Resourcing Hope for Ageing and Dying in a Broken World

Jean Améry (Hanns Chaim Mayer) was an Austrian-born essayist, whose reflections on ageing outline the cost that advanced age brings to the human body, mind, and spirit. He suggested the frail elderly come to rest, and are forced, by the depredations of ageing, to make do without. Similarly, scholars in palliative care and medical research (Linda Ganzini et al., Marianne Dees et al., and Timothy Quill, for example) have observed that persons confronting unrelenting prognoses and irremediable diagnoses are also forced, by the devastations of disease and dysfunction, to make do without. That is to say, whether ageing and frail, or dying, persons are discovering themselves to be in a world they no longer understand and without the capacities to engage with it. They in turn despair. Such despair generates behaviours that anticipate suicide or other, often tragic, outcomes that impede or greatly curtail or even completely inhibit human flourishing.

By addressing the genesis of despair in vulnerable populations, including the frail elderly and the terminally ill, while presenting the attenuating benefits of religious observance and related educative practices (habits of virtue), this project will demonstrate the way theology might resource both human flourishing and hope for these persons inundated by anguish in our late modern age with its anthropologies that leave persons vulnerable to despair. Responding to such risk and the threats of despair, an examination of the habits of character formation and communal life will follow. Such habits and practices might resource a way of being that enables a strength or resilience, a patience, to endure rather than succumb to both personal and social calamity, while learning to become homo viator or the 'human wayfarer' for journeys of perseverance.