Religious Resources for Healing
A Theologian's Story of Spiritual Care: A Patient Encounter and Gabriel Marcel's Authentic Relationship
Ashley Moyse, PhD, Vancouver School of Theology
This paper will offer a story of ‘spiritual’ care. But it is not the usual story of a hospital chaplain, or spiritual care provider, offering services to a patient facing the struggle for life against death. No, this is a story of 'Patricia'—a young woman whose life abutted by death transformed my understanding of the patient and the task of medicine, setting my vocation in a new direction.
While researching/working at two separate Oncology centers in Colorado nearly a decade ago I regularly engaged those suffering the effects of cancer at every stage, from new diagnoses of highly treatable neoplasms to the final stages of untreatable and aggressive malignancies. Yet early in my training, I worked with Patricia. She made decisions in conversation with her oncologist and family physician, among others, ostensibly free from the moral jargon and bioethical rhetoric—she was neither located at the crossroads of choice, nor encumbered by the technical grammar of justification, but rather known at the crises encountered in human life. She was one of my first patients/research participants, and was diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma. I knew a great deal of her condition: The prognosis was grim, and I was anxious meeting her the first time. However, after introductions, she sat down, looked at me directly and said, decisively, “I am going to die. I am refusing all further treatments, and I am going to die.” I did not know how to respond. For a moment I sat, staring at her dark grey eyes, unsettled by what I had heard. I was particularly unsettled by her decision to refuse further treatment; even though I knew, with such treatment, she would not likely survive the cancer. Nevertheless, I remained in a sort of stunned silence. Interrupting the awkward quiet, she responded gladly, her eyes warmed, “So, let’s enjoy our time together!”
Even though I felt uneasy regarding her forthrightness, and my obvious lack of clinical experience was evident by my mute reaction and discomfort, I was overwhelmed with intense curiosity. The whole event made little sense to me. She was an ailing woman, riddled with malignancies, confronted with the imminent threat of death. Nevertheless, she was rich with gladness and content in her decision. I eventually spoke during that first meeting, and, in subsequent appointments, we did enjoy our time. We were committed to sharing life together in a Colorado cancer clinic for one hour twice each week for a handful of weeks before her death. I learned a great deal from her, among others navigating the cancer experience. I listened, watched, and waited, while struggling to understand human life, inclusive of death. This encounter with Patricia and her wrestling with death interrupted and transformed my vocation—from a promising career in applied physiology to religious studies at the intersection of theology and medicine. But more than this, now affirmed by the theology of French existentialist Gabriel Marcel, she taught me a great lesson about ‘spiritual’ care—it is a lesson grounded by the characteristics of authentic relationships, including availability, fidelity, and hope. She lived these out for me so that I might be able to embody them for others. It is a lesson that might also interrupt and transform those ‘social and intellectual forces that continue to dehumanize the patient (and provider) experience and the practices of health care’.
Light over Darkness: The Expression of Emotional Loss and Grief Through Figurative Sculpture
Paivi Miettunen, MD, University of Calgary
Background: While many medical conditions are curable with modern treatment approaches, others remain “manageable” without cure. In the pediatric population, the illness experience for the family can be profound, especially if the child’s condition is associated with risk for increased mortality. Even in non-fatal conditions, the patients and parents often gradually disclose feelings of sadness and loss when faced with a chronic disease diagnosis. While medical training includes concepts such as “breaking bad news” as a part of a regular curriculum, teachings around grief and loss are less well formulated. While it is easy to agree that recognition and understanding of loss and grief are important for practice of medicine, the study of grief presents a challenging paradox. Although experience of grief is universal, its emotional manifestations are often considered private, and many medical students may not have had previous personal experience of grief.
