly are proposed: The symmetrical model, a loss/compensation model, an epigenetic model, and a historical/eschatological model. Each is described briefly with implications for pastoral and congregational care of older persons.

If there are two principles that have for centuries informed the pastoral care tradition of both the Christian church and the Jewish community, they are that the care of the religious community is to be extended to all persons at all ages and that such care should include in particular the care of persons with special needs—the sick, the widowed and orphaned, the aged and infirm. Pastoral care, defined by the Judeo-Christian tradition, in the often quoted phrase of Seward Hiltner, as "tender and solicitous concern for the welfare of individuals" thus conjoins a general principle of attention to the needs of all and a particular principle of special attention to persons who are suffering or in pain.

Exactly how those two principles have shaped the praxis of the religious community and its ordained representatives at a particular time and place in relation to the general and specialized needs of the aging has varied considerably over the course of time. A cursory reading of the historical literature of pastoral care would suggest the likelihood that that variation has had primarily to do not so much with changes in interpretation of scriptural norms that govern the meaning of "tender and solicitous concern" as it has had to do with changing cultural patterns of interpretation with regard to aging itself. Thus, if I may risk an oversimplification, in historical periods and cultural locations where aging persons were valued highly for their wisdom and longevity, that valuing tended to shape both the way in which the general principle of care of all aging persons was carried out and the way in which the suffering of the aging was given ministering response. In more recent times and cultural contexts like that of middle-class, upwardly mobile white America in the latter half of the twentieth century, the general principle of care of all aging persons has received a substantially different quality of attention than in earlier times and the manner of pastoral care for the sufferings of the aging has tended to be shaped to a considerable degree by current cultural images of the suffering that aging entails.

This assertion about changing styles of care for aging persons needs to be qualified somewhat by a recognition that consistently through the ages of the Judeo-Christian era there has been a common recognition that aging involves an inevitable degree of human pain. Since the writer of Ecclesiastes expressed the sad wisdom, "Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come, and the years draw nigh, when you will say, `I have no pleasure in them . . . ,"' there has been a consistent cultural understanding that with aging comes inevitable suffering. But the understanding of the suffering and the nature of the appropriate pastoral response to the suffering has been substantially different in varying cultural and time locations.

All that I have said thus far has been meant as an introduction to the theme that I want to pursue throughout the remainder of this presentation concerning pastoral care of the aging. Those of you who are familiar with my pastoral theological work will recognize it as a theme that I have been pursuing for some time in relation to a general theory for pastoral care and counseling. Stated briefly in relation to our present concern with aging, it is that the problem of structuring pastoral care for the aging, whether that be the caring relationship of the pastor with aging persons or the pastoral ministry of the congregation to and on behalf of the aging involves at a very practical level a hermeneutical task, a task of interpretation. Furthermore, the interpretive task has to do not only with interpretations of the meaning of pastoral care. but, perhaps just as or even more crucially, with interpretive models applied to the aging process itself. How the church and the pastor are to interpret aging as a human experience will set a pastoral and church ministry agenda.   What we as pastors and congregations do will be in large part an outgrowth of what we see the process of aging to entail, in short, on the complex of interpreted meanings we and our aging parishioners attach to the aging process.

It is not my purpose, nor do I think it appropriate to suggest that there can be only "Christian" interpretations of aging. As a matter of fact, it is important to recognize that the Christian tradition and its sacred scriptures themselves evidence a certain pluralism of interpretive models with regard to aging. But it is also important to recognize that the model of interpretation applied, whether that application is undertaken self-consciously or by default, will be highly determinative of the care given. Rather than proposing a particular model as normative for Christian pastoral care I will first proceed to describe briefly several models that are currently popular in America and then propose an alternative model rooted in a contemporary theme in Christian theology.

I have adopted the term "symmetrical" for this model from the psychologist, Paul Pruyser. In an article that originally was prepared as a presentation to a major symposium on Theology and Aging sponsored by the National Retired Teachers Association and the American Association of Retired Persons in 1974, Pruyser presents this model as the primary one that has informed Western society's understanding of the aging process.¹ It is a model based on the image of life as "a peak between two valleys" or a process of development toward "fullness of life," followed inevitably by diminishment toward senility and death. In my pastoral care crisis ministry text, Crisis Experience in Modern Life, I schematized this model.

