ROY J O’NEILL MSC

IN HIS POEM, Healing, DH Lawrence says:
I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self
And the wounds to the soul take a long, long time,
Only time will help1

Lawrence recognizes the significance of respecting the spiritual aspects of people in healing, and the necessity of including such needs in an integrated protocol of caring for people. Human illness and disease is not just a physiological problem that can be fixed technologically like a machine that has broken down. Nor is it just an imbalance in human chemistry that can be restored through pharmacology. Illness is wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self. Among medical professionals there is an increasing recognition that ‘spiritual distress’ is a part of the experience of illness and is in as much need of ‘healing’ as is the physiological, the psychological, or the emotional. No amount of pharmacology can impact on unease of soul. On the other hand, research is confirming what has really been known since the foundation of medicine. Religious faith and/or the practice of a personal spirituality does impact on the emotional and physical well being of individuals and families and, ‘during illness or other painful experiences, people do turn to their spiritual resources finding them helpful.’2 In different traditions, rites and rituals, or various ways of connecting to the sacred, are the expressions of these spiritual resources, demonstrating in mythic ways what is beyond the concepts of ordinary words, no matter how consoling.

Health care exits at the juncture of human suffering and spiritual searching. Dr Harold Koenig, one of the founders of research into spirituality and health, says:
When physical or emotional illness strikes, spiritual issues become even more important, as issues of meaning and purpose become relevant.3
Health care attends to people when they are suffering, and a time of suffering is often when people re-evaluate their lifestyle and ask significant questions about what is ultimate and how it is to be included at this moment. Thomas Moore comments that:
During illness the soul comes out of hiding, and shows itself in fresh realizations and new priorities…It is a mistake to think of illness only as an affliction of the body. Not only is the ‘whole person’ involved, but so is the family, and the sick person’s life and world. Serious illness is often a dark night of the soul.

As such, it requires soul doctors as well as body experts…You deal with issues of life and death, and you discover the importance of love and caring from family and from skilled strangers.4

Unfortunately, the predominant biomedical mindset within the health professionals often sees health care, with its intense emphasis on scientific diagnosis and its immense dependence on technological means, as in opposition to the spiritual dimension of humanity. Gerald May, a priest and medical practitioner, says:
This is the curse of a health-care system dedicated only to fixing problems, a system too streamlined to be concerned with what’s happening to peoples’ souls 5 .

The juncture of human suffering and spiritual searching really should be a confluence of two streams of thinking, resulting in a stronger flow of learning and healing. As Erich Segal commented:
Faith can lift the fallen, even heal the sick, better than the scientist, whose powers are circumscribed by frontiers of knowledge—which is where belief in God begins.6

Here in Australia, communities of religious belief founded many health care institutes, and today some still remain linked to those foundations, providing a kind of care that unashamedly includes the spiritual as well as the physical.7 The Public Hospital system, however, followed the basic secular model of other public institutions such as schools, and, while not entirely dispensing with the spiritual, were more inclined to maintain a ‘scientific’ focus. But, as Veronica Brady has observed:
Religion, it seems, is a scandal that refuses to go away, even in the most secular of societies… the impulse continues and must be acknowledged and lived through, especially perhaps in a secular society since it has to do with negative and midliminal experience…as common to the unbeliever as to the believer.8

For those entering our hospitals, religion and the spirituality associated with those religions, or with personal practice, are still significant even when regular attendance at religious services is no longer the case. Across the Randwick Campus of hospitals we see a distribution of religious identity that is consistent with our wider community. As well, we see a clear and increasing trend towards not identifying with particular denominations or religious traditions, and declaring a stance of non-practice within such traditions. While the figures for the major Christian denominations—particularly Anglican and Catholic—remain relatively consistent with a slowly declining trend, there is a marked increase in the ‘No Religion’ or ‘Not Stated’ and ‘Inadequately described’ aggregate to the point where it reaches a combined 36.64% of the aggregate admissions to the Campus over the last four years. Taken together, this category, in fact, exceeds any of the single major denominations over that same four-year period.

