We are one: body, soul and spirit

In my last post I focused on the different world-views underlying spiritual faiths and Western psychology, and questioned whether the latter was imposing its assumptions on the many people of faith. In this blog I pursue this line of thinking further, focusing on the increasing overlap between Western therapeutic thinking and Christianity.

Some think that Christianity and psychology have nothing to do with each other: they are different realms and there is no reason for Christians to be any more interested in psychology than in any other '-ology'. There are others who see Christianity and psychology as so overlapping that they almost merge into one, and use 'pop psychology' in the church context with great relish, and seem to almost equate therapy with sanctification!

One of the very first things I learnt as a therapist was that it is difficult to tell psychological problems apart from spiritual problems. There are mental health issues that may have their roots in spiritual problems, and spiritual problems that may be presented as mental health ones. [I'm not interested here in those who suffer from serious delusions - such as thinking that they are Jesus Christ - but rather in the interplay of our ordinary everyday psychological and spiritual experience in life's ups and downs.]

Physicians and psychotherapists increasingly acknowledge that physical and mental health affect each other greatly. We are, after all, one person - our mind is part of our body! So, when people think about being in 'good health' or a state of 'well-being', they generally mean being in good physical and mental health.

But this is not sufficient. We also need to include the link between the physical and mental with our spiritual being. We are indeed one person - body, mind (or soul) and spirit; they each affect the other. So I do not see how one may truly be in good health without the spirit also being healthy. And how can the spirit be healthy when we ignore it, starve it, even deny its existence? We end up with people who look healthy on the outside but who are empty on the inside, hollow shells - or as Jesus put it more plainly, "whitewashed tombs".

Moreover, I do not think Jesus subscribed to the current ideology which sees spiritual issues alone as being the concern of the church, while we leave physical health to doctors and mental health to counsellors and the like. Jesus dealt with whole people - body, soul and spirit - and his healing was total - physical, mental and spiritual. He gave bread to hungry people, hope to hopeless people, enabled lame people to walk and the blind to see, and forgiveness and new life to those who were spiritually broken.

Counsellors must engage with the spiritual realities of their clients, not with any aim for salvation, but merely to understand their clients properly. And the church needs to follow Jesus' example and deal with whole people. Too often both have fallen for the same deceit: that the spirit can be separated from the body and mind.

Nevertheless, the church and counsellors are aiming at different things. It is not the role of counsellors to pass comment on their clients' spiritual frame of reference, merely to understand and engage with the whole person in front of them. But the church will not be relevant to people if it confines itself just to the spiritual; the 'average person in the street', as well as those in the pew, will see the irrelevance of preaching that doesn't deal with the physical and emotional realities of our lives. The gospel is not just about forgiveness for personal sins and being right with God, but about restoring relationships and the natural world - it's about making all things new.

Catching glimpses, but missing the whole

Have you ever noticed that we describe ourselves in the terms that we expect our listeners to be interested in or understand. I'm not talking here about the fact that we talk about different things to different people, but rather that we describe the same issue differently when we talk to different people.

So we visit our doctor, and describe how we have so many headaches and are tired all the time. Next we talk to our therapist about being depressed. Then we talk to our vicar and say how hard we are finding it to pray. And then we come home and talk to our family and say how much we are missing our close friend, who died recently.

And so the doctor prescribes pain relief and something to help us sleep, the therapist helps us to change the train of thought that runs round in our head, the vicar talks about God being present even when we don't feel it, and the family member shares in our tears.

But if these are all expressions of the same issue - bereavement, in the simple example above - then no-one is hearing or understanding the whole. Who can we talk to without presenting just one facet of our experience; without limiting ourselves to the presumed realm of interest of our listener? And who is there that will listen openly to all that we are experiencing?

We live in a world where each professional is only an expert in some tiny fragment of human experience. But it's not just professionals' spheres of expertise that have become fragmented. I wonder whether this has led to our conceiving of our internal experience in equally fragmented ways. We subconsciously categorise our experience against some matching taxonomy: 'physical experience', 'mental or psychological experience', 'spiritual experience' - as if these are different and disconnected!

And by the time we have talked to all these different people and got such different kinds of help, we have almost certainly lost sight of the fact that they are merely facets of the one issue, and we wonder why all of these different problems have come along at the same time!

I am a therapist, so I would rather like to think that the therapist in my example above would do a better job than implied. Except that, by and large, most therapists don't 'do' God; they have got rather too sucked into the medical/psychological model of understanding mental distress, and so exclude the spiritual. Sadly, therefore, I am not confident that the answer lies in therapy.

I am also a Christian, so would really like to think that the answer lies in church. But, very sadly, my experience is that many Christians don't 'do' listening. I know that the kind of listening that is needed is difficult, and is in fact very rare to find anywhere. But how sad if it's not to be found at church. If churches do want their members to be open about the whole range of their experience, then this first needs modelling from the front (see: Who sets the agenda?) and we need to show a genuine interest in more than just "spiritual" things in church.

But perhaps the crucial question is this: when we come to God in prayer, what do we say then? What do we include and exclude? What do we assume that God is interested in? The trouble may be that we simply present a version of what we say to the vicar, somehow assuming that God is (only) interested in 'spiritual' things.

But, thanks to Jesus, surely God does understand and is interested in the whole of us - body, mind and spirit - the three in one? Where better can we go?