Chaplain's Corner

Spirituality has everything to do with connection: that unique capacity that we humans have to feel and experience deep and lasting connections with ourselves, others, the world and universe in which we live and God.  But what does it mean to be spiritually healthy?

Think for a moment about your relationship to yourself.  That is not a relationship that we think of very often but it is a very important one.  Back on the last day of May I received an email from a young nursing student that I have been encouraging over the last eight years.  The email was the text of a reflective paper that she was writing for a nursing class about “grief”.  In that paper this courageous young woman reflected on the grief she has experienced over a lost love, over the loss of her reputation in an disrespectful workplace, over her grief being experienced as she watches and is impacted by the aging of her parents and finally the grief she has experienced over the loss of her mental health and the lengthy and difficult road she has traveled to recovery.  I believe this young woman is quite healthy in terms of her relationship to herself but I know others who would conclude quite differently.

We all have relationships with others, but what is a healthy relationship with another?  People have different ideas about this.  I think that relating to others is healthy when there is appropriate vulnerability balanced by clear and well established boundaries.  But who is to define such categories as “appropriate vulnerability” and “well established boundaries”?

Our relationship with nature, creation, the universe we live in includes such things as the earth we live on, the heavens above us, art, music and every expression of human creativity.  Many of us run into this relationship for it asks little of us.  A walk in the forest or a beautiful garden, or an art museum simply asks us to observe and me moved.  But some appreciate nature by seeking to preserve it and others appreciate nature by seeking to master and exploit it.  Which is right?  Who can make such a judgment?  Does recognizing that spirituality involves a connection to the universe we live in help us here?  I am afraid it doesn’t.

But the relationship with the divine, of all the relationships that define our spirituality, has given humanity considerable difficulty over the millennia of our races existence.  So many conclusions have been drawn by members of our race.  Groups, we have come to call them religions, have formed around these conclusions.  Often these groups have been at such violent odds with  each other that they have resorted to hatred and murder, in an attempt to establish their way of thinking about this relationship as “the right” one.

We are living in a time when in an attempt to dispel this hatred and the murderous outcome, we are being encouraged to embrace the conclusion that every way of thinking about a relationship with the Divine is right.  Some of the conventional wisdom around this attempt has created such slogans as: “We all worship the same God, just in different ways.”  Or “All roads lead to heaven, so embrace the road you have chose and respect the choice the other has made.”

Some in thinking about our races relationship with the Divine have conceived of God as the “ultimate reality” and certainly according to the teaching of the Christian faith, God is believed to be the ultimate reality.  Orthodox (adhering to the accepted, traditional and established teachings of the faith) Christianity teaches that God is self-existent (having no beginning or end and needing nothing outside of God’s self to maintain existence).  Orthodox Christianity teaches that God created everything out of nothing and therefore everything that exists has its source in God.  Christianity also teaches that God maintains the order of the universe by the power of his might.

But other religions do not teach these things at all.  There is the religion we call atheism (it is a religious or belief system) that does not believe in the existence or a divine being of any sort and therefore does not attribute anything to the divine.  Then there is the religion, belief system, we call agnosticism.  It teaches that we can be sure of nothing when it comes to the divine, which does not outright deny the existence of the divine, but teaches that it is impossible to know anything about the divine, if indeed the divine exists at all.  And if you would study the religions of the world, their teachings would vary, some slightly, some radically from those of orthodox Christianity.  So how can you or I have a relationship with the Divine when there is so much disagreement over if there is such a being and what that being might be like if the divine does indeed exist?  And further, how would I assess if that relationship were a healthy one?

Such a quest seems almost absurd and impossible; unless, a person is willing to commit to a system of belief about God and live by such a belief.  So, and please read this carefully.  In terms of the concept of spirituality, an atheist can be spiritually healthy is he totally embraces the belief that no divine being exist without inner conflict.  So could a Hindu be spiritually healthy, according to the definition of spirituality, if he embraced Hinduism wholly and devotedly without inner conflict, as could a Jew, or a Moslem or a Christian for that matter.

Here it is that we find the limits of the teachings about human spirituality.  To understand humans as spiritual beings and to understand that our spirituality finds expression in our capacity to connect with ourselves, others, the world in which we live and the divine is all well and good.  But this is where the concept of spirituality discovers its limits.  It is unable and it should not be expected to define the nature of any of those relationships in terms of what is healthy and what is not.  “Spirituality” is a category that is limited to observing the nature of what it means to be human.  Whereas defining health in each of those categories of connection must be left to Faith.

For me, my wholehearted embrace of the Christian Faith as it is finds its definition in the Bible would define spiritual health in one way and another’s wholehearted embrace of another faith system would lead to another definition of health in this category of spirituality.  Consequently, this is where care needs to be taken.  We need to recognize the limitations of the category we call “spirituality” and understand that defining health within this category must always be the work that takes place with in the “faith” we have chosen to embrace.  And, as disconcerting as it may be to us, others who make different faith choices than our own will most likely find themselves at odds with us in defining what it means to be spiritually healthy and this is unavoidable.