Transcending Our Stories: A Narrative Perspective on Spirituality in Later Life

This paper draws on insights from narrative gerontology, narrative psychology, and narrative therapy to discuss spirituality in relation to aging. Defining spirituality in terms of meaning-making, it considers the possibility of narrative foreclosure - i.e., one's life continues on (beyond retirement, for instance) yet, in one's mind, one's story has all but ended. It argues that coping with the changes and challenges of later life requires countering such foreclosure by developing a good, strong story. A process of story-work is then elaborated whereby older adults can be assisted in expanding, examining, transforming, and eventually transcending the stories by which they live. Every person is born into life as a blank page -and every person leaves life a full book (Baldwin, 2005, p. ix). Growing old is one of the ways the soul nudges itselfinto attention to the spiritual aspect of life (Moore, 1992, p. 214)