Within this schema, when rationally and objectively conceived, the anticipated normal life cycle will appear somewhat like a convex lens with the points of the lens signifying the beginning and ending points of birth and death. During childhood and adolescence the horizons of life are rapidly widening. This is the period of becoming, of growing, of expansion. Adolescence continues that process of growth, though the physical growth begins to diminish toward the end of the teen-age years. Adulthood is the time of full expression of human life and full responsibility for the affairs of the human world. Then comes the menopausal period, often referred to as "the change of life." From that point on the physical body begins to decline or contract in its capacities. It is probably important to recognize that the expansion of human responsibilities and creative cultural expression has tended, with the coming of civilization and certainly with the coming of modernity, to continue to expand beyond the physical menopausal time. Thus the schema proposes a human desire for the continuation and even expansion of human powers that is psychologically very powerful. But the reality of diminishment of powers and decline of physical body is inexorable as the organism moves toward aging and eventually death.

This schema proposes that a central psychological experience of aging is what is here called "anguish." That term is a useful one within this model because its root meanings have connections with both anger and entry into a narrowing place. In a sense it thus communicates the angry entry into the inevitability of aging. It also suggests that there is a fundamental contradiction in the human experience of aging—the slow realization of diminishment and the continuing strong desire for both longevity and expansion of lived experience.

If this "symmetrical" interpretive model is understood as the primary model by which aging is to be interpreted, certain understandings tend to be so normative as to be taken for granted. For most persons, at least those who experience the "fullness" of adult life as pleasurable and satisfying, the goals tend quite naturally to become the prolongation of this fullness of engagement of life for as long as possible. Youthful vigor must be maintained. Busy engrossment with the duties and responsibilities of life must be sustained at whatever cost. To "let down" is to acknowledge aging and thereby admit that one may be "over the hill," as we sometimes say. Aging becomes the hidden fault or the subtle and seldom acknowledged enemy within that must be refused, even denied, for as long as possible and grudgingly admitted to one's self or one's intimates largely in secret until it can no longer be denied. Meanwhile it may he spoken of in the terms of an ironic joke on oneself—a joke that both expresses and conceals the sense of defeat that aging interpreted as the enemy within inevitably brings.

Efforts must be made to ease the blows that inevitably come to the self's need to feel fully in charge and, as we often put it, "on top of things." The confrontation with narrowing limits on physical capacities is received as a blow to the narcissistic self—what is sometimes referred to by self psychologists as a "narcissistic injury." With aging there come with increasing frequency experiences that jar, even injure one's sense of control of one's life. Aging thus becomes what is often the greatest test of narcissism. Skills, mastery of life, powers to do significant things, all aspects of living that provide a sense of well-being, begin to diminish. Not only that, but the relationships that have provided intimacy and a sense of being of worth to others may become depleted and lost. All these experiences can be deeply injurious to the human psyche.

For those who have experienced the responsibilities of full adult life as burdensome or onerous and oppressive, on the other hand, there may develop a certain anticipation of retirement "when I will be free to do whatever I want to do." Aging becomes the anticipation of freedom that sustains a narcissistic sense of control of one's own destiny.

There is thus in the symmetrical model of aging a central image of life's progression as involving tragedy or existential limit. There is also the image of aging as fundamentally involving adaptation to a reality that stands over against human desires, hopes, and expectations. The "comedy" of life belongs to youth; its "tragedy" belongs to old age.

It is perhaps important to recognize the extent to which this model of aging both informs and is informed by much of both popular and more sophisticated inquiry concerning the "human life cycle" in our time. The image of a cycle of life from birth to death that is repeated from generation to generation is, of course, as old as human history. But because of a complex set of broad cultural developments ranging from the increasing dominance of a naturalistic, scientific mind-set to the diminishment of popular notions about life after death the cultural preoccupation with the human life cycle (often referred to in popular literature as the "biological clock") has developed apace in the last half of the twentieth century.

Just as the symmetrical interpretive model sets an agenda of issues and dilemmas for the aging person, so also it tends to set an agenda of prioritizing concerns for pastoral care of the aging. With the central image of aging as tragedy and coming to terms with existential limits comes the interpretation of pastoral care (as indeed all so-called "help" for the aging) as the process of assisting persons to accept the onset of limitations and adapt to the realities of the life cycle. Pastoral care becomes the art and science of assisting persons to adapt to the realities of the aging process. Pastors are to develop supportive relationships that facilitate adaptation to aging in a variety of significant ways, the variation dependent on the particularity of individuals and their situations. Pastoral care is thus directed toward supporting the continuation of whatever generative, creative capacities the person may possess in ways that adapt to the reality of diminishing resources over time. Pastoral care is also directed toward assisting persons to come to terms with the losses that inevitably occur, the anguish of the aging process. From this perspective pastoral care ministry with the aging has a certain affinity to ministry to the bereaved. It is in many situations a ministry of "grief work" in relation to the losses that occur, the injuries to self-esteem that are experienced by the aging.

