Session 3a: Religion, Spirituality and Illness

Catherine Garrett - Making Sense of Healing: Meaning and Spirituality in Narratives of Chronic Illness
Senior Lecturer in Sociology, School of Applied Social and Human Sciences, University of Western Sydney, Parramatta Campus, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith South DC 1797, NSW, Australia.

The idea of 'healing' may include 'cure', 'remediation', and 'palliation'. It may also refer to the self-transformation that leads to one of these three results. How can we best understand this kind of transformation and its sources in contemporary societies? Sociological approaches to this question offer some insights, especially through the study of illness narratives, but they also raise a number of problems. What form of language might best reveal what such personally transformative experiences have in common? Can the divisions among 'spiritual', 'religious' and 'rationalist' interpretations be overcome? In other words, how can interdisciplinary approaches to these questions illuminate experiences of healing in ways that will benefit the ill and provide new insights for therapists and clinicians? This paper draws on autobiographies, poetry and literature, as well as the social and human sciences, to offer a new framework for thinking about such issues. It extends the typology of illness narratives given by Arthur Frank in The Wounded Storyteller by suggesting several possible varieties of the 'quest narrative'. These new narrative types provide fresh ways of thinking about the meanings of suffering and healing and about the similarities and differences among sufferers' responses to chronic illness. They suggest ways in which contemporary western societies might better understand and assist such people and those who care for them.

John Swinton - Making Sense of Dementia: Spiritual Perspectives on Forgotten Worlds
Senior Lecturer in Practical Theology, School of Divinity and Religious Studies, King's College, University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen, AB24 3UB

Dementia is a mysterious and frequently misunderstood form of mental health problem. The particular way in which dementia has been constructed under the influence of the biomedical model of health and illness has blinded us to some fundamental issues of personhood, spirituality and humanness. Whilst there has been a good deal of work done on this with regard to psychological perspectives on personhood, little reflection has gone on in relation to the spiritual dimensions of the experience of dementia. This paper will argue that the crucial significance of dementia as a human experience and indeed as a deeply spiritual experience, (rather than simply a purely biological condition), has been overlooked or downplayed in the development of current understandings of dementia and accompanying modes of caring. Reconstructing dementia using a spiritual perspective based on the lived experience of dementia, (spirituality being understood in its widest sense as the human quest for meaning, purpose, value and hope as well as that which is transcendent and captured within established religions), offers new possibilities for understanding dementia and caring for the deeply personal and spiritual dimensions of this condition.

When viewed from a spiritual perspective, dementia is found to have 'hidden' (in the sense that they are not prioritized or noticed within the dominant biomedical discourse surrounding dementia), spiritual dimensions that are vital for a holistic perspective which recognises, values and respects the individuality, personhood and wholeness of sufferers. A concentration on the spiritual contributes to a process of holistic reframing of what dementia is as a biological, social and spiritual phenomenon, moving us towards a perspective which captures the fullness of sufferers as relational and spiritual persons with concomitant needs. Such an approach helps resurrect the personhood of dementia sufferers and re-connects people who are by definition in the process of being disconnected from self, others and God. As such an emphasis on the spiritual dimensions of dementia is of great importance to our theoretical and practical approaches to this type of disease process.

Barbra Wall - ‘Sacred Moments': the Meaning of Sickness, Healing and & Death in the Catholic Tradition
Assistant Professor Nursing, Purdue University

This paper analyzes the framework of beliefs and values that underlay the Catholic tradition of health care in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how it understood the phenomena of suffering, sickness, healing, and death. The paper is informed by Charles Rosenberg's recognition that the perception, interpretation, and method of naming illness are cultural. Today the Catholic Church plays a major role in the health care delivery system in the United States, thus warranting a voice in the debate on the many ways in which we create meaning in health, illness, and disease. To comprehend how Catholics made sense of these experiences, and why hospital work was so important to them, one must understand the ways in which health, illness, healing, and death simultaneously were issues of body and spirit.

Included will be an examination of the theological principle of sacramentality, whereby the body is viewed as an important way for contact with the divine, and its corollary, mediation. The care of patients at the time of illness or death was particularly significant for its sacramental potential. Indeed, that nursing in hospitals involved mediation in human illness and death accounts for much of its importance for Catholic sisters, who founded most of the Catholic hospitals. The sickbed became the arena of a drama in which the critically ill or dying person's fate could be decided for the last time. Sisters could be present to participate in sacramental experiences that had eschatological meaning beyond caring and comforting. The study is especially important today for a society of "death deniers."

Historical methodology is used which draws upon primary sources in archives of three women's religious congregations who were active in establishing large health care institutions. The study is interdisciplinary in nature by using sources in history, nursing, medicine, women's studies, and religion.