The Ecology of Spirituality: Meanings, Virtues, and Practices in a Post-Religious Age

7. Niches for Spirituality: Healthcare and Rx Spirituality

103 chaPTEr SEvEn Niches for Spirituality Health Care and Rx Spirituality Niches for Spirituality The next three chapters examine three separate fields or areas of life in which the concept of spirituality has now found a home—or claims to have done so. Each of these areas has relative autonomy, has longstanding issues or problems of its own, and now includes those advocates who think that the introduction or injection of spirituality will help solve those problems. In a nutshell, we are going to agree that the problems are real, that the situations have created a sense of dis-ease and complaints, and that these conditions have lasted a long time. When we look at how spirituality is configured in each of these situations, we will find that somewhat different aspects of its multiple definitions have relevance to each area of life. Indeed, its exact meaning—if we can even speak about it having an exact meaning—varies considerably depending upon which of these areas we work within. What is not clear is that spirituality is the solution to any of these long-term problems or that the sudden introduction of this term will add clarity to an account of them. We know, or think we know, what is wrong with health care and work; we know, or think we know, what we crave from recreation. To add spirituality to these understandings may be a deceptive and needless complication. Or it may illuminate some aspects of our dis-ease but obscure important dimensions of the full situation. I have chosen these three areas because within each a coherent body of writings already exists and it is easy to speak of a “spirituality and _______” movement within each. In other areas, such as education 104 The Ecology of Spirituality or law enforcement, there are those who want to interject spirituality into the discussion of the meaning or purpose of their field, so our three choices are not exclusive. I could also have chosen professional sports (a particular and peculiar example of “work”) or social work or leadership studies or probably even more far-ranging fields and areas. All of these exhibit a pattern of enthusiasm for spirituality as the missing ingredient that will solve major problems in the area. The statement from the CAOT featured in chapter 1, claiming that spirituality lies at the core of their profession, is the model for this type of endorsement. I have not chosen to examine religion as an area, however. The reasons for this are twofold. First, the turn to spirituality within religious communities is guided by definitions such as Principe’s and is based on a model borrowed from what he called level two—that is, guidebooks such as St. Teresa’s The Interior Castle. It would make an interesting but comparatively narrow discussion to see how such traditional resources have made their impact upon religious groups and individuals who never would have had any contact with Carmelite nuns prior to the last few decades.1 But the appropriation of spirituality in this sense by religious persons now is not a very surprising story. The second reason for not focusing on religion is that the spread of spirituality into healthcare , business, and recreation is unexpected, new, and surprising. This is where the newer and vastly expanded definition, the umbrella quality of the concept, has been applied. It is here where the story becomes intriguing and where recent excitement surrounding the term is so novel and dramatic. And it is in these new contexts that spirituality has pushed its way into new niches, places where no one forty years ago would have expected to see anything like it. Medicine and Human Meanings A Long-Term Problem The plight of hospitalized patients drew the attention of a doctor and a clergyman. They found that, in spite of an immense gain in prestige over the days when hospitals were where the poor went to die, the hospital remained an alien and terrifying environment. The scientific expertise on display in the modern hospital was awesome. But it was awesome in Otto’s sense of numinous and overwhelming, too, an encounter with something not only mysterious but frightening. The specialized language , the environment with its own rules and regulations, the hierarchy of medical experts, all this made the experience of being sick Niches for Spirituality: Health Care and Rx Spirituality 105 dehumanizing. The problem was not...