There are important connections to be made here with the deep tradition of pastoral care within the Christian community. In the terms of that deep tradition, ministry to the aging within the symmetrical interpretive model may be seen as a form of the ministry of "sustaining." This, according to the classic nomenclature of pastoral care, is one of the four functions of pastoral care throughout Christian history. The others include the functions of guidance, healing, and reconciliation.

During these early centuries of the Christian tradition, pastoral sustaining look form in a fourfold task of helping persons troubled by an overwhelming sense of loss. The first task of preservation sought to maintain the troubled person's situation with as little loss as possible. Second, this function offered the consolation that actual losses could not nullify the person's opportunity to achieve his [sic] destiny under God. Third, consolidation of the remaining resources available to the sufferer built a platform from which to face up to a deprived life. Finally came redemption, by embracing the loss and by setting out to achieve whatever historical fulfillment might be wrested from life in the face of irretrievable deprivation.²

An example of pastoral care of the aging from my own early ministry experience is perhaps illustrative of the particularity of the ministry of sustaining. I was serving as pastor of a mid-sized congregation in a county seat community in mid-America at the time. In that community there was a small institution dedicated to the care of aged women that had been established by the will of one of the community's prominent citizens several decades earlier. I had several parishioners who were residents of the home that I visited regularly, sometimes taking communion. Two of these women parishioners stand out in my memory.

Mrs. Brown was a widow in her late seventies who suffered from numerous minor physical complaints—complaints that were exacerbated by her feeling of having been abandoned by her children. She had no recognizable interests or activities of her own to sustain her. Rather she spent most of her days preoccupied with her body and its aches and pains. My visits to her were marked by her rehearsal of these complaints concerning her health and her neglect by her children. My pastoral relationship was characterized by two efforts to sustain her: my willingness to listen and my intention to interest her in activities in the home and the congregation. I tried to bring her some news of persons she knew in the church each time I came. I also arranged for her to be placed on the regular calling list of a group of lay visitors in the congregation. I made a point of asking her about people and events in the institutional setting to which she was confined.

None of these efforts seemed to make any substantial impact on the narrowly defined self-preoccupations of Mrs. Brown's life, though she did seem to appreciate the visits I and the lay visitors made. In a limited sense, her connection with the relationships and meanings we who visited her attempted to represent did sustain her. At least it sustained that connection within the limits she permitted. In retrospect, I find myself wondering what might have happened if I had made a stronger pastoral move to intervene between Mrs. Brown and her children. Family systems theory (something I knew nothing about at that time) would suggest the possible value of arranging for a family conference or two in which the question of Mrs. Brown's sense of neglect and perhaps the family's impatience with Mrs. Brown's pitiful self-preoccupation might be aired. Be that as it may, the pastoral care ministry to Mrs. Brown seems clearly to be within the model of sustaining her in a situation that seemed inexorably to be moving toward greater diminishment and death.

I probably remember Mrs. Jones largely because she related to me and her situation in a manner that stood in stark contrast to Mrs. Brown. Even though she was some five years older than Mrs. Brown and in many ways more physically handicapped, Mrs. Jones was a person who made strong and sustained efforts to remain involved with the world around her. Her room was filled with books and plants she loved and tended. She read the newspaper regularly and listened faithfully to the evening news on her little radio. Our conversations largely had to do with the outside world—everything from world and national affairs to happenings in the life of the community and church. She had a telephone and maintained close relationships with a number of friends with whom she talked regularly. She did not complain a bit about her state of immobility, but usually ended those remarks with some comment of satisfaction that she still had a number of avenues of interaction with things in which she was interested.