At the same time, however, data from a recent research project carried out on Campus indicates that this is not a relinquishment of all spiritual values, but rather a dissociation from an institutionalized practice of religion.9 The ‘spirituality’ of these traditions, however, has not been abandoned. It would be a mistake to believe that because someone no longer attends religious services of their faith tradition or no longer identifies with that tradition, they no longer need their spiritual source at critical times in their lives. Dr Bruce Rumbold, writing for The Medical Journal of Australia, says:
Spirituality may be described as the web of relationships that give coherence to our lives. Religious belief may or may not be part of that web. Often we only become aware of strands in the web when they are stretched or broken, as happens with a life-changing event like a diagnosis of serious illness in ourselves or in someone we love. …A religion-based understanding of spirituality—spirituality as beliefs about the sacred—tends to be more acceptable in healthcare contexts because it provides definitional clarity that assists the division of professional responsibilities. However, many patients do not observe this conceptual neatness, applying the term ‘spiritual’ to core values, meanings and practices that integrate their experience, often with only tenuous connections to ideas of transcendence.10

There is an increasing tendency to see ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’ as quite separate aspects of human experience—separated and in conflict with each other. David Tacey has commented that:
Religion needs spirituality to keep the tradition alive and linked to the contemporary time. Secondly religion needs spirituality to keep dogma and creed connected with human experience, and thirdly to keep the orthodox tradition related to the creativity of mysticism. … Spirituality needs religion to offer a language to express itself. Religion offers spirituality a history to be connected to, and a sacramental community in which to find sanctuary and support.11

There is an inherent danger in separating religion and spirituality exclusively. David Ransom argues for exploring the extent of this binary experience and asks,
How might we imagine ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’ in a way that respects their distinctiveness and yet maintains them in a creative and constructive tension? 12

Ranson concludes:
The re-awakening of spirituality is a moment pregnant with possibility. But it is also a moment in which the dangers are not to be discounted. The divide that has occurred between ‘spirituality’ and religion’ has attributed to the first a fresh authority and credibility, and to the second, a retrieval of its fundamental role in the spiritual quest. But the divorce of ‘spirituality’ from ‘religion’ runs the risk of sundering a vital tension that is foundational to a mature transcendent quest.13

There is a fundamental flaw in some ‘popular’ spirituality movements14 which try to place ‘spirituality’ outside the scope of any structured belief system. Tony Kelly confronts such spirituality, questioning if:
The generalised spirituality now in vogue (is) a kind of spiritual autism, a self-enclosure incapable of the ultimately Other-ward ecstasy of adoration, self-surrender and praise…What if this whole spiritual phenomenon were nothing more than the re-emergence of Gnosticism, or at least a kind of elitist soul-culture amongst connoisseurs of special experience?15

Spiritual experience is not always personally comforting. Often, through our experience of illness or approaching death, our entry into a spiritual experience or an encounter with the sacred, divine, or holy is difficult, painful, problematic, anything but serene and peaceful to begin with.
Rudolf Otto, in The Idea of the Holy, a small, but significant, publication in the early part of last century,16 examined this paradox of encountering the Divine, consisting, in his view, of the experience of both the mysterium fascinans and the mysterium tremendum. The former is the wonderfully elevating and blissful moment of entering the numinous. This is Paul’s experience of being ‘caught up to the third heaven.’ (2 Corinthians12:2). The latter, however, is when we come face to face with some power that confronts us with our own sense of powerlessness and frailty and the brevity of our present life. This is when our corporeal nature recognizes the limits of its existence in the face of the immensely Eternal One.

[We sense our] creaturehood (Geschöpflichkeit) as impotence and general nothingness as against overpowering might, dust and ashes as against majesty.17

It is this latter nature of the holy that is such a challenge to the ego-centric individualism of our Western cultures and is so assiduously avoided by those who would promote ‘spirituality’ in opposition to ‘religion’. Encountering the mysterium tremendum needs, what Tacey calls, ‘a sacramental community for sanctuary and support’.18 Like Moses in the cleft of the rock, we meet God indirectly, in a sacramental way within a community of like-minded believers.