Objective and Methods: This paper focuses on how visual arts, specifically figurative sculpture, help bridge the gap between the theoretical concept of grief and the ability to recognize its manifestations in a contemporary patient population. Throughout centuries, sculpture has shaped our understanding of emotional loss and has created a way to express synonymous concepts with grief. To understand how sculptors have engaged with grief in the past and whether this mode of expression is relevant today, this paper compares the portrayal of loss through mortality in the form of funerary statues from Staglieno Cemetery in Genoa, Italy, to the depiction of other types of emotional loss expressed by contemporary figurative sculptor, Alicia Ponzio. Ponzio’s works “Letting Go” (2010) and “Lingering Shadows” (2012) were included as present-day examples and compared to the following funerary monuments: Tombs for Raffaele Pienovi (by Giovanni Villa, 1879), Francesco Oneto (by Giulio Monteverde, 1882), Hermann Brauer (by Leonardo Bistolfi, 1904) and Giuditta Varni (by Santo Varni, 1875).
Results: In analyzing the way in which these artists express the psychology of emotional loss, the main methods of communication included the use of constructed metaphors, such as depiction of a solitary figure with an averted gaze to portrayal of known themes in the Christian religious tradition, such as “Pieta”. In each work the sculptor connects with the observer through emotions, portraying by gesture, facial expression, or by use of symbols sadness, loneliness, importance of human connection and other emotions related to experience of grief and loss.
Discussion: Through figurative sculpture these artists offer non-verbal ways of expressing and understanding human response to profound loss. Even though the artists are separated by more than a century, they generate in the viewer a similar poignant connection on an abstract and emotional level. Additionally, the aesthetic beauty of the sculptures offers solace, and transcends the experience of grief.
Future Directions: By identifying a unique way of teaching about visual recognition of emotional response to loss, the next step is to develop an integrative visual arts and medicine curriculum that would facilitate the students’ ability to identify and empathize with grief and loss in a contemporary population.
Ritual Healing
Robert Hesse, PhD, Institute for Spirituality and Health
Medicine has been using placebos for decades to heal, without knowing the neuroscience of why they often work. Religion has been using rituals for millennia to heal, without knowing how God often makes them work. Medicine may call rituals merely placebos but the faithful believe otherwise, finding it often in their liturgies. In either case it can result in psychological, physical, and spiritual healing. In some faiths, rituals take the form of sacraments, which by definition are both symbols of God’s love, similar to placebos, and substance of God’s love, similar to a patient’s belief in the effectiveness of placebos. Medicine can no longer ignore the benefits of religious rituals any more than it can ignore the benefits of placebos. Ritual healing can breach the wall of separation between medicine and religion.
Placebos in medicine usually impact only one of the senses but rituals often impact all the senses, which can make them a richer more human experience and therefore even more neurologically effective. All faiths utilize rituals. This paper addresses some of the more powerful Christian rituals to be used to heal, as presented by both their sacramental meaning and the physical senses that they impact. Sacraments can lessen dehumanizing clinical procedures and promote healing.
The sense of smell has the strongest neurological impact on memory. Churches use the aroma of incense and the sweetness of fresh flowers to stimulate the olfactory glands. Examples include the incense in Santiago de Compostela Cathedral in Spain and flowers in the Santa Maria ad Martyres church in Rome. Providing sweet scents in a hospital environment would promote healing.
The sense of sight utilizes more of the brain’s synapses than any other sense. Churches often combine art, architecture, and nature to impact the sense of sight. Examples of each include Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel, the Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg, and Christ in the Desert Benedictine Monastery in New Mexico. Incorporating inspirational art in patients’ rooms would promote healing.
Music profoundly touches the brain partly through the heart because the beats per minute of music, closely matches the resting heart rate. Pipe organs, and especially Gregorian chant’s repetitive sounds, provide a vestibule into contemplative prayer, which has scientifically been shown to promote healing. Playing music in MRI, CT, and X-ray rooms would promote healing.
The sense of touch is communicated via the skin, the largest organ in the body. Liturgy incorporates touch in hugs, handshakes, hands on the head, and anointing. Most notable is the healing sacrament of the sick using anointing with fragranced oil. Healing massage and anointing would promote healing.
Taste and smell are closely linked senses in communicating with the brain. The Christian Eucharist is at the center of all sacraments and the majority of Christians believe, as the apostles did, in Christ’s presence when they consume the taste of bread and wine. Chaplains provide healing communion.