Although in a sense I found my visits with Mrs. Jones sustaining to my own life, I did sense that the regularity of my appearances to talk for a while were very important in sustaining Mrs. Jones in her valiant efforts to remain engaged and active in her world. Her life was in certain ways lonely in that she had no family in the community. She deeply enjoyed a chance to converse and share ideas. Her lively spirit needed sustaining interaction. Again, in retrospect, I wonder if I could not have done more to assist Mrs. Jones in her efforts to keep her world from contracting. Her telephone could have been put to helpful use in the life of the congregation. Her social zeal could have been channeled into forms of advocacy of those values and concerns that she sustained. I perhaps was too much influenced by the cultural images of aging that taught me to see her primarily as a person with needs to be fulfilled by my ministry rather than as a talented person who had much to contribute to the life of the community despite her confining physical situation.

There are, to be sure, a number of strengths to be found in the symmetrical hermeneutical model of aging and the quality of pastoral care that emerges from it. Its insistence on the reality of the aging process, its openness to the shame, loss and grief experienced by the aging, and its sophisticated appropriation of current psychological models of aging as the completion of the life cycle provide both an agenda of issues to be tended and a set of pastoral observational tools to be applied in pastoral work. In a sense the weaknesses of the model are inherent in its strengths: its tendency toward acceptance of culturally defined values in relation to the relative worth of youth and vigor over aging and diminishment of powers, its emphasis on what are essentially negative or "confining," "narrowing" experiences, and its concomitant lack of an adequate model of transcendence. The risk of its realism for both aging person and pastoral care practitioner is that it can take on a quality of pessimism, as if aging means inescapably fighting a losing battle.

The pastoral theologian, K. Brynolf Lyon, makes a useful theological/ethical contribution to this interpretive model with his notion that the fundamental task of aging comes at what he calls the metaethical level. From this perspective:

Old age can only properly be understood . . . as following the primary period of integration of moral becoming. As a second characteristic of this perspective, then, we can say that the period of life following the primary generative period raises the issues of the meaningfulness of the particular formations one's moral becoming has taken. This does not mean, of course, that older adults necessarily walk around talking about their past jobs or their children all the time. In its deeper sense, it has to do with the meaning of who one has become in the context of such generative issues (and in the context of one's full developmental history) and whether that meaning is sustaining in the light of the losses, challenges, and changes that accompany older adulthood.³

Lyon goes on to propose that pastoral care with the aging involves two aspects: (1) Facilitating appropriate meaning-making with regard to the metaethical task. This may involve "an explicit reworking of conflicts, ‘mythologizing,’ or shoring up crumbling defenses" as the particular person may require. (2) Facilitating the building of a value-consensus within the community which encourages and sustains such appropriate meaning-making. He goes on to argue that this ultimately involves more than just the care of individuals or groups, but necessitates the engagement of public issues in relation to the aging.⁴

In the article to which I referred earlier in adopting Paul Pruyser's "symmetrical" label for the most widely utilized interpretive model undergirding both contemporary understanding of aging and pastoral care of the aging in America, Pruyser proposes a significantly altered variation of that basic interpretive construct. He attempts to counter the fundamental tragedy and pessimism that the symmetrical model engenders with a loss/compensation model as a counter to the loss/acceptance of inevitability image of most appropriations of the symmetrical model. Pruyser proposes that aging, though it involves inevitable loss and the concomitant suffering losses entail, also brings certain compensations. Pruyser's psychological orientation causes him to describe these compensations in largely psychological terms, but they nevertheless are significant for pastoral care in that they provide important conceptual tools for assisting pastors in both reflecting on and working pastorally in situations in which the aging are experiencing existential losses and narcissistic injury.

A brief listing of Pruyser's six compensations of aging will suffice to convey the direction his effort to ameliorate the inevitable losses of aging takes.

He proposes a gradual discovery on the part of many older persons of some good and wholesome dependencies. The full flowering of adulthood is marked for most people by both the requirement to become more self-dependent and to take on responsibility for others (to whom we often refer as our "dependents"). The release from the weight of responsibility for children and a more or less heavy schedule of work responsibilities that aging most often involves begins a process of reversal of this situation. Parents begin to see how much they can receive from their children, not only in terms of physical acts (I recall here a recent time when one of my sons assisted me in doing a yard task too heavy for me to do by myself, for example), but even more in terms of their infusion of liveliness and acts of care and affection. Experiences begin to occur that cause the aging to reconsider in important ways their former strivings for independence.

Aging can bring the ability to redefine one's own status in more personal and less instrumental terms, thus relieving one from some of the hierarchies of status related to occupation, income, and social approval for being "in charge" or "on top of things," particularly in the working world. Having become who one is, one is no longer oppressed with the obligation of "making it," whatever that might mean in one's social group.