St Augustine of Hippo, writing at the beginning of the 5th Century CE, said that a sacrament is a visible sign of a sacred thing, a visible form of an invisible grace.19 This is a very broad description of any kind of actions that can be seen as pathways or beacons to an awareness of mystery. Rites and rituals are those moments open to grace and blessing when the invisible actions of God are made visible in the use of material creation. In the broadest sense of the word, ‘sacrament’ is the sign of something sacred and hidden. In this sense the whole world is a vast sacramental system, in that material things are for human beings the signs of things spiritual and sacred, even of the Divinity. ‘The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.’ (Psalm 19:2). The writer to the Romans acknowledged this sacramental universe as the most telling sign of God’s presence and the one most easily available to anyone who would dare to look. ‘Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.’ (Romans 1:20). If we dare to look, McFague argues:

We might begin to see (for the first time, perhaps) … the extraordinariness of the ordinary. We might realize that we live and move and have our being in God. We might see ourselves and everything else as the living body of God.20
While it is true that grace is everywhere,21 human beings need a focused way of viewing such a reality, some specific symbols and actions that attempt the connectedness with metaphysical realities. McBrien says:

A sacramental perspective is one that ‘sees’ the divine in the human, the infinite in the finite, the spiritual in the material, the transcendent in the immanent, the eternal in the historical.22

Rites and rituals are limited ways in which we strive to make God present to us, allowing, as Gleeson does, for the fact that:
There can be no pretence that in any human experience, even in a special sacramental ritual like the Eucharist, we can capture the full reality of God. There can be no question of objectifying God, of delivering God in a package, as it were.23

Rites and rituals, however, are grounded in the context of a sacramental worldview and are not somehow a separate reality. Sacrament and sacramentals, are rites that specify or localize what Hopkins called ‘God’s grandeur’ which ‘flames out like shining from shook foil’24 in the sacramental experience, if we but attend to it. But the grounding is in the everyday ordinary things. Moore asserts that:
To the soul, the ordinary is sacred and the everyday is the primary source of religion.25

Irwin supports this contention:
A major issue that needs rethinking and refurbishing in our day is appreciating sacramentality in general and the sacramental worldview as the framework and ground for celebrating liturgy and the seven sacraments. This means viewing the words, symbolic gestures, and actions conducted in our solemn assemblies as rooted in the life we live outside those events.In a sacramental worldview, the world in which we live is interdependent—all that dwell in it are part of God’s plan for us all.The world is also the primary locus where God is revealed, disclosed, and experienced. This means that the world, humans, and all creatures great and small are signs of God among us. It also means taking seriously daily and domestic things, for these are the tangible ways and means the Church uses to experience and partake in the life of God both in liturgy and sacraments and outside them in all of life.26

Within the context of illness and suffering, common as it is to the human condition, human beings, viewing their experience in a ‘sacramental way’, can find a path to Mystery. The mystic traditions of a number of the major religions of the world acknowledge suffering as one of the ways of touching the holy and of reaching ‘holiness’—an encounter with the Divine. The Book of Job is a classic struggle to make sense of the senseless and to find God in the midst of chaos.27 Mystics within the Christian tradition called this the via negativa (the way of negation) or the dark night of the soul.28 May29 and Moore30 have returned to these insights as a way of helping people who are sick and suffering make sense of what is happening to them, and of finding meaning and God in the oscura of these liminal experiences. In recent history, we find Dietrich Bonhoeffer writing from his prison cell in 1944:
Suffering is a way to freedom. In suffering, the deliverance consists in our being allowed to put the matter out of our own hands into God’s hands.31

With the collapse of our ordered world, when the people and possessions we prize most, when the things that are most important to us, are suddenly stripped away from us, we are left, like Job, naked. When there are no familiar props and supports which help to make some sense of the senseless, even in the religion that has served us well, it is then, and perhaps only then, that we may begin to see the face of Mystery.32 This is the searing experience of gold being tested by fire. (1Peter 1:6-7).33 A period of protracted illness can give time to reflect on the experience and seek some meaning. Kirkwood outlines alternative ways in which this might be done when faced with the reality of suffering in our personal lives.34

When it comes to facing the mysterium tremendum people of our present generations are not asking the kind of questions that might arise for theologians and dogmatists. They are asking what Hellwig calls:
The gut-level questions about personal experience and personal responsibility and the personal effort to make sense of life.35

Beaudoin, argues that Generation X (born in the 1960s and 1970s) is a deeply sacramental generation, searching for authentic spiritual guides and dependable, genuine communities in which to encounter God and interpret their own experience of the divine, especially when faced with suffering. ‘Suffering is a catalyst for GenX religiosity.’36 Some communities of faith have a unique charism in their sacramentality that has the potential to speak powerfully to this generation’s spiritual yearnings and experiences of suffering. I believe that there is such potential within the Catholic tradition. But in order to speak, powerfully or otherwise, there needs to be a common ‘language’, acceptable to both the community of faith and the individual caught in the experiential moment. Finding that common ‘language’ is one of the tasks of the chaplain who is striving to meet the spiritual yearnings in the midst of suffering. Like music, rituals have the ability to ‘speak’ in many languages.

