What spirituality is and is not
What is spirituality?
Spirituality is a difficult concept to define but this should not diminish its significance or credibility. It is no more complex than other commonly used terms within health care. Think how difficult it is to define everyday terms such as care, community, love, attention, affection and so forth. The fact that spirituality is difficult to define and that people tend to define it in different ways is not unusual in terms of the language we use as health care professionals. One way of understanding spirituality is to think of it in this way: a person’s spirituality relates to those core beliefs about reality…the way things are, that enable them to make sense of and cope effectively with their experiences, including their experiences of illness.
One of the things we often overlook is that all illnesses are first and foremost deeply meaningful human experiences. Professionals may offer diagnoses – cancer, schizophrenia, appendicitis, depression, anxiety, influenza – but behind these labels are real people experiencing their illness within particular contexts, accompanied by specific emotions and understandings. Illness is always my illness.
According to Swinton (2005): “Illnesses are deeply meaningful events within people’s lives, events that often challenge people to think about their lives quite differently. Spirituality sits at the heart of such experiences. A person’s spirituality, whether religious or non-religious, provides belief structures and ways of coping through which people begin to rebuild and make sense of their lives in times of trauma and distress. It offers ways in which people can explain and cope with their illness experiences and in so doing discover and maintain a sense of hope, inner harmony and peacefulness in the midst of the existential challenges illness inevitably brings. These experiences are not secondary to the ‘real’ process of clinical diagnosis and technical care. Rather they are crucial to the complex dynamics of a person’s movement towards health and fullness of life even in the face of the most traumatic illness”.
Reference: Swinton J in Cobb M (Ed) (2005) The Hospital Chaplain’s Handbook, Canterbury Press: Norwich.