Spirituality, Mental Health, and Social Support

A Community Approach

Beate Jakob, Birgit Weyel, Beate Jakob, Birgit Weyel

• Verlag: De Gruyter
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110674286
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Theologie & Religion
• Thema: Religionsphilosophie

This book brings together studies on how congregations have resources which can promote health with a focus on accompanying people with depression as well as how congregations can be sensitized to mental health and the needs of persons living with mental disorders. In this collaboration, a close connection between research-studies was combined with a congregation-based implementation. In addition, a selection of surveys provide deep insights into the interaction between pastoral care, medical health care projects and spiritual care as a new discipline.

I Religion and Health. An Overview

Does Faith Heal?

Reflections on the Complex Relationship of Religion, Illness, and Health

Michael Klessmann

Note: This lecture was originally held at the study day “Faith and Health in Cultural Context” at the University of Tuebingen on October 15, 2016.

1 Scenes to Introduce the Topic

The Gospel of Mark (5: 25–34) tells the story of a woman who suffers from bleeding for twelve years. Doctors could not help her and her illness just grew worse. She heard of the wandering rabbi and miracle healer named Jesus. She thought to herself, “if only I could touch his clothes, I would be made well” and pushed forward through the crowd that surrounded him. And then, as she touched him, she felt how her bleeding stopped, and at the same time, Jesus sensed strength leaving him. He discovered the woman, who was afraid that she had done something forbidden, and he said to her, “Your faith has healed you” (Mark 5: 34). Your faith has healed you physically but also in your relationships. The Greek verb σώζω used here means salvation from mortal danger, from the danger of illness, as well as figuratively the salvation from sin and guilt, from disturbed relationships. For this reason, healing is also regarded as a sign of the beginning of the Kingdom of God – the sick become physically healthy as well as being re-accepted into the community, which had excluded them because of their illness. To this extent, they are healed in a holistic way: physically and in terms of their social relationships.

The second scene: the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported in the 14 to 15 May 2016 issue in a whole page story about a journalist who multiple doctors agree has incurable cancer and only a few more weeks to live. Although the man does not really consider himself religious, he begins to pray and meditate intensively, and to the surprise of his doctors, the tumor completely disappears after a few weeks. Is this a spontaneous recovering or a healing through faith?

The third scene: a young woman who has two small children and is a member of my circle of friends falls ill with an incurable, inoperable lung tumor. She is a member of the church, speaks with the hospital chaplain when she goes to the hospital, prays and meditates more than before her illness, but is not cured, and dies. It is normal that faith fails to make the sick healthy. Faith resulting in healing is the rare exception.

Ultimately, healers and healings using esoteric religious methods have existed for millennia. However, such healing methods and their promised results are viewed today as charlatanism and quackery and are regarded as dangerous and harmful because they deter the use of available conventional medical assistance.

Those who contemplate the relationship between faith, illness and healing would also do well to consider the following different contradictory aspects. Faith can contribute to healing and foster the interpersonal abilities of sick people. Faith often does not heal and can even harm. Moreover, there is a further variation: faith does not heal in a simple, causal sense, but allows for an altered approach to illness, a changed attitude toward illness and death. As Karl Barth put it, faith strengthens our “ability to be human” and therefore contains something healing.

2 On the Altered Relationship between Religion and Health in the Postmodern Age

From Antiquity to the Enlightenment, medicine and religion have been closely related. In Exodus 15: 26 it is exclaimed programmatically: “I am the Lord, who heals you.” God wounds and bandages, he shatters and heals (Job 5:18). The doctor has a supporting role, but the actual healing power comes from God – or, as in the Hippocratic tradition, from nature. Therefore, it was long customary in simple medieval hospitals that the sick first confessed to a priest and had their sins forgiven: the person should be spiritually pure, freed from one’s remoteness to God before it was considered reasonable to begin a medical treatment.

Since the Enlightenment, the systems of medicine and religion in Western societies have diverged. In the eyes of enlightened contemporaries it is no longer a God that miraculously heals in response to prayers and rituals, but rather the medical art of doctors. Scientific medicine increasingly identifies the physio-chemical causes of illness, treating them surgically or chemically (medicinally), and having enormous success. At the same time, criticism is voiced time and again that this scientific model of illness and health works in a reductionist way because bodily processes are separated from psychological, social and spiritual processes. However, there are other approaches:

• The persistent boom in alternative medicine (which includes a conglomerate of different methods) can be understood as a response to the ever-growing specialization within conventional medicine. Alternative medicine is a kind of holistic medicine in which the treatment is integrated into a relational-cosmos. Persons with organic disorders cannot be adequately understood and treated without taking into account their relationship with the environment, nature, fellow human beings, themselves, and (however it is understood) transcendence. When this happens, the treatment of a diseased organ can lead to the healing of the whole person.¹
• Palliative care and hospice work have created a new perspective for holistic treatment and accompaniment of sick people. The WHO standards for palliative medicine explicitly specify that in addition to physical pain, psychological, social and spiritual problems and questions should also be given high priority in the treatment.
• The religious criticism, inspired by Sigmund Freud and widely accepted among medical professionals as well as psychologists well into the twentieth century, that says religion is an infantile projection of the humanly longing for a heavenly father figure, is hardly upheld today. The growing acceptance of Far Eastern religions and their practices has encouraged a different, so to say benevolent picture of religion. Religiosity and spirituality, the meaning dimension, have in a new way, become respectable and even worthy of research. Since then, religiosity has also been regarded as a resource whose capabilities are used in life and disease management.
• Since the late 1980s, there has also been increasingly more and explicit research on the connection between religion and health, primarily in the USA, but also in Europe. The surprising and sometimes contradictory research results have even convinced religious critics that one cannot simply ignore this topic.
• Finally, the widespread systemic orientation within the field of social sciences has contributed to a new reputation for this topic. In systemic thinking, one assumes that everything that is part of a system also has an effect. Religious beliefs – systemic psychologists speak of God constructs – are constituents of individual, familial and social systems, and as such are effective in every case. However, this effectiveness can be constructive as well as destructive.²

With this changed discussion, two branches of tradition are coming back together that have been closely linked for centuries. On the one hand, there are the abundance of concrete healing practices that have existed for thousands of years in all cultures (care of wounds, knowledge of herbs, massage techniques, etc.) that always involved a religious dimension, because disease was primarily viewed as disturbance of a comprehensive system of life and wholeness. For a long time, healing was understood not only as physical restitution, but above all as restoration of the lost balance in the relationship to God, and consequently to the world, fellow human beings and oneself. Jesus first forgives the sins of the paralytic. His healing is the result and expression of forgiveness, that is, the restored order with God and with life as a whole. Salvation (shalom), which God gives, will be anticipated and symbolized (therefore fragmented) in the experience of healing.

On the other hand, however, we have to work from the assumption of an “independence of bodily phenomena.”³ Not every illness has a (causally understood) psychological or spiritual dimension. Rapidly growing tumors, such as brain tumors or pancreatic cancer, elicit intolerable pressure...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction Spirituality, Mental Health, and Social Support. A Community Approach
• I Religion and Health. An Overview
• II Studies
• III Approaches to Improve Mental Health
• Index