I find a lot of people who dont like the word religious use the word spiritual. But they seem to have a clearer idea of what it means than I do. Is there any way an agnostic like myself can use the word?
Heres a way. See if you can guess who this is:
But of course, so many people dont talk a religious language now. That doesnt mean they havent got a spiritual need
I think that spiritual pain can be very much the feeling that there is no meaning, that youre not worth anything. [This] can be the heaviest thing that a patient endures and I think the best way to reach that is simply to listen.
They dont want us to give answers and explanations when they make comments like, it seems so hard, why should this happen to me or, even harder, to my daughter or my husband? The answer is not to try and explain, but to share and the response of listening.
You need to come as a vulnerable person yourself to give that kind of attention. And you need, I think, to make your own search for meaning in the terms that make sense to you, and to be constantly on the search. I hope that St. Christophers, with hospice place for travelers, is itself a traveler in that way and that individual people working here are themselves travelers, because theres always something new to be learned in this field.
People can do it without having a particularly religious background although I do think that Christian foundation, Christian faith which we were concerned with when we founded this has something to say about God sharing the suffering. We dont have an answer, but we have a person who knows what its like [But] anybody is welcome, of faith, no faith, different faiths. You can be a good Atheist in the middle of St. Christophers and be perfectly comfortable.
This is Cicely Saunders speaking, the founder of the modern hospice movement (The full text, from which this is taken, is here).
It is hard to think of a creative social invention of the last forty years that is more valuable than hospice. I learned this again last year when my mother-in-law was dying in Florida, and the people from hospice came to her bedside to help ease her days. Hospice has always been about taking care of the whole person the best medical care, but also attending to the subjective experience of the patient: their physical pain, and their spiritual and psychological pain. Treatment includes the right pain meds and a listening and caring person. In practice, these types of pain are hard to distinguish: lessening one may lessen another too.
Patients are not just a bunch of symptoms: they are whole people. One day, this approach may suffuse medical care for the non-dying also.
The quote says it all. To be spiritual is to seek, listen, journey, love, and learn to trust.
As an agnostic all this rings true to me. I reject none of it.
At the same time, it is no surprise to me that these insights and entrepreneurship came from an evangelical Christian.
Many secularists and sceptics seem to think religion is basically just a form of social control. But its not so simple. Religion is as complex as human nature and social life. Religions regenerate from within, creating liberation and compassion as well as hypocrisy and conformity.
Cicely Saunders was 27 when she converted to Christianity. At 29 she found herself in charge of a ward with a dying patient. He was a Polish Jew, and agnostic, who came from the Warsaw ghetto and had come over to England before the uprising. He was not very educated, he referred to himself as only a rough old fellow, he worked as a waiter and he had no relations in this country and very few friends. He was only 40, felt his whole life had been wasted and now he had inoperable cancer. He was discharged, but later admitted to another hospital where Cicely visited him, seeing him no more than twenty-five times in all before he died.
Ever the unconventional person in her relationships, Cicely fell in love with him. One day when he was very sad, he suddenly said to her, cant you say something to comfort me? and she, respecting his Jewish roots, said the 23rd psalm....(Later she offered to read more from the Bible to him) No, he said, I only want what is in your mind and in your heart.... a remark that was to become one of the cornerstones of hospice philosophy.... (From Shirley du Boulays biography of Saunders).
It was nineteen years from his death to the opening of St. Christophers Hospice. Saunders qualified as a doctor, learned everything she could about the care of the dying, raised the money to open the hospice from the great and powerful as well as many ordinary people. The movement is now world-wide .
There are many sceptics who one day will be grateful for hospice. They will not have to rethink their scepticism. But they might be a little more humble in their generalisations about religious and spiritual people.