Ashley Moyse, PhD, Vancouver School of Theology
This paper will offer a story of ‘spiritual’ care. But it is not the usual story of a hospital chaplain, or spiritual care provider, offering services to a patient facing the struggle for life against death. No, this is a story of 'Patricia'—a young woman whose life abutted by death transformed my understanding of the patient and the task of medicine, setting my vocation in a new direction.
While researching/working at two separate Oncology centers in Colorado nearly a decade ago I regularly engaged those suffering the effects of cancer at every stage, from new diagnoses of highly treatable neoplasms to the final stages of untreatable and aggressive malignancies. Yet early in my training, I worked with Patricia. She made decisions in conversation with her oncologist and family physician, among others, ostensibly free from the moral jargon and bioethical rhetoric—she was neither located at the crossroads of choice, nor encumbered by the technical grammar of justification, but rather known at the crises encountered in human life. She was one of my first patients/research participants, and was diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma. I knew a great deal of her condition: The prognosis was grim, and I was anxious meeting her the first time. However, after introductions, she sat down, looked at me directly and said, decisively, “I am going to die. I am refusing all further treatments, and I am going to die.” I did not know how to respond. For a moment I sat, staring at her dark grey eyes, unsettled by what I had heard. I was particularly unsettled by her decision to refuse further treatment; even though I knew, with such treatment, she would not likely survive the cancer. Nevertheless, I remained in a sort of stunned silence. Interrupting the awkward quiet, she responded gladly, her eyes warmed, “So, let’s enjoy our time together!”
Even though I felt uneasy regarding her forthrightness, and my obvious lack of clinical experience was evident by my mute reaction and discomfort, I was overwhelmed with intense curiosity. The whole event made little sense to me. She was an ailing woman, riddled with malignancies, confronted with the imminent threat of death. Nevertheless, she was rich with gladness and content in her decision. I eventually spoke during that first meeting, and, in subsequent appointments, we did enjoy our time. We were committed to sharing life together in a Colorado cancer clinic for one hour twice each week for a handful of weeks before her death. I learned a great deal from her, among others navigating the cancer experience. I listened, watched, and waited, while struggling to understand human life, inclusive of death. This encounter with Patricia and her wrestling with death interrupted and transformed my vocation—from a promising career in applied physiology to religious studies at the intersection of theology and medicine. But more than this, now affirmed by the theology of French existentialist Gabriel Marcel, she taught me a great lesson about ‘spiritual’ care—it is a lesson grounded by the characteristics of authentic relationships, including availability, fidelity, and hope. She lived these out for me so that I might be able to embody them for others. It is a lesson that might also interrupt and transform those ‘social and intellectual forces that continue to dehumanize the patient (and provider) experience and the practices of health care’.
Light over Darkness: The Expression of Emotional Loss and Grief Through Figurative Sculpture
Paivi Miettunen, MD, University of Calgary
Background: While many medical conditions are curable with modern treatment approaches, others remain “manageable” without cure. In the pediatric population, the illness experience for the family can be profound, especially if the child’s condition is associated with risk for increased mortality. Even in non-fatal conditions, the patients and parents often gradually disclose feelings of sadness and loss when faced with a chronic disease diagnosis. While medical training includes concepts such as “breaking bad news” as a part of a regular curriculum, teachings around grief and loss are less well formulated. While it is easy to agree that recognition and understanding of loss and grief are important for practice of medicine, the study of grief presents a challenging paradox. Although experience of grief is universal, its emotional manifestations are often considered private, and many medical students may not have had previous personal experience of grief.
