The power of community with older people

I suppose reading could be identified as my adult addiction. Somewhere along the process of college and graduate school, the importance of reading was embedded into my personality. I am constantly looking for books that will keep me a well-informed person. Reading books is a supplement to reading a daily paper, a local three times per week paper, and several journals, that are published weekly, monthly or quarterly. The pressure of modernity has pushed me to the world of the internet and the world of Wikipedia. I cannot stop reading.

I can list books that I would call “life changing.” Now at an advanced age, I am still looking for that special book that will change the perspective from which I will look at life and the world. If I were engaged in a conversation with any of my readers, I am bound, sooner or later, to ask “have you read…..?”

Atul Gawande is a surgeon by profession. Obviously he learned to use the English language as well as the modern tools of surgery. His book, “Being Mortal,” was published in 2014. It hit the New York Times best seller list immediately and has not yet left. The subject of the book is the aging population of the United States. He is a skilled researcher, an acute observer and a marvelous story teller. In his writing he draws on research, family experience, and observations from his medical practice.

He reaches some frank conclusions. Our helping professions are making a lot of mistakes in the provisions they are making for our aging population. My purpose in writing this column is not to list all of his conclusions. Rather I am going to dwell on one particular conclusion that pervades the entire book. The greatest need of the aging senior population is community. As people age, inevitably they lose the community relationships upon which they have built a meaningful life.

My own life is a good example. Almost all of the people of my high school graduating class are gone. One by one over the past 25 years they have died. For many years, my high school class was my connection to the community in which I grew up. The same thing has happened to my professional colleagues. Death and movement to far-away places have taken them beyond my access. I am the last living person in my immediate family. All my siblings have died. I am still living in my own home in which I have lived for the past 29 years. I no longer can keep up with the lawn and the maintenance needs of my home. I will be moving from my neighborhood in the not too distant future. The mobility of the American population pushes me and the entire senior population toward social isolation. Our need to be a social being does not diminish. Along the way married seniors lose a spouse. Adjusting to single life is possibly the ultimate push toward isolation.

The building industry and professional service providers have completely misunderstood the needs of older seniors, especially their need for community. When examined, the push is toward further isolation with needs being addressed by professional care givers rather than by friends, neighbors and family.

Whether our need for community is innate or acquired is a useless conversation. Our need for community is a universal, and does not go away with aging. In fact, the need may grow with advancing age. Gawande’s book confronts us with the need for community to be a whole person. Will Americans listen? I write as a Baptist Christian. Baptists have corrupted the Christian Faith by talking incessantly about individual salvation. Being a whole person is an experience of community. Paul makes the argument for community in a classic statement in chapter 12 of his first letter to the Corinthian church. In summary he says that while we are individuals, we are parts of a body in which we need one another in order to function properly.

Socially the most satisfying life is one in which we give and receive. We give one another rides rather than calling a cab. We prepare and share food. (Typically we do not eat in a healthy manner in isolation.) Games are best played in social settings. There are good reasons for book clubs, quilting clubs and bridge, poker and rook clubs. Isolation is a thief. Community produces the rich life

A few decades ago, there was a good deal of conversation about Communitarianism. In Communitarianism, all of life is seen through the eyes of the community. Individual needs are certainly recognized but are subservient to the needs of the community. Community is the most basic unit of the good life. More recently an insane individualism has taken over the American culture.

The sooner we return to the primacy of community, the better our lives will be, especially for seniors.

The Rev. Howard Bess is a retired American Baptist minister, who lives in Palmer, Alaska. His email address is hdbss@mtaonline.net.