Chaplain's Corner

What do elections have to do with the work of a chaplain? Our nation’s universal health care is a national value funded in part through transfer payments from the federal to provincial governments. Regional health authority budgets are approved and funded by the Manitoba Government through its health branch. For this reason anyone who works in health care might be interested in elections.

In the course of six months we will have had both a federal and provincial election. By the end of April we will be pretty tired of election campaigns and promises and we will probably be bracing ourselves once again for the broken promises, delays in action and the political wrangling that is Canadian government.

In Manitoba the money that funds heal care chaplains has never come entirely from government funding. In Southern Health/Santé Sud, most of the funding for spiritual care services comes from the community: local church groups, health care foundations and individual donations with a lesser amount coming from the RHA budget.

In MB Health’s conceptualization of health care, spiritual care is included. In reality, finances are often not allocated to spiritual care primarily because there are so many other needs crying for the funding; needs that are directly related to caring for the physical well being of those being served. I am not convinced that we should be looking to the government to fund spiritual care services. I understand the thinking: people are not just bodies, but they have minds and spirits as well. Therefore health care needs to provide care for the bodies, minds (mental health) and spirits (spiritual care) of those that come into care.

But spiritual care is different than both caring for the bodies and minds of the citizens of the province. Spiritual care has so many more variables. Spirituality is the sum total of our longing for meaning and purpose;  our longing to be connected to ourselves, others, our environment and the divine; our longing to live with trust and hope in an uncertain universe and our longing to experience a sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves.

Governments should never be allowed to define how these longings are either understood or met. Unlike an infected appendix, a soul out of sorts cannot be healed in just one way. History demonstrates that governments that have tried to dictate how spirituality is to be understood and addressed always fail. Matters of the spirit are not best addressed by government.

It requires wisdom, sensitivity and respect to care for the spirit of another person and a commitment not to use the privilege as an opportunity to attempt conversion to one’s own spiritual perspective. Spiritual care in the health care settings requires that the provider be solidly grounded in his/her own spiritual convictions, and at the same time respectful and helpful if the other sees and addresses spiritual need in a very different way. I personally don’t see the government funding spiritual; care in any kind of equitable way in the foreseeable future but I hope that those working in this field will humbly serve to support and encourage those who are aware of their spiritual needs in times of health crises.