I am a gynaecological surgeon. There are some, both within
my profession and without, who hold that spirituality and religion should not
be the domain of healthcare professionals at all, and I know that many of my
colleagues shy away from the subjects in conversations with their patients, for
fear of causing offence and losing their jobs. It’s a tragically ironic
situation when you consider that originally, in the Middle Ages, hospitals and
healthcare were founded and run by religious organisations. Back then they were
good at caring for the spirit and not particularly good at medicine, but now
the situation is reversed: medicine delivers remarkable results but often
without a sense of caring for the psychological and spiritual needs of the
patient.
For me, ‘spirituality’ means one’s experience, or attempt
to experience, a sense of the transcendental, either independent of religion or
within the setting of a religious ceremony. The spiritual is as important a part
of anybody’s life as the religious and the psychological, and it is both
independent of those two aspects and overlapping.
Carl Gustav Jung might have suggested the collective sub-conscious
as an explanation for the particular sense of the sacred one can sometimes feel
in holy sites. Certainly it is very difficult not to feel the weight of history,
and of the faith of millions of people who have made pilgrimages to Iona,
Assisi, Patmos or Jerusalem.
Richard Dawkins would have us believe such spiritual experience
is all a fantasy, some form of collective madness, although whenever I hear him
criticising religious belief I am reminded of Puddleglum the marshwiggle in
another of C S Lewis’s Narnia tales, The Silver Chair, who, when the
witch says that Narnia is a fantasy, replies: ‘If it is a fantasy then it is
much better than the witch’s reality and I will stick with the fantasy anyway’.
I am sure that that is a sentiment shared by many of my patients, particularly those who live with a cancer or other life-changing diagnosis. I would never claim that those with a spiritual side to their lives live longer, but I would venture to say that they perhaps live better. Their cup seems to veer to half full rather than half empty. A young woman whose cancer I had removed comes to mind. When we met at her six-week post-operative consultation, I showed her a Venn diagram demonstrating the overlap of spirituality, religion and psychology and asked whether any of the three areas appealed to her. She replied: ‘Oh doctor, I’m a very spiritual person. My brother is a priest and I’m well into religion. And for good measure I’ve signed up with a psychologist!’ Here was a woman who had really grasped what it was all about. I think that both she and I knew that while she was having a very tough time she would get through. And she did.
The Journey: Spirituality. Pilgrimage. Chant by
Richard Smith is available now in paperback, priced £9.99 from
www.dltbooks.com.
nice post books about god
ReplyDelete