Some years ago Reinhold Niebuhr observed that confronting "the deeper terrors of the soul" gives meaning to human experience. For many people, old age is one such terror. Older people, especially those who are sick or frail, remind us visually and often viscerally of what we wish to evade for as long as possible. The young, with few exceptions, see the old as "other," while the middle-aged distance themselves from images of their future selves. Yet most of us will grow old, and at least some of the terrors we once held at bay will likely visit us.

To come to know the old in the first person is a step toward transforming our terror into a source of meaning. This issue of the Bulletin intends to help our readers take that step. First-person knowing can alter our perceptions of aging and old age and help us see beyond facial lines, white hair, shuffling gait, or stroke-induced paralysis to a whole person with a past, a present, and an identity often fractured by illness. In this issue, Tom Cole and Thu Tram Nguyen's article on the Visible Lives Project ("Who We Are, Where We Have Been") demonstrates how stories can be used to rebuild lives and reveal the person behind the mask of age. Cole and Nguyen's project reminds me of Jungian analyst Florida Scott Maxwell's observation, written in her 84th year, that as we age, we may become drab on the outside, but inside we burn with a fierce energy.

In contrast, the recent effort to reverse the traditional "decline and loss" paradigm that long governed thinking about aging has generated cultural images that try to eliminate aging's terrors by focusing on the grandmother marathoner or the mountain-climbing great-grandfather. But by willing away the negative forces that accompany old age, these images can easily, if not deliberately, exclude the physically or mentally frail from the human community. Drew Leder's article for our Media Rx department ("Aging into the Spirit") highlights this cultural trend and poses some solutions based on the spiritual insights offered by religion. And Marshall Kapp and Rabbi Peter Knobel, writing for our Common Ground column, explore a troubling case whose realities are probably much more commonplace than the cheering prospect of "successful aging."

Gerontology today includes literature, sociology, anthropology, history, religion, and philosophy and encourages an immediate meeting of one person and another — in a sense creating the I-Thou relationship famously described by Martin Buber, an authentic encounter with another person in which the I cannot evade the terrors of the soul that the Thou may be experiencing. Such a meeting reduces the security that distance or "otherness" offers. The rewards of so risking oneself, however, are many. Jack Shea's wonderful story, "Part of the Ocean: Spiritual Wisdom and Aging"; the excerpts from Frida Furman's prize-winning and engaging book Facing the Mirror: Older Women and Beauty Shop Culture (in the Reading Room section of this issue); and Anne Wyatt-Brown's piece on women writers reveal the faces of old age with utter realism, occasionally biting humor, and inspiring spiritual depth.

Also in this issue, Madelyn Iris discusses a project recently concluded at the Park Ridge Center, Retrieving Spiritual Traditions in Long-Term Care for the Elderly, which explored how religious understandings of old age might guide us as we face our own aging process and that of people we love. And our colleague Martin Marty gives us his perspective on the blessings and challenges of retirement in "Moving Aside" (Last Word).

This issue of the Bulletin begins an engagement with older speakers and their lives. It emerges from our project funded by the Retirement Research Foundation — Scholars in Residence for Ethics, Values, and the Meaning of Old Age. We hope it will lead readers to their own exploration. The I-Thou encounter encourages us to "try-on" the aging body in advance of our own aging, to experience vicariously the degradations and the power of old age, and, above all, to be open to our own aging with its ambiguities, uncertainties, and also possibilities. Old age can be a time to free oneself of the inessentials and to tend to basic questions — a journey undoubtedly best begun early in life and hard to put off later.