On Sunday, August 30, 2020, I finish my role as pastor of Mannheim Mennonite Church. This will be my last pastorate as I move into full-time ministry as a spiritual director, psychospiritual therapist, and spiritual care provider for Hospice. As I come to the end of my congregational pastoral career, I have given much thought to the decline of the church in our time. There are many reasons for this decline, some which are related to the church. But there are other causes that are tied to our culture and how our culture sees, understands, and experiences life. The dominant worldview of culture now is non-spiritual, that is, our world is material and physical and that there is no such thing as non-physical reality. One such expression of this dominant worldview is the Medical Model of health. In this blog, I want to explore how the Medical Model has transformed psychiatry from a profession that heals the soul to one that heals the brain. This shift also explains a key reason why religions like Christianity are in decline. But this loss of the soul also provides a doorway to how Christianity and other religions can regain their place of relevance within our culture. It requires inviting people to put on glasses that allows them to see in spiritual colour again. Let me explain. This summer, during holidays, I read a fascinating book titled “Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain.” Within it, the author, Dr. Elio Frattaroli, a psychiatrist, shares how the field of psychiatry has lost its original roots. The word psychiatry comes from two Greek words, “psyche” which translates as “human soul, mind, spirit” , and “iatreia” which translates as “healing” (p. 12). This means that psychiatry is the healing of the human soul. In his book, Frattaroli shows the transition in psychiatry from healing the soul to that of healing the brain. For decades, Frattaroli notes that the treatment of choice within psychiatry was the psychotherapeutic process, that is, a medically trained person listening closely to the person in distress with the goal of addressing the cause of this distress. This involved the “entire process of self-reflection—paying careful attention to one’s conscious experience of anxiety, shame, and guilt, and then to the deeper layers of disowned, less conscious emotions they point to” (19). At the basis of this process is the universal experience of inner conflict between opposing needs and the tendencies within the self that triggers anxiety, shame or guilt (16). Frattaroli notes that this existential inner conflict is “recognized and described by virtually every known religion as the opposition between the Flesh and the Spirit; between the lower passions (our bodily appetites and emotional needs for pleasure and power) and the higher desires (our spiritual yearning toward truth, love, and virtue)” (16). When professionals do this type of listening, Frattaroli claims we are listening to the soul (19). In saying this, Frattaroli is not saying that medications were not important or not used. They were used to manage the symptoms but psychotherapy was seen as the process that led to healing the person’s soul. Frattaroli labels this model of psychiatry as the Psychotherapeutic Model of psychiatry. However, with the emergence and advancement of medicine, the Medical Model began to arise in psychiatry. Frattaroli claims that this model teaches that “anxiety, shame, and guilt are meaningless neurological glitches, and not an urgent call to self reflection. It denies the relevance, and even the existence of inner conflict and discounts the usefulness of psychotherapy as a process of healing self-awareness” (24). Through this Medical Model, the inner conflict within the soul is reduced to a chemistry problem within the brain, a problem that can be solved with the right medication. By 1995, the Medical Model was so pervasive within psychiatry that Frattaroli notes that “in the age of the Brain, dynamic psychotherapy, once the cornerstone of psychiatric training, is no longer considered relevant to psychiatric practice and so is taught minimally, or not all in most psychiatric residency programs (81). As a pastor as well as a psychotherapist, I find this shift in psychiatry very interesting for it provides a key reason why religion and the Christian church are in decline. In many ways, psychiatry and the Christian Church are in a similar business. Both professions are addressing the anxiety, shame, and guilt issues that arise within human experience. As noted above, in the past, psychiatry connected these negatives feelings to the inner conflict people experienced between the dynamics of their Flesh and the dynamics of Spirit. The psychiatric treatment of choice then was psychotherapy. The Christian Church has perceived a similar inner conflict within humanity and addressed the resultant feelings of anxiety, shame, and guilt through spiritual practices, rituals, songs, and teachings. Now, thanks to the pervasiveness of the Medical model, the experiences of anxiety, shame, and guilt are no longer seen by our culture as Soul or Spirit issues. They are seen primarily as issues of the neurological system within our brain, issues that proper medication can managed and even possibly resolve. If this is the case, why would anyone in our culture look to the Christian Church as a relevant place to address their experiences of anxiety, shame, and guilt experiences? They wouldn’t. In fact, the Christian Church has been portrayed by our culture as place where such negative feelings have been induced in people for the selfish purposes of growing the church. If one looks closely at the history of the Christian Church, it does not take much effort to find evidence for such a negative view of the church. However, just because the Medical Model has little space within its philosophy for the dynamics of the Soul and Spirit does not mean that these dynamics don’t exist. It interesting to notice what while the practice of psychotherapy has fallen in use within the profession of psychiatry, it is still used by psychologists, social workers, and by a new group of practitioners who focus entirely on the practice of psychotherapy. In 2015, the College of Psychotherapists of Ontario was formed to regulate these practitioners, including myself. While the Medical Model believes that anxiety, shame, and guilt have its roots in our brain chemistry, there is a growing group of people, like myself, who believe in the older theory that these negative feelings arise because of the inner conflict between the dynamics of Flesh and the dynamics of Spirit within a person. So how do we help