51-3 From Suspicion to Trust: the Middle-aged and Older Adult Religious Believers’ Spiritual Learning Process
| Chun-Ting Yeh | Ya-Hui Lee |
| National Pingtung University | National Chung Cheng University |
In previous studies and literature on both spiritual learning and experiential learning, we found that individual learning is a learning process utilizing past and prior experiences on future practices, namely, from the past to the future. Both literature and previous research paid much attention on individual learning in terms of how learners interact and gain experiences from the external world, self-life experiences, and reflections. From the study of spiritual issues, spiritual health is one of the factors of successful aging, as well as the positive significance of religion and spirituality, but it is difficult to fully understand the entire experience process of personal spiritual learning. However, the theory of experiential learning can be very helpful to further explore the spiritual learning process since the theory of experiential learning emphasizes the goal consciousness, action, reflection, feeling and experience of learning process. These concepts have already contributed to the current research to further explore the evolution process of personal spiritual value from a very simple perspective to a more advanced scope. For instance, we learned that individuals need to achieve the spiritual health status through the integration of life experience, covering the past to the future growing process. Having a lack of related research on how individuals succeed spiritual health, the current research aimed to investigate the middle-aged and older adults’ spiritual learning process. In order to explore and analysis participants’ spiritual learning experiences, we adopted phenomenology approach and conducted semi-structured interviews with 6 middle-aged and older adults. These participants were 3 males and 3 females, the ages ranged from 49～67 and average age 58.2 years. The participants were 1 Christian, 1 Catholic, 1 Muslim, and 3 Buddhists, respectively. The results of the study were summarized as followings: The participants’ spiritual learning experiences could be divided into four phases, including initial contact, doubt and conflict, learning reflections, and experienced spiritual meaning. The first phase explained and referred to the reason why middle-aged and older adults first contact certain religions and the inner feelings of participating in religious beliefs. The second phase illustrated how adults’ inner doubts and conflicts aroused from their learning processes which mainly involved ignorance of the truth of religious explanations, suspicion and misunderstanding of religious doctrines, conflicts with family members due to religious problems, or interruption of religious activities. The third phase referred to a more specific study and reflection on religion and spirituality, including the guidance of the elegant, the study of a group, the combination of experience, fixed time and step-by-step learning, and further reflection on personal work, sin, interpersonal and failure experience. The fourth phase referred to the participants' sense of spiritual learning from their religious beliefs. The first two phases were the spiritual learning that took place in the early stages. The first two phases can be discovered in their spiritual learning processes at a very initial stage. In the study, we found that participants are commonly curious about religion or resolve their questions after encountering negative experiences. All these can facilitate their demands of perusing a higher level of spirituality. Furthermore, there were continuous flow between the last two phases of spiritual learning. As participants felt spiritual through continuous learning, they continued to devote themselves to religious activities and learning and experienced the value of spirituality again from the reflection of self, life, and negative experiences. Spiritual learning experiences mainly occurred in the phase of learning reflections and experienced spiritual meaning as these two phases were usually for participants who have more time to further study and engage the study of religious spirituality after they retired from their work. By doing so, they learned and understood the meaning of religious spirituality from their young to old life experiences. In the spiritual learning process, the participants were affected by the inner peace, possessed the inner strength to overcome the dilemma and the spiritual bath, understood the meanings of life, and took actions to change the life, to contribute, as well as to make efforts for next life. These benefits from spiritual learning helped the participants lead a healthy and active life.
Keywords
Adult learning, experiential learning, religion, spiritual learning.
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