When the web of relationships that gives coherence to our lives begins to unravel under the spiritual distress of severe pain, illness or approaching death, spiritual reserves are recalled and put into practice in the form of rites or rituals, either as the official rites of a community of faith (Sacraments or recognised prayer forms) or in the rituals of popular piety or non-specific celebrations of a ritual nature. In the minds of the dogmatists and theologians there may be a distinction in kind between these, but in the midst of spiritual distress many would regard such distinctions as passé. Even if not connected with their traditional sources of religious belief, the majority of patients and their families still acknowledge that some attention needs to be given to their spiritual needs and that the ministrations of those who can best meet those needs is beneficial to their healing. It is the task of the Hospital Chaplain to do so. Those responsible for the implementation of health care protocols and policy within our hospitals should recognize those needs as integral to the processes of healing and incorporate them into the everyday functioning and operations of our health care facilities.37 Some individuals may have a spirituality closely connected with the traditions of a community of faith, and the practice of specific rites or rituals. Others may not. As regards our Australian attitude to things spiritual, Tacey argues that, within our national psyche, there is ‘a deep artesian stream that carries a hidden connection to spiritual matters.’ He uses the image of the Todd River in Alice Springs, flowing always underground but only at times of climatic intensity being seen on the surface.38 The spiritual connections of many of the patients and families within our hospitals are like our desert rivers in the Centre of our arid continent, flowing silently underground and emerging at times of life intensity. Their spiritual experience may often be nourished in personal prayer, and private rituals at significant moments in life, rather than in the public expressions of communal worship. Lopez notes this phenomenon as well:

The sacred is a reality that is prior to and independent of organized religion. Various surveys have indicated that a majority of those who do not belong to any religious body nevertheless continue to believe, pray, experience the sacred and engage in behaviour they explicitly label as religious. 39

The hospital chaplain meets the full spectrum in ministry and helps to heal through spiritual care.

Fr Roy O’Neill MSC is the Coordinator of Chaplaincy Services at the Randwick Campus of Hospitals. He has com-pleted a Masters in Ministry Degree through the MCD. His thesis was entitled, Moments of Grace and Blessing: Rites and Rituals in the Process of Healing.

