Start with a story: Thomas Groome, page 117

This is going to be an interactive time. That means I will stop periodically to give you some things to think about and to ask whatever questions you may have. My job here is not to set myself up as the expert. My job is to stimulate creative reflection and together we'll ask the questions necessary to understand the connection between spirituality and our health.

Your contributions to this time are important, whether you voice your thoughts or not.
(Ask for a show of hands: nursing staff, volunteers, medical personnel.)
Your presence here tells me a few things: that you recognize an important connection between spirituality and health; that you are committed to living a life of faith yourself, and it tells me that you care deeply about people in distress. Your presence also tells me that you desire to help others make meaning out of often very difficult situations, situations of illness and sometimes death that force the deeper spiritual issues in life.

There are at least two ways of listening and interacting with this subject matter. 1. You can listen and interact with the material for the purpose of your own personal and spiritual growth. My experience is that even if you've heard all this before somewhere else, there is always more to discover about your relationship to God and to the world. This ongoing discovery gets triggered by involved listening and willing interaction. 2. As you listen and enter the invitations for reflection keep in mind the people you visit in your capacity as spiritual services volunteer, or the patients you care for in your nursing role. Think especially of those who need support, encouragement and hope. How do the things we explore today show up in the person who suffers from cancer, the one who worries about her sick child, the one who faces sudden disability?

Spirituality is a very losely used word today. Just about anything that makes people feel good seems to get lumped into this category. But there is more, way more, to spirituality than just offering tools to "feel good" - that in itself can be rather shallow and short-lived. In its basic definition, spirituality refers to that human desire with which we are all born that compels us to search for meaning beyond ourselves. There seems to be an inner push, carved into our DNA it seems, that we experience ourselves, others and the world around us against the backdrop of a wider, divine horizon. Ron Rolheiser wrote a book with this title: Seeking Spirituality or Holy Longing. Ron starts his book by defining what spirituality is.

He says: we are born with a deep restlessness, an unfulfilled desire, an unquenchable fire. Some call it a longing, a loneliness, a wildness. Others call it an all-embracing ache, a dis-ease, even call it a madness that comes from the gods. Whatever we call it, we are ultimately referring to the same thing. We are born with universal and unfulfilled desire. Sometimes this desire hits us as pain - dissatisfaction, frustration, and aching. Other times we experience it as deep energy, something beautiful, an irresistible pull towards love, ecstacy, beauty, creativity. Desire can therefore show itself to us as aching pain or as delicious hope.

Spirituality, according to Rolheiser, is ultimately what we do with this desire. What we do with our longings, both positive and negative, is our spirituality. It's the stuff that the Greek philosopher called: "We are on fire because our souls come from beyond, and that 'beyond' draws us back towards itself." St. Augustine, in the 4th century, said something similar: "You have made us for yourself, o Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." Spirituality, then, is what we do with our unrest, with the fire within us.

In this basic understanding, spirituality is first about whether we feel at peace with the world around us, with ourselves, with God, no matter what our life situations are. Spirituality is about being able to sleep at night, even before it is about whether we go to church and how often. It is about being integrated or falling apart, about being within community or being lonely, about being in harmony with mother earth or feeling alienated from her. Whether we let ourselves be consciously shaped by religious ideas and practices or not, the fire within us moves us to act. The ways we act leave us either healthy or unhealthy, loving or bitter, connected with others or alienated from them. We can go to church every day, yet feel bitter, judgmental of the world, impatient with others and ourselves. Likewise, we can be raised without any religious practice, and somehow find peace, harmony and compassion in our hearts. I am not saying anything about the value of church attendance here. I merely want to illustrate that a healthy spirituality is about way more than the outward expression we give to that spirituality.

Ron Rolheiser says: bottom par. on page 17

And what shapes our actions is basically what shapes our desire. Desire always makes us act. Our doing will lead to either greater integration or disintegration within our personalities, minds, and bodies - Our actions and attitudes lead to the strengthening or deterioration of relationships: to God, to ourselves, to others, and to the world of which we are a part. The habits and disciplines we use form the basis for a spirituality, and for the way we make meaning out of what happens in life.

For example, suppose you start suffering chronic backache. Your doctor tells you that it is arthritis. Well, that is a pretty factual way of understanding the pain. Then, later on, a friend suggests that there is more going on than the physical pain. She has seen and heard you struggle. She has heard you question and raise new doubts on old issues. You realize then that she could be right: the pain of mid-life is triggered. This gives you a wider horizon of meaning. Finally, in prayer, you realize that this pain, arthritis and mid-life, is your Gethsemane. Then you realize that this is the place in your life where you are asked to sweat blood. Gethsemane is a metaphor, but by connecting your pain to the image of Jesus sweating blood, you are broadening the horizon of meaning and you are contemplating the divine presence and activity in your life, right through the pain.

