Can Your Faith Make You Well?
An important question in healthcare these days is the importance of a patient/client’s religious/spiritual tradition or set of beliefs and its role in the return to physical or emotional or spiritual health of a person. Most of the world’s religious traditions, both ancient and modern, attest to the affirmative when addressing this issue. It is only with the advent of the scientific revolution that the physical health of a person became split off from the rest of the human.
As my colleagues and I practice pastoral psychotherapy, the area of behavioral/mental health care, which implicitly accepts and appreciates the belief or faith tradition which a client brings to the consulting room, not only the experience but the willingness and ability to sort through and come to terms with one’s beliefs provides a piece of the firm foundation on which a stable personality is built. A conflict with God, a feeling of unworthiness, an ability to forgive or be forgiven, a search for reconciliation which seems illusive, a sense of guilt or shame which is too devastating to the person to offer in prayer are profound spiritual issues which eat away not only at the soul, but the psyche and the physical self as well.
The partnership which occurring more often and more intentionally between professionals trained not only in the physical or behavioral arts and sciences but also with training, or at least an educated understanding of the importance of religious and spiritual beliefs demonstrates the way in which doctors, therapists of all kinds, clergy of all of the major faith traditions try to work together for the cure and healing of the person in need. To try to argue that some want to rely only on the religious tradition for healing is to try again to divorce one’s faith from the rest of one’s life, something which modern culture attests is not what people in need of health and wholeness are seeking.
Recent surveys demonstrate the active religious beliefs of our citizens. Other surveys overwhelmingly affirm the importance of prayer and its role in healthcare. A Gallup poll of the early nineties revealed that a majority of persons seeking mental/behavioral health care wanted to be sure that the therapist not only welcomed their religious beliefs as a part of the therapy but also many wished that the therapist might even share his/her own religious belief.
So, Can your faith make you well? Your faith can move you along way toward health and wholeness. It is part of the healing arts and the cornerstone of most of our lives.
Dr. Paul Melrose
