Adapted from a talk given at Modum Bad, a remarkable psychiatric hospital and learning center in Vikersund, Norway.
The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.
Galway Kinnell, “St. Francis and the Sow”
Preamble
We need conceptions of healing and renewal that embrace the whole human being. We need conceptions of human being and of physical and emotional health that embrace human experience more fully than we are accustomed to imagine. Such exploration requires an expansion of our accustomed ways of knowing, our practical epistemology.
In that adventure there are several paths to follow, some worn by many feet, some freshly made. The one suggested and illustrated here echoes the values upon which Modum Bad was founded. It may be appropriate, in this 50th anniversary year, to assess their significance and their presence in our midst today.
Re-imagining
Whatever one's healthy, toxic or nominal religious history and convictions about religious practice and belief, the experience of suffering, recovery and renewal is usefully conceived integrally as spiritual journey as well as psychological transformation. Human development and spiritual development are one story, one path, not two. Psyche and soul are descriptive of the same reality (they are, after all, the same words in the original Greek).
In this inquiry it is useful to turn to religious thought and practice with a fresh eye free of jaundice. These days, in the thin air of secular ascendancy, such wisdom is more often latent than manifest. Its relevance to a re-visioning or re-imagination of human development, suffering, healing and clinical practice, can hardly be taken for granted.
We may have to formulate a new language to quicken our hearts and minds. To do that responsibly and with care, we should start with a re-examination and reinterpretation of the old language. Such language will be unfamiliar to some, and may seem dauntingly archaic to others, irrelevant to our current challenges of growing, healing and living well with one another and with our patients.
The old wisdom, however, stands ready to be reawakened and drawn into our daily lives—even those of us determinedly secular in our sense of the world. We have only to suspend disbelief and imagine anew the stories and songs, the rituals and symbols, the praxis of religious life. We will need to contemplate and re-imagine words and concepts we have known and to which we may have become averse – God, soul, prayer, the sacred and the profane, ministry, the cycle of life, death and rebirth or resurrection, holiness and redemption, immanence and transcendence.
Such words, for most of us, have not lost their emotional potency, however much we have set them aside. Re-visioning can offer us – and those for whom we bear responsibility – freedom from constraint and a shedding of armor – relief, awakening and inspiration.
Re-imagining can be demanding, and may ask of us a full measure of empathic compassion – first toward ourselves. We shall have to shed at least some – and perhaps many – of our preconceptions and habits, and bring only our full presence—body, mind, heart and soul.
Let’s say that soul is the whole—our embracing integrity, our most capacious and harmonious identity, never fully manifest in consciousness. The instruments of soul are imagination and memory, soul’s emotional tone typically one of pathos and joy. In our partial awareness of soul we yearn (Senshucht is the manifold German word) for the wholeness that is already ours. We might say, then, that soul at once embodies and searches for presence. It is both dwelling and seeking.
The Norwegian word for pastoral counseling is sjelesorg, soul-work, soul healing. It should describe psychotherapy as an integrated whole.
For what, for who does soul long? For what do we engage in soul-work? For relief from suffering. To be seen and known. For reconciliation. For joy. For wholeness. For home among "all creatures great and small."
Consider the remarks of UCLA psychiatrist and neurobiologist Dan Siegel:
Elucidating the links between the physical brain and the processes of the mind has shed light on the deepest nature of the self. When we examine the deep layers of our neural selves, we come to glimpse not only the roots of our mental and social lives, but the essential reality of our selves as part of an integrated whole across the span of time.
It may be that our work as human beings is not only to seek meaning and satisfaction in our lives and to dedicate ourselves to alleviating suffering in others but to be a part of a larger effort to bring integration and healing into the many layers of our interconnections with each other.
As we explore and incorporate the many domains of integration, what seems to evolve naturally is the sense of being connected to a larger whole, something more than just our bodily defined sense of self in this time we call our "life." This [integration] enables us to become more fully aware of our interconnected belonging as we, in Albert Einstein’s words, "widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
The experience of Sabbbath: an example of re-imagining
The word “Sabbath” may evoke vague memories of onerous obligation and inconvenience. In all but a few marginal instances, Sabbath remains in Christian practice a small stub of its former self. We must dig deeper into the layers if we are to find suggestive meaning and value for our everyday lives.
[continued]