I saw a powerful illustration once of a spirituality that stretched the horizon incredibly far. Without a doubt it touched the divine, yet it left me most uncomfortable because I'm not sure if I could to likewise. Anyone seen the award-winning movie "Life is Beautiful?" The Italian Jewish father ends up in a concentration camp with his 6-year old son. With the horror of dehumanizing methods of violence, and the smell of the gas chambers filling their nostrils, this father never ceases to break open the horizon for his son. He keeps up telling his son this is all a game: "When we get enough points, we win a tank and we will get out." At first one wonders whether he is just being dishonest by not telling his son the truth about being in a death camp. But the father's ability to keep a spirit of hope, play and joy ultimately saves the child from being severely traumatized. When the Germans desert the camp and the allied tank drives through the camp, the little boy is the only one left. Carefully he comes out of his hiding place. Seeing the allied tank come around the corner, his eyes grow big with amazement: "We won the game, here is our prize - daddy was right all along." The boy comes out alive and the father does not. This is a story about a spirituality of hope and of redemptive, or sacrificial, love even in the most ugly of circumstances.

I want you take a few moments now for some quiet reflection. If you want, you may close your eyes... Try to remember a time when you were severely challenged, when maybe all your efforts to find meaning in life no longer worked, when maybe you wondered whether God had abandoned you. If you cannot think of such a time in your own life, think of someone you know this has happened to. What happened - what were the circumstances: a sudden illness, the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, the giving up of unfulfilled dreams, what were you deepest and most agonizing questions at that time .......... If you remember a question, write it down. What was it that eventually broke open the horizon of meaning for you, so that you saw your life in a new light, with new hope. What was it that fuelled a new commitment to live and love with passion and gusto? Savour that experience of new hope. What did you learn in the process? What was the gift God gave you that has stayed with you ever since....

Share briefly with your neighbour about this memory. (5 minutes)

Whatever the process is that you experienced in that time of your life - that's what spirituality is all about.

If we are intentional about our spirituality, and intentional about our prayer life, which is an expression of our spirituality, then we open the door for God to reach into our lives through everything and everyone. A healthy and open spirituality makes possible that:
other people can become messengers objects can become symbols nature can burst with God's self-communication dreams can become visions imagination can become creativity pain can become labour pain, announcing the promise of new life events can become vehicles for meaning and for God's communication.

Story from Bernie Siegel, page 231/232

From birth on we are programmed to invest everything around us with meaning. When we cannot find meaning we panic - big time. When our place or purpose in God's world gets lost, we feel adrift. Have you ever known someone who went into a blaming mode for the hardships that befell him/her? Ever seen someone panic because they could not absorb the shock of a terminal illness? Ever heard someone say: "What did I do to deserve this?" We all know moments like that. Whether we are capable of moving beyond such times of chaos or not, depends a lot on the kind of spirituality we have fostered in our lifetime.

How do we distinguish healthy from unhealthy spirituality? What are the criteria for a healthy spirituality? (Ask for their answers and write them down on the board)

How do we know when turning to God leads to lasting liberation and peace, and when turning to God is a crutch and discourages us from taking responsibility for our lives? And what works for one does not necessarily work for another.

Whether a person has fostered a spirituality that is healthy and life-giving will show in the people you visit and care for, in the hospital or recovering at home. It is often in times of crisis that our healthy and unhealthy responses are triggered the most.

In order to define a spirituality as healthy, three things need to be taken into consideration. These are:

1. The form/expression of a given spirituality is always to be a means to an end, and never an end in itself. If the means becomes the end, we will feel extremely threatened when our usual understandings and responses no longer work. We all get caught mistaking the means for the end. I have had times in my own relationship to God, that it felt like the ground was shifting under my feet, and I'd panic. It was only when I gained back right perspective that I was able to risk and let the old forms go, so new ways became possible.

2. Our spirituality is intimately linked with our personality, our childhood, our religious biases and preferences, and our actual experiences. I experience this strongly when I compare my R.C. religious background with the R.C. experiences of my husband and other people around here. My Catholicism was NOT marked by strong devotional practices, strict observances, and the Mass in Latin. When Jim and I speak of our childhood church experiences, it almost sounds as if we were raised in two different denominations. The only Catholic church I knew was the renewed and changed form. This makes it easier for me to feel at home in the church's liturgical renewal. But never having known any other church also makes it difficult for me sometimes to understand why some people seem to have such a longing for the old ways or why some people can so vehemently reject the new ways. 3. Healthy spirituality is life-giving and love-giving both within ourselves and towards others. Does our ability to relate to God come from a wellspring of love? Is our ability to find meaning and purpose in our times of crisis supported by a wellspring of love which flows out of us toward healthy self-love and love of others?

