The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

Spirituality, Religious Wisdom, and the Care of the Patient

Spirituality, Religious Wisdom, and the Care of the Patient

Sidney Callahan
siddan@bestweb.net

Sidney Callahan, Ph.D., holds the McKeever Chair in Moral Theology at St. John's University, Queens, New York.  She is a columnist for Commonweal Magazine and a board member or consultant for numerous secular and Catholic organizations that concern ethics and public life including the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, the Catholic Common Ground Initiative, and the Hastings Center.  She is the author of many books including In Good Conscience:  Reason and Emotion in Moral Decision Making and Abortion:  Understanding Differences (co-edited with Daniel Callahan).

Thank you for providing this wonderful series and for asking me to take part in this session on Dignity And The Care Of The Patient: An Islamic/Catholic Dialogue

I will begin with some general thoughts about spirituality and then move to some resources that the Catholic religious tradition has to offer for patient care.

Many Spiritualities

Catholic belief in God's Life Giving Holy Spirit working everywhere in the world, and especially within human hearts and minds leads to the acknowledgment that many different spiritualities exist.   The "spirit," is generally used to refer to an inner dimension of the person.  This spiritual core can be seen as the deepest center of the person.  It is here that a person reflects and experiences ultimate reality.  An ultimate reality will necessarily transcend the individual in some way and include more things than what can be easily seen or touched.  Spirituality will concern the highest values held by a person and is a universal characteristic of human beings.   As Michael Downey a Christian theologian writes in Understanding Christian Spirituality,  "All human beings are spiritual in so far as all have the capacity to know and be known, to love and be loved, to be free and enable others to be free." (p.33) Many other definitions of spirituality stress the depth, inwardness and ultimate grounding of the spiritual quest for meaning.

Today we see secular spiritualities that emerge in human experiences of art, music, nature, exercise, sex, diet, crystals, dreams, creative work, martial arts, or even fly fishing.  Many practices that give aesthetic pleasure and heightened cognitive awareness are meaningful to persons and are not always attributed to an ultimate Divine Reality.  When people tell you, " I'm spiritual but not religious," they can be referring to their meaningful moments of secular spirituality or "stripped down" spirituality.

Another level in a spiritual quest may acknowledge some ultimate reality beyond the natural world but not to membership in an organized doctrinally defined faith.  Here the person seeks transcendent meaning by getting in touch with, or becoming atuned to some larger reality of Spirit, with a capital S-- a Great Spirit, or World Spirit, or Higher Power.  Persons pursue the Spirit through inner spiritual meditation, prayer, worship, vision quests or a disciplined practice.  Psychologists have studied "peak experiences," or epiphanies of various kinds which induce a belief in a benevolent ordered reality beyond the human sphere.  When experiences of a Spirit is identified with goodness and benevolence, then the seeker can feel the need to respond with right action and corresponding compassion.  Spiritual seekers then embrace the moral requirements of behaving with truth and compassion, perhaps in the disciplined path of an eight fold way or a twelve step program. The numinous experience of a transcendent reality and the ethical imperative become fused.  Many eclectic forms of stripped down spirituality exist in America; they often attract seekers who have an allergy to highly doctrinal and organized religious institutions.

Monotheistic Religions and Spirituality

In Christianity the Holy Spirit is worshiped as creatively working within the world to inspire, heal, console, empower and sanctify human hearts, inspire the Church community, and redeem the whole of creation.  I think a Christian can claim that the aspirations of the human spirit in secular spiritualities and in stripped down spiritualities are manifestations of God as Holy Spirit.  Once, however, you assert that the creation is not identical with God, but rather is God's good work, doctrines of pantheism will not apply.  With the Christian doctrine of Incarnation, i.e. that God enters history as a truly human being, then it follows that historical embodied humans keep their unique identities for eternity.  The resurrection of the body assures Christian worshipers that they will not melt away into some form of Nirvana or collective entity.

Once a seeker gets caught up in a "non-stripped down" "non-secular" spirituality of a traditional high religion, the way to holiness requires effort-lots of blood, sweat and tears.  The arduous path of spiritual discipline leads away from egotism, illusion and self-deception-as well as toward joyful celebration.  In Christianity, the God of Love, Three Persons in One, desires the healing and happiness of humankind.  Human beings are created in God's image and viewed as an eternal part of a good creation.  Grace builds on nature and humankind is called to participate in God's Divine Life of the Trinity, through union with Jesus Christ, truly human and truly divine.  God becomes human so that humans can become God.   Humans fully alive are the glory of God.  Spirituality is a process of "perfecting a person's humanity" by living in the "simple loving presence of God," a process that entails what the great theologian Karl Rahner calls "the mysticism of everyday life." Every thought, feeling and act is important, whatever you do in both word and work do for the glory of God.

Continued  ->
Printer-Friendly Version

Ingrid Mattson, "Dignity and Patient Care: An Islamic Perspective"
Dignity: Introduction
Table of Contents