Objective and Methods: This paper focuses on how visual arts, specifically figurative sculpture, help bridge the gap between the theoretical concept of grief and the ability to recognize its manifestations in a contemporary patient population. Throughout centuries, sculpture has shaped our understanding of emotional loss and has created a way to express synonymous concepts with grief. To understand how sculptors have engaged with grief in the past and whether this mode of expression is relevant today, this paper compares the portrayal of loss through mortality in the form of funerary statues from Staglieno Cemetery in Genoa, Italy, to the depiction of other types of emotional loss expressed by contemporary figurative sculptor, Alicia Ponzio. Ponzio’s works “Letting Go” (2010) and “Lingering Shadows” (2012) were included as present-day examples and compared to the following funerary monuments: Tombs for Raffaele Pienovi (by Giovanni Villa, 1879), Francesco Oneto (by Giulio Monteverde, 1882), Hermann Brauer (by Leonardo Bistolfi, 1904) and Giuditta Varni (by Santo Varni, 1875).
Results: In analyzing the way in which these artists express the psychology of emotional loss, the main methods of communication included the use of constructed metaphors, such as depiction of a solitary figure with an averted gaze to portrayal of known themes in the Christian religious tradition, such as “Pieta”. In each work the sculptor connects with the observer through emotions, portraying by gesture, facial expression, or by use of symbols sadness, loneliness, importance of human connection and other emotions related to experience of grief and loss.
Discussion: Through figurative sculpture these artists offer non-verbal ways of expressing and understanding human response to profound loss. Even though the artists are separated by more than a century, they generate in the viewer a similar poignant connection on an abstract and emotional level. Additionally, the aesthetic beauty of the sculptures offers solace, and transcends the experience of grief.
Future Directions: By identifying a unique way of teaching about visual recognition of emotional response to loss, the next step is to develop an integrative visual arts and medicine curriculum that would facilitate the students’ ability to identify and empathize with grief and loss in a contemporary population.
Ritual Healing
Robert Hesse, PhD, Institute for Spirituality and Health
Medicine has been using placebos for decades to heal, without knowing the neuroscience of why they often work. Religion has been using rituals for millennia to heal, without knowing how God often makes them work. Medicine may call rituals merely placebos but the faithful believe otherwise, finding it often in their liturgies. In either case it can result in psychological, physical, and spiritual healing. In some faiths, rituals take the form of sacraments, which by definition are both symbols of God’s love, similar to placebos, and substance of God’s love, similar to a patient’s belief in the effectiveness of placebos. Medicine can no longer ignore the benefits of religious rituals any more than it can ignore the benefits of placebos. Ritual healing can breach the wall of separation between medicine and religion.
Placebos in medicine usually impact only one of the senses but rituals often impact all the senses, which can make them a richer more human experience and therefore even more neurologically effective. All faiths utilize rituals. This paper addresses some of the more powerful Christian rituals to be used to heal, as presented by both their sacramental meaning and the physical senses that they impact. Sacraments can lessen dehumanizing clinical procedures and promote healing.
The sense of smell has the strongest neurological impact on memory. Churches use the aroma of incense and the sweetness of fresh flowers to stimulate the olfactory glands. Examples include the incense in Santiago de Compostela Cathedral in Spain and flowers in the Santa Maria ad Martyres church in Rome. Providing sweet scents in a hospital environment would promote healing.
The sense of sight utilizes more of the brain’s synapses than any other sense. Churches often combine art, architecture, and nature to impact the sense of sight. Examples of each include Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel, the Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg, and Christ in the Desert Benedictine Monastery in New Mexico. Incorporating inspirational art in patients’ rooms would promote healing.
Music profoundly touches the brain partly through the heart because the beats per minute of music, closely matches the resting heart rate. Pipe organs, and especially Gregorian chant’s repetitive sounds, provide a vestibule into contemplative prayer, which has scientifically been shown to promote healing. Playing music in MRI, CT, and X-ray rooms would promote healing.
The sense of touch is communicated via the skin, the largest organ in the body. Liturgy incorporates touch in hugs, handshakes, hands on the head, and anointing. Most notable is the healing sacrament of the sick using anointing with fragranced oil. Healing massage and anointing would promote healing.
Taste and smell are closely linked senses in communicating with the brain. The Christian Eucharist is at the center of all sacraments and the majority of Christians believe, as the apostles did, in Christ’s presence when they consume the taste of bread and wine. Chaplains provide healing communion.