Reading Peace, Love and Healing by Bernie Siegel makes me conclude the following, especially when Siegel talks about advice to give to folks who are afraid of dying: he suggests three ways to get to heaven without dying: one, live fully in the present moment, since in heaven there is no time limit; two, allow everything in life move you and fill you with love, since the measure of love given and received is the only thing we get to take with us in death; three, give away those things that make for treasures in heaven like, forgiveness, joy, comfort, blessings, faith, hope and love.

Here is another story that illustrates this: Siegel, page 239

Group work - 15 minutes

Reporting back - 10 minutes

Break - 10 minutes

We recognize the extent to which a spirituality is healthy by the effects, the fruits. I want to share with you ten points that lead to good fruits of a healthy spirituality. I am going to make these points in the forms of questions. Each question has a positive and a negative part. As a way to make the following points our own, I will pause briefly after each one and invite you to "rate" yourself on a scale of one to ten, ten being the most positive, the healthiest, and one being the most negative, the unhealthiest. One warning: no one can rate themselves at ten for all these points. We are always on a journey toward healthy spirituality, and some days are better than others. That's just the way things are with us. That is why, besides being honest with ourselves, it is essential to be gentle also.

Again, these questions are not just for ourselves. Keep in mind how these same issues show up in the people you visit. What can you glean about spirituality when you talk with patients, with their families, with the nursing staff. Even when you do not have explicitly religious conversations, a lot of these things show through in the attitudes and feelings expressed. 1. Do we acknowledge a relationship with God/the divine in mutual freedom, or are we enslaved by ritual, and guilt ourselves when we don't do as told?

2. Do we grow in mindfulness of the present and of the quality of our life, or do we dwell on past mistakes, the faults of others, and a fretting about the future?

3. Do we grow into an open orientation to life, welcoming the unexpected as new opportunities, or are we rigid about how "things should be done and not done"?

4. Do we grow in our capacity to love (of God, ourselves and others) without strings attached (freely given), or do we dish out conditional love, and are we consumed by a tendency to criticize, judge and complain (mutter under our breath about God, ourselves + others)?

5. Are we capable of transforming our quantity of do-ing into a quality of be-ing, or are we led to compulsively do-do-do without stopping long enough to just be?

6. Are our hands and heart open to receive God/life/others/ourselves, or do we go through life with clenched fists and a closed (hurting) heart?

7. Can we tap into a transforming power which helps us rise above suffering and pain in our lives (much of which we have no control over) and draw meaning out of it, or is our self-image, self-esteem and self-confidence affected negatively by the nature and quantity of that suffering?

8. Are we drawn to God first within ourselves, and then outward toward the larger community for both our worship and for directing our sense of service and mission, or do we keep our spirituality private and closed in on itself?

9. Is our spirituality a source of joy, and even ecstasy at times, plunging us into glimpses of the eternal and the universal, or is our relationship to God a source of frustration and even disappointment at times, like being lost in the maze of our own life?

10. How do we deal with questions, doubt and our own lack of faith? Do we regard such moments as invitations to seek further, as a beckoning from God to come closer, or are we threatened by our own un-faithfulness and go to great length to suppress such inclinations?

Again a reminder: we all have both healthy and unhealthy ways of relating that pull on our relationship with God and with others. Asking ourselves these questions will hopefully make us more aware of how to recognize when the balance tips too much to the negative side.

There is another aspect which needs to be addressed on this topic of spirituality and health. For that I want to read from Mark's Gospel, the first chapter. That one chapter could well be the busiest in his entire gospel: Jesus is baptized, calls the first disciples, and heals at least four people - all in one chapter. Read 1:32-35

Jesus often felt the need to "withdraw to pray." (Lk. 5:16, 6:12) Why did Jesus "withdraw to pray"? Meeting all the external demands of life has an enormous attraction on us - like a powerful magnet, the world is forever drawing us out and out and out.... The risk is that we lose touch with our centre, lose touch with the place where our sense of self, our sense of direction, is anchored and take its cues from. Jesus too was pulled on, tugged on, in all directions. The needs of the people around him were overwhelming. Jesus knew quite well that human relationships and resources will always fall short of giving the divine sustenance our soul needs. We often look to the things in this life, and the people close to us, to still that insatiable hunger in us for love, for peace, for acceptance, for God. Jesus knew that only God, the only one who is infinite, can still an infinite hunger for love. In order to continue giving of himself, Jesus needed to withdraw and recenter. In withdrawing Jesus drinks from the well who is God. In doing this, Jesus became free to love and to forgive as unconditionally as God.