Pruyser speaks of a certain relaxation of psychological defenses. "With greater and more profound knowledge of the inevitable ambiguities of life and acceptance of irreducible ambivalence of one's own feelings, unpleasant realities can be faced with less denial, and negative affects or dubious propensities are no longer prone to lead to reaction formation."⁵

Aging, according to Pruyser, often brings a greater capacity to live in the present as distinct from always looking to the future. Oldsters "can enjoy more because they enjoy it now, in the present moment."⁶ He goes on to suggest that for those who have religious faith, the faith that has sustained them in dark times in the past, sometimes defensively, can now become a more reflective and even enjoyable cosmology that "beautifies and validates their present days."

Pruyser proposes that the relief from the heavy responsibilities of the middle years of life can strengthen aging persons' capacity to identify with the idealism of youth and thus conjoin the hard won wisdom of years with a reappropriation of the ideals and values of the young. Here this hermeneutical model suggests a reawakening or reopening of life's possibilities as counter to the diminishments of the constrictions of aging. In subtle ways the model therefore proposes the possibility of transformed styles of interaction with the world made possible by the same alterations of structures of relationship that the symmetrical model interprets as losses.

Finally, Pruyser suggests that one of the compensations of aging may be a new-found freedom to reveal one's innermost thoughts. "However honest and open a person may have been before, aging gives him [sic] new candor for speaking without inhibitions."⁷

Interpreting aging and pastoral care of the aging in the categories provided by the loss/compensation model will tend to a degree to ameliorate the tragic image of the symmetrical model and thereby modify somewhat the pastoral theological thrust of pastoral care from the traditional function of sustaining in the direction of pastoral guidance. Pastoral guidance has traditionally included as one of its purposes assisting persons in the making of choice decisions and in the redirection of their commitments and energies. It has likewise included the role of assisting persons to reexamine their relationships, whether that be relationship to self or to others. It has thus had at its core the image of facilitation of persons' strengths and exercise of free, if limited, choice rather than the image of sustaining persons who have suffered irretrievable losses. In this way a more positive, less negatively tragic note is introduced into the ethos of pastoral care of aging persons. The confrontation with reality becomes not simply tragic and constricting, although that may indeed be present, but also the confrontation with as yet unrealized possibilities.

Erik Erikson's model of the life cycle is one that has been widely adopted as a psychological structure that informs pastoral care ministry to persons at various stages in the process of maturation and aging. Although Erikson's model can be seen as simply a variation of the "symmetrical" model of aging, it contains implicitly a somewhat different emphasis than the physical reality of development and diminishment that model is built upon. For Erikson the human life cycle cannot fully complete itself—arrive at its full development—until the last stage when what Erikson speaks of as integrity becomes a pervasive possibility. The achievement of the integrity of life's final stage involves, at least implicitly, a circling back to the first virtue of stage one in infancy, the virtue of trust. Trust and integrity, in the healthy senior citizen, are for Erikson conjoined. Thus rather than emphasizing the diminishment of aging, Erikson maintains an image of fulfillment and full-orbed realization of the goal of the entire life process as the achievement of healthy aging.

Aging within this hermeneutical model becomes the time that makes possible a perspective on the whole of life that is not fully possible until the "length of days" of a lifetime has taken place. Aging thus brings into focus a way of valuing all of human experience that both relativizes the person's sense of one's own life pilgrimage and affirms its unique worth. Thus Erikson's perspective points to a possible experience of transcendence that both accepts the limits of a single life and points beyond its boundaries toward values that transcend its limits in relation to the continuing cycle of the generations. In this way Erikson's model begins to press against the "'expansion/diminishment" quality of the symmetrical model by means of its vision of wisdom and integrity growing out of the process of the life cycle as its fulfillment.

Building on all three of the models thus far discussed, yet going beyond them to embrace an explicit Christian theological narrative hermeneutical theme, I would propose the possibility of developing what I will call a historical/eschatological model that can shape both an interpretation of aging and of pastoral care of the aging. This is to suggest that aging be envisioned as a time that, in what appears to be a paradoxical fashion, marks the coming together of an individual's historical identity and his or her appropriation of a Christian eschatological identity.⁸ Since it is not possible to develop fully the scope and pastoral implications of such a model in a short presentation such as this one, what follows should be taken as only suggestive.

