Abstract
Recent approaches to spirituality in health care suggest spirituality and meaning making are intimately connected. However, not much has been done to explore the hermeneutic and existential implications of this perspective. This article delves into these hermeneutic and existential questions, suggesting that narrative is a comprehensive phenomenon through which spirituality can be described and understood. This leads to a systematic description of spirituality, which is both defined and described herein. This article ends with a reflection on the clinical implications of this model, drawing upon both practical literature and impressions from the author’s own spiritual care clinical practice.
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Notes
In this article I use the term “spiritual care provider” to refer to any healthcare professional who provides spiritual care as part of their clinical work. This can include physicians, nurses, and any other professional for whom spiritual care is part of their scope of practice. This is in contrast to professional Spiritual Care Practitioners whose exclusive scope of practice is to provide spiritual care. I use the term Spiritual Care Practitioner in keeping with the standard nomenclature in Canada, in keeping with the Canadian context in which this article was written. In other jurisdictions, Spiritual Care Practitioners are often called professional Chaplains.
Note this account of moral aims differs from some trends in moral philosophy. Moral philosophy attempts to identify and describe what constitutes the good, often using concepts like virtue to guide the reflective process (e.g. MacIntyre 2007). As much as those accounts have value, the point here is that regardless of whether a person manifests a moral sensibility in the traditional sense or not, they do have some notion of what constitutes the good, and that notion informs their movement through life. This might appear like moral relativism. Rather what is attempted here is to establish a descriptive category rather than a substantive account of what constitutes the right and the good. As I have written elsewhere (Lasair 2018a), it is sometimes necessary to intervene in a client’s notions of the good if these are misconstrued or harmful (see also Pargament 2007). Without any notions of the good, such interventions would be unnecessary. That individuals have notions of the good is the universal phenomenon; what constitutes the good for specific individuals has to be determined in relationship with them.
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Lasair, S. A Narrative Approach to Spirituality and Spiritual Care in Health Care. J Relig Health 59, 1524–1540 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-019-00912-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-019-00912-9