Drawing on theology in nursing
Dr Janice Clarke
Institute of Health and Society,
University of Worcester
Social
Body
Mind
Spirit
Body
Mind
Current theories of nursing and their
links to spirituality
• Some Eastern theology and use of chakras and the idea that religion
can be drawn on to build knowledge but not from Islam and only
very alternative Christian theology
• spirituality is about self actualisation and consequently say a lot
about the self but nothing about relationship
• a kind of implicit idea that the three parts are related and interact
but no way of actually explaining how it might be
• Caring - but how? –
• how this can be created in an ordinary nurse with no interest in
spirituality and without a high level of awareness.
• What about the body and how that interacts with a patients
spirituality
• Little basis in any theory
•
•
•
•
•
No mention of body care
Based in talk
Don’t link to literature on care
Not about relationship
Embedded in the mechanism of the nursing
process
Model of the person with integrated parts
which interpenetrate and influence
each other
Caring for the whole person is the starting point of spiritual care.
Body - material or physical
aspect of our nature
Spirit - the breath of God
BODY
Mind ( in the original module is called
Soul -psyche– and includes
the mind
SPIRIT
MIND
31/07/2017
Janice Clarke, University of Worcester
6
What is a person
We are of the earth and of the
spirit between the high and
the low, spiritual and
physical
Or?
“earthly yet heavenly, … midway between majesty and
lowliness; one self-same being, but both spirit and flesh.”
(St. Gregory Nazianzus, Oration 38: 11,in Ware 1987:199)
“He is my helper and my enemy, my assistant and my
opponent, a protector and a traitor…. If I strike him down
I have nothing left by which to acquire virtues. I embrace
him. And I turn away from him. What is this mystery in
me? What is the principle of this mixture of body and
soul? How can I be my own friend and my own enemy? “
(St John Climacus, 1982:186)
“The spiritual joy which comes from the mind into the body, is in
no way corrupted by the communion with the body but
transforms the body and makes it spiritual”.
(St. Gregory Palamas1983:51,Triads, II: ii 9)
“As the ancient philosophers aptly put it, “the soul is the form of
the body”. What you see is, by definition, not matter, but the
soul, the person! “
(Clement, O. 1986:56)
A Cosmic Universe
Or?
This cosmic God reaches out to the whole of his creation and draws it back
into union with himself.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar talking about the Areopagite’s vision of Celestial
Hierarchy:
“… a holy universe, flowing forth, wave upon wave, from the unfathomable
depths of God, whose centre lies always beyond the creature’s reach; his
vision of a creation that realizes itself in ever more distant echoes, until it
finally ebbs away at the borders of nothingness, yet which is held together,
unified, and “brought home”, step by step through the ascending unities of
an awestruck love.” (2003:58)
• The discourse on spirituality in nursing deliberately avoids
terminology which might be construed as religious. Those who use
‘religious’ language to speak of spirituality have been
criticised.
Tanyi (2002)
•
Reed (1992) described ideas attached to the concept of spirituality
such as ‘ethereal’, ‘supernatural’ or ‘immeasurable’ as ‘conceptual
baggage’.
•
McSherry and Draper (1998) criticised Bradshaw (1994), for using
religious symbolism in her descriptions of spirituality, saying that
the words ‘covenant and pastoral’ ‘romanticise’ the subject.
• Nurses are exhorted to separate religion and nursing and not to use
religious language to describe spirituality.
it is possible, Pals argues, for an outside interpreter to
agree with a number of things “asserted or entailed
by a believers creed without thereby committing
himself to the truth of the believer’s creed” (Pals
1986:28).
Davie (1994:123–124)
cites a Liverpool hospital chaplain, ministering to two
different groups of women in two hospitals, young women
coping with miscarriage, stillbirth and sick babies and older
women with gynaecological cancers. While both groups were
happy to see this chaplain, the younger had no language with
which to communicate their spiritual grief, rage or happiness,
whilst the older women had recourse to half remembered
prayers, and rituals from their youth, which filled a void in
communication.
“Post religious language and culture are on the whole extremely
impoverished in this respect. … amongst thoroughly
secularised children it is sometimes as if there were an
awareness of a gap or an incompetence in secular language.
Religious terminology seems to slip in by default because it
expresses the felt sense of what the child is experiencing “
(Hay & Nye 1998:144).