NOTES
1. de Sola Pinto, V. and F. W. Roberts, Eds. (1994). The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence. London, Penguin Books. p 620.
2. VandeCreek, L. and L. Burton (2001). Professional Chaplaincy: Its Role and Importance in Healthcare. http://www.healthcarechaplaincy.org. For a detailed examination of the research literature supporting these contentions, see Cohen, J. (2002). Report on Spirituality, Health and Healing in South Eastern Sydney. Sydney, South East Sydney Area Health Service. The major conclusion of this report is that:
There was a general consensus that spirituality, beyond religion, was an important component in health care. Those interviewed who had come through Nursing were more comfortable with ‘spiritual distress’ as part of the nursing taxonomy. Others recognized its importance, at least intellectually, even though they themselves may or may not be connected with an organized faith community.
3. Koenig, H. G. (2003). ‘Religion, spirituality and health: an American physician’s response.’ Medical Journal of Australia Vol. 178 (2): 51-52.p. 51.
4. Moore, T. (2004). Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life’s Ordeals. London, Piatkus Books Ltd. pp. 267 –268.
5. May, G. G. (2004). The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth. San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco. p. 6. Gerald May practised medicine for over twenty-five years. He is now the Senior Fellow in Contemplative Theology and Psychology at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation.
6. Segal, E. (1993). Acts of Faith. New York, Bantam Books.
7. Elliot, H. (2001). Hospital Chaplaincy in the Context of Religion in Contemporary Australia. Department of Studies in Religion. Sydney, University of Sydney. p. 58:
The philosophy of the Sisters of Charity had always been that healing involved both the physical and spiritual welfare and that all clergy, regardless of religion or denomination, would be welcome at their hospital.
8. Brady, V. (1994). Caught in the Draught: On Contemporary Australian Culture and Society. Sydney, Angus and Robertson.
9. O’Neill, R (2005). Moments of Grace and Blessing: Rites and Rituals in the Process of Healing. Masters Thesis, Melbourne College of Divinity, University of Melbourne. A copy of this thesis is available at the Medical Library at The Prince of Wales Hospital.
10. Rumbold, B. (2003). ‘Caring for the spirit: lessons from working with the dying.’ Medical Journal of Australia Vol. 179 (6 Suppl): S11-S13.
11. Tacey’s address at the Australian Health and Welfare Chaplain’s Association Conference deals with this in detail. Tacey, D. J. (2003). ‘Recovering Faith in a Faithless Age: the Post-Modern Spiritual Landscape and A Case Study of a Student’. Australian Health and Welfare Chaplains’ Association Conference 2003 Keynote Addresses. Alice Springs, Australian Health and Welfare Chaplains’ Association. He takes up these similar concerns in Tacey, D. J. (2003). The Spirituality Revolution - the emergence of contemporary spirituality. Sydney, HarperCollinsPublishers.
12. Ranson, D. (2002). Across The Great Divide: Bridging Spirituality and Religion Today. Sydney, St Pauls Publications. p. 14.
13. Ibid. p. 76.
14. Tacey, D. J. (2003). The Spirituality Revolution—the emergence of contemporary spirituality. Sydney, HarperCollinsPublishers. pp 141-142:
When spirituality becomes popular we can almost be certain that some vital element or ingredients of spirituality have been left out of the popular conception. Things become popular by being distorted, especially by leaving out the hard bits, and emphasizing those aspects that seem easy or desirable…The tendency to idealise and distort the idea of spirituality has been facilitated in our time by New Age industries and enterprises. These industries service the contemporary hunger for spiritual expression, and they often style spirituality as an ego-friendly or utopian experience, presenting the encounter with the spirit as a ‘feel-good’ encounter.
15. Kelly, T. (2004). ‘Reflections on Spirituality and Church.’ Compass Theological Review Vol 38 (8): 19 - 27. p. 25. Kelly also examines this whole question of New Age ‘spirituality’ in Kelly, T. (1993). An Expanding Theology, Faith in a World of Connections. Sydney, E.J. Dwyer., especially pp 40 – 48.
16. Otto, R. (1923). The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational. London, Oxford University Press.
17. Ibid. p. 21.
18. Tacey, D. J. (2003). ‘Recovering Faith in a Faithless Age: the Post-Modern Spiritual Landscape, and a Case Study of a Student.’ Australian Health and Welfare Chaplains’ Association Conference 2003 Keynote Addresses. Alice Springs, Australian Health and Welfare Chaplains’ Association.
19. Sacramenta signacula quidem rerum divinarum esse visibilia, sed res ipsas invisibiles in eis honorari.In De Cathechizandis Rudibus XXVI 50. Latin text on line. Augustine De Cathechizandis Rudibus. www.thelatinlibrary.com/augustine/catechizandis.html Augustine’s insight is also the foundation for the title of this Project: Moments of Grace and Blessing: Rites and Rituals in the Process of Healing.
20. McFague, S. (1993). The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. London, SCM Press Ltd. p.132. This whole work is a consideration of the sacramentality of creation.
21. Bernanos, G. (1937). The Diary of a Country Priest. London, The Bodley Head. p. 317.
22. McBrien, R. P. (1994). Catholicism. Melbourne, Collins Dove. pp. 9-10.
23. Gleeson, B. (2004). Symbols and Sacraments: Their Human Foundations. http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/theology/ejournal/aejt_2/:
The God whom we encounter in sacraments is…Mystery. Real though it is, the sacramental encounter is limited. Even as we experience the presence of God, within and through the signs of the presence of God, we experience also the absence of God…And yet, one does not hesitate to claim that in sacraments of all kinds, God does meet us, and we do meet God.
24. Gerard Manly Hopkins God’s Grandeur in Gardner, W. H., Ed. (1953). Poems and Prose of Gerard Manly Hopkins. Middlesex, Penguin Books. p. 27.
25. Moore, T. (1992). Care of the Soul: How to Add Depth and Meaning to Your Everyday Life. London, Judy Piatkus Publishers Ltd. p. 203
26. Irwin, K. W. (2002). ‘The Development of Sacramental Doctrine in the Church: Theory and Practice.’ Recovering the Riches of Anointing: A Study of the Sacrament of the Sick. G. Glen. Collegeville, Minnesota, The Liturgical Press: 59-82. pp. 79-80.
27. This theme from The Book of Job was examined in detail in a series of keynote addresses by Norman Habel, an Australian Lutheran theologian, given to The Australian Health and Welfare Chaplains’ Association National Conference held in Alice Springs in April 2003. In these Habel argues that it is the suffering of what he terms ‘spiritual abuse’, perpetrated by those who would crush the spirit with creed and dogma, that has driven people from the Church and ‘religion’ into seeking ‘a bold new spiritual experience’ in a ‘post-religion age’.
28. Perhaps the best known of these is St John of the Cross with his Noche Oscura which he prefaced with Canciones de el alma que se goza de haber llegado al alto estado de la perfección que as la unión con Dios por el camino de la negación espiritual. (Songs of the soul, which is possessed by being called to that higher state of perfection in union with God by way of spiritual suffering.) In Rodrigues, J. V., Ed. (1988). Lira Mistica : Poesias de Santa Teresa y San Juan de la Cruz. Madrid, Editorial De Espiritualidad. p. 136.
29. May, G. G. (2004). The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth. San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco.
30. Moore, T. (2004). Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life’s Ordeals. London, Piatkus Books Ltd.
31. Bonhoeffer, D. (1959). Letters and Papers from Prison. London, Fontana Books. p. 161.
32. Achterberg, J., B. Dossey, et al. (1994). Rituals of Healing: Using Imagery for Health and Wellness. New York, Bantam Books. p.12:
Illness (or disease) can be the beginning of a deep spiritual quest. It may offer you the challenge of confronting—perhaps for the very first time—the fact of your human mortality.
This idea is also in Gleeson, Symbols and Sacraments.
33. 1Peter 1:6-7:
In this you rejoice, though now for a little while you may have to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold which though perishable is tested by fire, may redound to praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
This image of purification runs through both Testaments, and is present in the Apocrypha as well.
Then the tested quality of my elect shall be manifest, as gold that is tested by fire.’ Hear, my elect,’ says the Lord. ‘Behold, the days of tribulation are at hand, and I will deliver you from them. 2 Esdras 16:73-74.
34. Kirkwood, N. A. (1995). Pastoral Care in Hospitals. Sydney, E.J. Dwyer. p. 20:
Any regular visitor to a hospital will inevitably be asked the question ‘Why?’ ‘Why me?’ That question involves more than the Kubler-Ross explanation of it as a response of anger. Fundamentally, it is a theological question. . This whole chapter considers the role of suffering in life from a Christian perspective.
35. Hellwig, M. (1981). The Meaning of the Sacraments. Dayton Ohio, Pflaum Press. p. 3.
36. Beaudoin, T. (2000). Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass. p. 97:
Xers’ relation to suffering lays the groundwork for religiousness. This knowledge of suffering sparks our spirituality, because suffering is a sort of ‘boundary experience’ that forces us to confront questions about our own human limits. After all, when you suffer, you want to know why, for how long, and who or what is responsible. If you ask that question broadly enough, you wonder about God and religious experience, whether in emotional, resentful, dismissive, ironic, debased, or intellectual ways. Suffering is a catalyst for GenX religiosity.
37. Departmental policy, from the New South Wales Department of Health, is that this should be implemented. In introducing A Model Plan for Chaplaincy and Pastoral Care Services in Hospitals prepared by the Civil Chaplains Advisory Committee in New South Wales, the Director of Health said: This Circular and the Model Plan take into account changes that have occurred regarding chaplaincy and pastoral care services in the health system. They apply to hospitals and to community based facilities and services. Health Services will need to consider access to chaplaincy services across the continuum of care and ensure appropriate services are available. Co-operation and religious tolerance should be promoted and encouraged to ensure the needs of our diverse community are met. Reid, M. (1998). File No A4534 Chaplaincy Services to the New South Wales Health System. www.health.nsw.gov.au. This policy was reinforced in a more recent Circular from the present Director General Roby Kruck. (2004/91).
38. Tacey, D. J. (2003). ‘Australian Spirituality and Health.’ Australian Health and Welfare Chaplains’ Association Conference Keynote Addresses. Alice Springs, Australian Health and Welfare Chaplains’ Association. This is reminiscent of Isaiah 35: 6-7:
For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water.
39. Lopez, F. (1994). Pastoral Care in an Emerging World. Sydney, Marist Centre for Pastoral Care. p. 132.