people rediscover the dynamics of Spirt and that their soul is more than their biological brain? Within the New Testament, Jesus talks about the importance of sight. Jesus said that he came into the world so that those who don’t see could see, and that those who claim to see would become blind (John 9:39). We live in a culture right now that I sense is very blind to the dynamics of the human soul and Spirit. Our culture now believes and thus teaches that the world is essentially physical, something that you experience through your five senses of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. Therefore, all our thoughts, feelings, dreams, images, longings, intuitions, and sensations are simply biochemical and neurological processes that we can see and measure through using scientific devices such as MRIs, etc. But what if our sight and all our physical senses are missing something? What if our scientific devices are not picking up all that there is happening within reality? Are they sensitive enough? And futhermore, what is triggering the biochemical and neurological processes that we are seeing on MRIs that lead us to having thoughts and emotions and intuitions? There are clearly lots of mental and emotional dynamics where we are not the source but rather the receiver of them. One of my directees sent me a video a couple of months ago that I found very useful as a metaphor for what I am trying to describe in this blog. It is a video of a sixty-six year old man receiving a special gift from his family for his birthday. It was a special pair of glasses that looked like sun glasses. He is a little puzzled at first as to why his family think these glasses are so special until he puts them on. Then he takes them off and then puts them back on again. He cannot believe what he is seeing. For the first time in his life, he is seeing colour. He starts to show tears of joy and amazement. (Click here to watch a video of this man seeing colour for the first time) From the day he has been born, he has been colour blind: dark and light and many shades of pale colours in between were all he ever saw. I don’t know when he discovered he was colour blind, when he discovered that most people saw the world differently than him. But now, with these glasses, he sees the beauty of colour, every shade of colour. He sees his world in a totally new way now, one he was not able to see before. One way of describing our culture is that it is spiritually colour blind. Due to the cultural belief that the world is only physical, that is what most people can only see. They are blind to all other dimensions of life. Even many religious organization including churches are spiritual blind, except their spiritual blindness works differently. Many people within these organizations have very set views of how God or Spirit works in the world. As a result, they are blind to all the other ways that God’s spirit works outside their faith framework. This was the blindness that Jesus was talking about when he shared this teaching about blindness to the religious leaders of his time. He was describing them as being spiritually blind. We live in a world where most people's sight only allows them to see the world as just physical or to see the world through black and white lenses, or both. What would happen if when people entered the church doors, they were given a set of glasses to wear all the time, glasses that allowed them see the different colours or dynamics of Spirit in their lives and in the world? No longer would they see the world as just physical; no longer would they see the world in black, white, and gray colours. If people had that experience of church, I suspect our churches would be full to capacity and beyond. Now, it is important to remember that when we put these special glasses on, we will see full colour. We will see all the different shades and expressions of Spirit in our lives and in the world. This includes all the dynamics of love, grace, truth, compassion, kindness, strength, all the fruits of God spirit. That is one half of the spiritual colour spectrum. But we will also see the other half of the spiritual colour spectrum, that is, all the dynamics that cause us that inner conflict that all humans experience, the experiences of anxiety, shame, guilt, and all the negative dynamics of Spirit. Often, these negative dynamics of Spirit are judged as sinful or evil when they are viewed through the black and white lens of good and evil, a common lens in our culture, even in our churches. When this judgement happens, these negative spirits go into hiding within us and within our culture and stay there in the unconscious causing us grief through experiences of anxiety, shame, and guilt and often much violence and pain. However, this judgement does not happen when we view these negative dynamics through spiritually colour glasses. Instead, these negative dynamics are seen as they are, fallen expressions of Spirit, expressions that when held with compassion and grace, by others like a psychotherapist, spiritual director, or a wise mature Christian or person of faith, can come out of hiding and reveal their truth and provide the insights and experiences needed for the person to take the path of transformation home. When we see life in colour spiritually, when we see all the different dynamics of Spirit, we not only see the wonders of God’s creation with nature but also within human experience. We also begin to see more clearly how human fallenness happens but more importantly, we see the paths of transformation that people can follow that will take them to a place of greater human wholeness and fulfillment. All because we now see life through spiritually colour glasses. Questions to ponder:
1. Consider the glasses you wear that shape how you experience the world. What are the blind spots in your glasses? What aspects of life do your beliefs keep you from experiencing? When do your beliefs keep you from seeing and experiencing the spiritual dimensions in life found in the dynamics of your thoughts, emotions, intuitions, and sensations in your body? 2. Consider the colours that your current glasses allow you to see. Which dynamics of Spirit are easy for you to see and experience? Which ones are harder for you to see and experience? 3. When do you find your glasses only allowing you to see in black and white? When do you find yourself judging experiences into good and evil categories ---within others, within yourself? 4. What gifts have you discovered by being able to see the world and your life through spiritually coloured glasses?
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