What happens to our faith when we can’t remember?

Dementia: Living in the Memories of God

Dementia is an umbrella term for a group of illnesses which often have similar symptoms, including Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia.

Dementia is a syndrome – usually of a chronic or progressive nature – that leads to deterioration in cognitive function - the ability to process thought - beyond what might be expected from the usual consequences of biological ageing.

It affects memory, thinking, orientation, comprehension, calculation, learning capacity, language, and judgement. Consciousness is not affected. The impairment in cognitive function is commonly accompanied, and occasionally preceded, by changes in mood, emotional control, behaviour, or motivation.

Dementia is currently the seventh leading cause of death among all diseases and one of the major causes of disability and dependency among older people worldwide.

It has physical, psychological, social and economic impacts, not only for people living with dementia, but also for their carers, families and society at large.

There is often a lack of awareness and understanding of dementia, resulting in stigmatization and barriers to diagnosis and care.

Swinton says: “Dementia is of course all of these things. But above all else and most importantly, it is a meaningful human experience that occurs in the lives of people who seek to live well and find dignity and hope even the midst of the difficulties. It is when we forget that, that stigma and caricatures begin to creep in.”

In his award-winning book, ‘Dementia: Living in the Memories of God’, Swinton, who previously worked as a mental health nurse and as a hospital chaplain, uses practical theology to reframe and reconceive the nature of dementia itself and offers innovative proposals regarding our understanding and care for people living with this condition.

He asserts the need for an approach based in respect and dignity, arguing that our cultural discourse about dementia has been framed in a reductive and profoundly negative way, concentrating almost exclusively upon the condition as a biological disease marked by neurological decline and the loss of the self.

The book fundamentally challenges this assumption. It argues that dementia must properly be conceived and confronted as a social, cultural and spiritual phenomenon rather than merely as a narrowly biological one.

Swinton proposes that the fundamental questions of identity, memory, hope, and knowledge of God raised by our experience of dementia are, in reality, questions whose very nature and significance can only be pursued in a properly social register—in ways that take seriously how the experience of dementia occurs in and through interpersonal relationships, rather than as something that ‘happens’ only within the confines of an individual brain.

With specific reference to the Christian community, the book argues that this involves reconceiving of human identity and personhood as realities that are fundamentally grounded in God’s memory rather than merely preserved by the fragility of human memory as such.

In this way, Swinton redefines dementia in a specifically theological light, drawing its experience into contact with the story of the Christian gospel wherein believers discover their identities as they relate to one another but also to God, rather than achieving and sustaining them only on the basis of what they can or cannot remember or can and cannot do.