This model would build upon the symmetrical model to acknowledge that a primary aspect of the aging process beyond mid-life does indeed have to do with coming to terms with the reality that we humans arc finite, historical creatures who have the privilege and gift of being present in creation as we know it only for the limited span of a life cycle. Coming to terms with that is both a confrontation with limits—the limits of my finitude—and an opportunity to find new and compensatory value in the attainment of the long look of history, i.e., a sense of one's history that Erik Erikson is reaching for in his concept of epigenesis and its goal of ego integrity. But the sense of history made possible by aging is not only that pertaining to one's own historical experience. It is in a real sense the opportunity to "place" one's self within human history and, as Erikson suggests, to achieve the integrity and singularity that goes with that.

Aging, however, presents also the possibility of seeing the limits of historical life as it has been in human history and as it is presently known to the person as being contained within a larger and more open-ended vision of the future God is bringing about—in theological language, the eschatological vision of God's future. Historical self-limits thus come up against the limitlessness of God's eschatological future.

Said another way, the thrust of this interpretive model has to do with a relocating of the ground and basis of hope for the aging from the arenas of "hopes" for the self's future to the arena of participation in the great hope of humankind found in the Christian eschatological vision. In the Christian tradition this shift from human life "hopes" toward a larger vision of Christian hope has very often taken the form of a variation on the ancient mind/body dualism. The pastoral theologian, K. B. Lyon, reminds us that the way aging has been seen as offering possibilities of "growth" has often involved the notion that, as the body declines, there become available new opportunities for "spiritual growth." The spirit of the aged, now less encumbered by the "passions of the flesh," is left free to focus on spiritual growth. There is an implicit contrast here between the transient and the permanent—things that pass away and things that are permanent. "Nature is subject to the cycle of growth and decay (thus the decline of our physical being with aging), while spirit (when rightly related to God) may continually ‘advance in newness of life.’"⁹

Lyon goes on to contend that this dualism cannot be sustained either on the basis of modern thought or biblically. Modern pastoral care theory has generally been psychologically supported by an understanding of the human as being a unity of body and spirit. Yet, he says, there is much in the contemporary pastoral care literature that still sees the dualism as the principal position to be overcome. In popular culture the passions are often seen as inappropriate "sins of the flesh" in the aging.

It is probably important, if one is to take the eschatological hope tack on the problem, that it be kept in some degree of tension with the "aging as decline of powers" model in order that there be some taking into account of the inevitable losses and decline of physical abilities that come with aging. Here the image of human identity as paradoxically historical and eschatological developed by Jürgen Moltmann and further elaborated in my The Living Human Document is perhaps most apt. An aspect of what Moltmann calls our human historical embeddedness involves our embeddedness in the physical realities of the life cycle with its progression toward old age and death. Eschatological hope and eschatological identity therefore are always in a tension with the reality that we are finite, historical creatures.

Such a sense of one's own life and all of human life as being contained in the limitless life of God moves, of course, beyond what Erikson envisions in his emphasis on the embracing of the cycle of generations on the part of aging persons. Working within the confines of human categories, Erikson sees the fulfillment of aging as arising out of the accomplishment of the generative tasks of adulthood. Integrity in the aging is therefore the outcome of fulfilled generative responsibility for the coming generations. Eschatological identity, however, is not finally dependent upon human generative accomplishment, important as that is, but rather rests on the confidence of faith in the promises of God with regard to the future of all things. The self's integrity is stitched into the integrity of God's future which is both open-ended and limitless.

The historical/eschatological model of aging likewise builds upon but moves beyond the loss/compensation model suggested by Paul Pruyser. Like that model, it suggests that the attainment of advanced stages of aging brings with it not only experiences of loss, most particularly the loss of physical powers, but also certain valuable compensations that can enhance the person's sense of freedom from many of the real and imagined burdens of life. The primary compensation, however, made available by the historical/eschatological interpretive possibility has to do with the enlarged and less humanly dependent context within which one's total life and present situation can be understood. Not only does aging bring the possibility, as Pruyser suggests, of learning to enjoy and value certain human dependencies; within this model it also brings the possibility of "enjoying" and "valuing" the final dependency of human life, human hopes, and human expectations on the ongoing life of God. Aging interpreted within the historical/eschatological paradigm is thus aging "in God," in the phrase of Jürgen Moltmann.¹⁰ By allowing one's own life and history to be placed within that context the aging persons can be set free from not only the psychological defensiveness to which Pruyser points, but also the need to "defend" one's life span as of ultimate importance within itself. The eschatological context thus can enable a freeing of the self of the aging persons to live within the enlarged context of God's promise and future.

