Abstract
How can body-centered spiritual practices help those experiencing traumatic grief? Research on trauma recovery using Porges’s polyvagal theory demonstrates the central role of body-centered practices in helping survivors experience safety before they can search for meanings. Research on religious coping and trauma emphasizes the search for meanings but does not pay as much attention to the role of spiritual practices. This article argues that spiritual practices revealing compassion and benevolence in embodied, relational, and transcendent ways help people in their search for meanings that are flexible, integrated, and complex enough to bear the weight of traumatic grief. The author illustrates this by describing the role of a spiritual practice in her grieving the death by suicide of her 27-year-old son. Listening to sacred choral music evoked grief and an embodied sense of being held within a relational web of love, which became a safe space to experience lament and religious struggles arising from her religiously multiple identity. The conclusion describes how intercultural, spiritually oriented care can help people find intrinsically meaningful body-aware spiritual practices that compassionately energize a collaborative search for meanings amidst traumatic grief.
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Notes
I use a pastoral theological method that begins with lived experience rather than a deductive use of sources of religious authority such as doctrine or sacred texts. In the 1920s, Anton Boisen’s personal and clinical experiences of mental illness prompted him to develop a pedagogy of clinical pastoral education (CPE) that begins with what he calls “the living human document” (Boisen 1936, 1946, 1960). Boisen’s legacy continued in the work of Princeton pastoral theologian Seward Hiltner (1958), Black pastoral theologians who began their pastoral theologies with the lived experience African Americans in the late 1970s (Smith 1982; Wimberly 1979), and feminist and womanist theologians who began with their lived experiences as women in the 1990s (Glaz and Moessner 1991; E. Graham 1995, 1996; Hollies 1992; Miller-McLemore 1994; Miller-McLemore and Gill-Austern 1999; Watkins Ali 1999; Way 1972).
Pastoral theologians are making use of scholarship on the social construction of emotions (McClure 2010) and particularly Cvetkovich’s (2012) scholarship on cultural emotions to describe the role of neoliberalism and a market society (Helsel 2015) and consumer ways of coping, especially substance use disorders (Waters 2018).
I experienced the spiritual practice of listening to sacred choral music as my central resource in grieving my son’s death. I know that many other aspects of my life sustained me in this traumatic loss as well as past losses: a stable and loving marriage and family, meaningful work, a supportive church family and academic community, financial stability, and intercultural spiritual care and behavioral healthcare. Without all of these resources, my spiritual practice would not been as effective.
It may seem unusual and even questionable to draw explicitly on my life experience as an illustration. This tradition of using oneself as the “living human document” for theological reflection and teaching is rooted in both the clinical pastoral education movement and the work of its founder, Anton Boisen (Asquith 2010; Boisen 1936), and in the therapeutic approach in pastoral care, counseling, and theology that draws upon psychodynamic psychologies in conversation with theology to understand suffering. Understanding one’s own suffering in conversation with teachers, supervisors, and colleagues is part of becoming self-differentiated and theologically empathic so that one does not impose one’s beliefs, values, spiritual practices, and ways of coping—especially those formed in the crucible of suffering—on others. Theological empathy is the reflexive capacity to imagine how another’s emotions generate a lived theology or orienting system that “makes sense” given their family and cultural contexts (Doehring 2018b).
“Caregivers may think chronic illness is only of concern during the acute crisis stage surrounding diagnosis, but people continue to incur losses over the ensuing years” (Arora 2009, p. 22).
“As the focus on chronic illness shifts from background to foreground and new losses or crises occur, care seekers may need new ways of making sense of their illnesses, including new theological understandings of their experiences” (Arora 2009, p. 34).
Pastoral theologian Robert Dykstra (personal correspondence) writes, “Aesthetic experiences, whether involving our being held by a religious icon, a poem, a piece of music, a work of art, or a landscape, become then a form of déjà vu.” Dykstra uses The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (Bollas 1987) to understand such aesthetic experiences as “an existential memory: A non-representational recollection conveyed through a sense of the uncanny. Such moments feel familiar, sacred, reverential, but are fundamentally outside cognitive coherence . . . because they express that part of us where the experience of rapport with the other was the essence of life before words existed.”
A redemptive understanding of Alex’s death may become relevant in my long-term retrospective search for meanings. At some future time, I will likely look back and reclaim more fully the goodness of life amidst the horror of suffering. As Shelly Rambo (2017) notes, traumatic memories often continue, over time, to co-exist with resurrection beliefs.
LaMothe (2018) offers a complex pastoral political theology of care that examines human suffering and flourishing in light of the macro political, economic, and cultural forces and institutions that contribute to both. I find his descriptions of love and care as related but distinct helpful in understanding my love for Alex and the ways I tried to work with his behavioral health team to care for him: “Love includes care, but to care does not necessarily include love. . . . The Samaritan cared for the injured man, but I do not think he loved him. . . . Care, then, from my perspective, is a more fundamental human reality and a more fundamental political concept” (p. 30).
A threefold typology of comparative approaches to religion as exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist was first proposed by Race (1983). The category of particularism was added by Hedges (2010). Here are simple descriptions of these comparative approaches:
Exclusivism: radical discontinuity among religions (e.g., Christianity is the only truth)
Inclusivism: belief that many religious paths lead to the same end, such as the “one God” of Christianity (Prothero 2010)
Pluralism: openness to the ways that all religions may be true and may have common categories, such as symbolic worldviews, contemplative practices, moral teachings, etc., some of which may be studied using quantitative and qualitative methods in psychological and sociological studies.
Particularism: preservation of the distinctiveness and integral wholeness of particular religious traditions, often rejecting efforts to search for and measure categories of religious or spiritual phenomena
“Religious multiplicity—the experience of being shaped by, or maintaining bonds to, more than one spiritual or religious community at the same time—is occurring more frequently in the United States and Europe. In other parts of the world, religious multiplicity has long been a norm. As more and more people transgress religious boundaries, this multiplicity becomes more visible. We increasingly encounter spiritually fluid people in public life, at school, at work, at backyard cookouts, and at the health club” (Bidwell 2018, pp. 1–2).
For the complexities of how to use a particularist comparative approach to understand the pluralist approach of Pargament, see Taves (2013).
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Doehring, C. Searching for Wholeness Amidst Traumatic Grief: The Role of Spiritual Practices that Reveal Compassion in Embodied, Relational, and Transcendent Ways. Pastoral Psychol 68, 241–259 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-018-0858-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-018-0858-5