Understanding, assessing, and intervening in the spiritual nature of medical events: theological and theoretical perspectives

ABSTRACT

That professional spiritual care practitioners are required to work in and communicate in secular healthcare is an increasing reality in this profession. However, the theological nature of spiritual care practitioners’ work does not always lend itself to easy translation into terms standard to healthcare. This is in part due to healthcare’s universal dependence on empirical science to determine its norms of care. Spiritual care practitioners therefore need to find ways to describe and justify their practices for other healthcare professionals. This article seeks to do precisely this by articulating a philosophical theory about the spiritual nature of medical events. This article furthermore develops a clinical tool for assessing a client’s progress in integrating the event into the fabric of their life. The result is there is now a way forward for understanding spiritual care practitioners’ theological work in secular contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Spiritual care
• medical events
• assessment
• intervention
• healing
• incarnation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Simon Lasair is Director of Spiritual Care and Mission Effectiveness at Samaritan Place, a long-term care home in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. He holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Manchester, UK, and has published several peer reviewed articles concerning spiritual care. His ongoing research concerns spirituality and spiritual care in healthcare, integrating both theological and philosophical perspectives alongside empirical research.

ORCID

Simon Lasair http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7368-2183

Notes

1 I use the term “professional spiritual care practitioners” to reflect the Canadian context out of which this article was produced. In other jurisdictions such practitioners are typically called chaplains. The motivation behind using this nomenclature is to reflect the multi-faith nature of such practitioners’ practices within healthcare contexts, many of which are often publically funded. Within this Canadian context chaplains are usually practitioners funded by specific religious groups and denominations, rather than the healthcare institutions themselves. Spiritual care practitioners, in contrast to chaplains, thus see themselves as a specific kind of healthcare professional, albeit ones who are well-rooted within their own faith traditions, their specific theologies providing both justification and direction for their caregiving practices (cf. CASC, 2018).

2 Badiou’s theory is highly abstract, relying heavily on mathematical formulations to communicate his concepts. The examples here illustrate Badiou’s concepts, while also contextualizing them for healthcare settings. Almost needless to state, there will be some aspects of Badiou’s thought that are lost in this translation. However, to communicate the relevance of Badiou’s thought for spiritual care, such translation, and these contingent losses, are necessary.

3 Note, this is a departure from both Žižek’s and Badiou’s materialist assumptions; for both of them, metaphysics only exists as an ideological distortion of brute material realities. This might be similar to the perspective of medical science as well, if not those of specific medical practitioners. From these perspectives, metaphysics functions solely in the domains of the symbolic and the imaginary (cf. Žižek 2014). From the perspective articulated herein, metaphysics is a very real domain, existing both apart from, and also integrated with, material realities.