Jesus also withdrew to pray in order to meet his own need, especially in the midst of his own struggles - think of his prayer in Gethsemane. Jesus did not feel guilty about his doubts, he did not ignore his fear; Jesus did not pretend grandiosity. Jesus simply offered the raw terror in his own heart. Up to three times Jesus offered God raw terror ... And in that process of handing over his terror God reached out and strengthened him.

Being called to walk with those in distress and illness, we can do no less than pattern our ministry onto Jesus himself. An active prayer life will not only sustain us and keep us anchored - it will also increase our communion with those in need. For in prayer we unite our hearts to one another and to God, even if at times the pain is too great for words, even if at times all we have to offer is a broken spirit and red eyes from crying. Henri Nouwen, a priest and a great spiritual writer of our time, was brutally honest when it came to being real with God. Many times when depression, loneliness and pain risked swallowing him up, Nouwen sought out a friend and asked that person to hold him while he cried and cried. We are called upon at times to hold our friend while s/he cries, at times even to keep the faith on behalf of our friend who seems incapable of keeping the faith herself. At other times we are the ones who need the loving embrace of another. At times our faith in God, ourselves, the world is so weak that others will have to watch over us. A healthy expression of spirituality shows in our ability to be generous in our love for one another, and to be honest when we are needy and weak. Jesus showed the capacity for both: he held and cured and loved and forgave those in need. Then, in Getsemane and in the hour of his death, he cried out to God to be held in love against all odds. If we can do the same we can face even the ugliest suffering, and we can face even death, and come out a new creation. "And hope does not disappoint us for God's love is poured out for us.... (Rom. 5:5)

Times of suffering and death make crystal clear the close connection between spirituality and health. In fact, approaching death makes the gap between the spiritual and the physical narrower and narrower. Bernie Siegel, in his work as a surgeon, has observed this over and over again. Countless times he has witnessed the importance of love - love given and received. Love is what fuels that fire with which we land in life, that fire called endless desire, a longing, a loneliness, a wildness. That fire that is called an all-embracing ache, a dis-ease, even called a madness that comes from the gods is made whole, is filled, by Love. Love helps us to integrate and become whole in our soul. Love grows our spirituality.

What is it that allows us to live on after our deaths? What is it that allows those we leave behind to heal from the pain of losing us? Two things stand out. The first one is love. And often, it is when we suffer, when we struggle to deal with the disease, when we are dying that we need to do the loving and the healing and the teaching. First must come self-love. Self-love is the acknowledgment of the divine fire inside of us, no matter our imperfections (Remember: we are all perfectly imperfect). And out of self-love comes the ability to reach out and to love and help others. If we love, we can never be a failure. If we love, we grow a healthy spirituality. If we love, we secure for our loved ones their future, their healing, their immortality.

The second thing is that we must have had is a chance to come to full bloom in this life. The opportunity to let our unique beauty shine has tremendous consequences for our spiritual health. If we have lived and had our shining moment, however small, then it will be much easier to let go of this life in peace. Moreover, we will know and our loved ones will know our unique beauty. This knowledge will sustain those we leave behind; it will heal their loss, fuel their memory and support them in times of their own trial. When this does not happen, when we have known neither love nor a shining moment of beauty, when we have never been allowed to express our own value, we can leave behind a pain in others that cannot be healed, an emptiness that cannot be filled.

The following poem (Siegel, page 250) expresses both these elements very eloquently. It was written by a man to his wife after her death. I want to end with this poem.

Questions, comments, suggestions

SPIRITUALITY AND HEALTH
October 24, 2001 Marie-Louise Ternier-Gommers

Group work:

Time-permitting, discuss one or two of the following statements

What touches you about these statements? Do any of the statements remind you of someone who has said similar words? What does each statement tell you about the connection between spirituality and health?

"The men, women, and children who have looked death in the face, are often those who know most about living. Their message is: "I learned that I was going to die, so I decided to live until I died."

"I suggest to all physicians who are feeling the despair of being unable to cure: go to your sickest patient, and sit at their bedside for half an hour. I guarantee that your patients will heal you in the time you are sitting there, by their strength, their courage, and the fact that they don't ask you for a cure but are simply healed by your caring."

"How can I love myself when there is one self-disappointment after another? If I were another person trying to love me, I would turn to greener pastures because of the 'well today - sick tomorrow' characteristic of MS. How can you love someone so lacking in dependability? Learning to love myself is like learning a foreign language."

"I forced my thoughts to change. Suddenly I saw myself standing in front of a warm, comfortable, well-lit lecture room. In front of me sat an attentive audience. I was giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp! All that oppressed me at the moment became objectively seen and described from the remote viewpoint of observation." (Victor Frankl recalling life in WW II's concentration camp, choosing to change his thoughts made him survive another day)

Fr. Andrew Britz (Editor, Prairie Messenger) presenting ARCCC award to Marie-Louise Ternier-Gommers, Editor of Our Family Magazine

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