To be sure, it is both unnecessary and unrealistic to propose that all aging persons should or could envision their own life span and its limits within the specific language symbols I have here used to suggest the historical/eschatological model. The actual language symbols, indeed the experiential meanings which might provide the vessels for such an experience of aging, must needs come from the images and themes that make meaningful connection with the individual life in question. But the tone and direction of appropriation of the aging process the model embodies may in a rich variety of ways be possible for many aging persons if the relational context can be provided that facilitates it,

A model of pastoral care with the aging is thus suggested by the historical/eschatological. model of aging about which I have spoken only in very general terms. Put very simply, the model of pastoral care it suggests will be governed by the intention to facilitate in whatever way possible the experiencing of the aging process by persons receiving the care of the church and its ministers from within the historical/eschatological interpretive model of aging. The historical/eschatological model is thus proposed as both normative for church and ministry pastoral practice and inclusive of most of the descriptive elements of the other three models.

Engaging the task of pastoral ministry with the aging from within a historical/eschatological model for pastoral care of the aging can undergird in significant ways the facilitation and, on occasion, the physical provision of both interpersonal and institutional/communal contexts of human interaction and care where aging persons may experience their aging from within the historical/eschatological model of interpretation. This involves two distinct but interacting processes, the facilitation of the self-interpretation of aging on the part of aging individuals and the interpretive ethos that surrounds aging persons and interprets aging for and to them. With regard to the first, those providing pastoral care will seek to relate to the aging in ways that invite their coming to self-understandings that incorporate the values and meanings of the historical/eschatological model. The model thus provides for the development of pastoral relationships with the aging that invite reflection, sharing of the experiences of loss associated with aging, and search for new and transformed self-understandings that incorporate the values of the historical/eschatological model. Here all of what was discussed earlier concerning pastoral appropriation of the symmetrical, loss/compensation, and Eriksonian epigenetic models becomes significant. The pastoral response to the shared search of aging persons for new self-understanding will, however, be guided by the core meanings of the historical/eschatological model.

With regard to the second socio-cultural interpretive context, the church and its ministers will engage in whatever social, political, and missional activities are appropriate to seek the transformation of societal attitudes toward aging in the direction of the values directly contained or implicit within the historical/eschatological model. The church will both seek to enact and embody those values and meanings in the institutional and missional programs it sponsors and advocate those values and meanings in the public arenas that affect the care of the aging. The model thus will seek to conjoin traditionally pastoral/priestly modes of ministry with prophetic/missional modes of congregational engagement of societal issues.

The thesis of this essay has been that the experiential content, issues arid dilemmas, as well as the outcomes of both aging itself and pastoral care of the aging are to a considerable degree dependent upon the interpretive model governing the operational understanding of aging and pastoral care as response to aging. Three interpretive models receiving attention in contemporary theories of aging have been examined and a fourth theologically grounded model has been briefly proposed. Further theoretical work needs to be done to bring these four models fully into mutually critical correlation, particularly in relation to the many and varied specific problems of pastoral care of the aging in American culture. The practical application of the model likewise deserves further elaboration. The possibilities for both individual and societal transformation with regard to aging embodied in the model have however, even from a brief comparative study such as that undertaken in this short essay, revealed themselves to be highly suggestive for pastoral practice.

1. Paul W. Pruyser, "Aging: Downward, Upward, or Forward" in Seward Hiltner (Ed.), Toward a Theology of Aging (New York: Human Sciences Press), 1975, pp, 102-118.

2. William A. Clebsch and Charles R. Jaekle, Pastoral Care in Historical Perspective. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall), 1964, p. 43.

3. K. Brynolf Lyon, Toward a Practical Theology of Aging. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), 1985, p. 77.

4. Ibid., p. 83, 84.

5. Pruyser, op. cit., p. 114.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., p. 116.

8. Charles V. Gerkin, The Living Human Document. (Nashville: Abingdon Press), 1984, p. 67. See also Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit. (New York: Harper & Row), 1977, p. 192.

9. Lyon, op. cit., p. 59.

10. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God. (New York: Harper & Row), 1974, pp. 252-255.

Charles V. Gerkin is Professor of Pastoral Psychology, Candler School of Theology, Emory University.