Paul Please note: Due to the large amount of email Paul receives and the limitations of his physical condition he can no longer respond to all email. But please keep sending — he reads them all.
Spirituality and Children: Little Angels or Bad Seeds?
Sweetness and Light?
Children are often perceived as being in more immediate touch with our better natures of innocence and wonder – some would say nearer to God or the divine. For example, we have Jesus saying “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” (Mark 10:15)
Poets sometimes make this connection too. For example, there’s William Wordsworth’s famous “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Sample:
...not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home…
Wordsworth refers here to the idea that in infancy and childhood, something of God’s presence still remains with us in a way that fades as we enter youth and adulthood.
Rotten Apples?
All the same, it’s a platitude to observe: “Well, you know how cruel children can be.” At worst I think of the novel Lord of the Flies. Fiction maybe… but I have to say I’ve known groups of children I wouldn’t want to leave alone for five minutes, let alone unsupervised for years on an island!
Do kids come trailing clouds of glory or with a big chunk of the apple of original sin still stuck between their two front teeth?
Added April 29:
CARNIVAL OF HEALING (Shoot, I still can't make the script work for the "widgets...")
Reiki 4 Life accepted my “Freudian Aroma Therapy” post of April 18, 2007 for the Carnival of Health. I appreciate Meredith’s willingness to post an alternative point of view on this subject.
I worked for twenty-three years in the public schools, most of it as an elementary school counselor. One seasonal memory from around this time of year that I remember with nostalgia was taking part in the testing of preschoolers who would be starting first grade in the fall.
Our school custodians would prop open the main doors at either end of the downstairs hall that ran the full length of our sturdy two story brick building. A stream of children and parents would enter with the cool morning air. Most children were dressed in their spring best: the girls in light pastels and whites with the boys often wearing serious shirts – meaning they weren’t just T-shirts but had buttons!
The array of personalities displayed by these tiny people was astounding and delightful. There were children who would jump from their seats and start to head straight for the school door after finishing with you. I guess all their previous life experience told them that by now they must be off work for the rest of the day. You had to go out after them and sell them on the notion of taking another test: no, your mom’s really not expecting you back just yet… and you do want to get some more stickers on that bear, don’t you? But I bet you like coloring books, right? Because when you’re all done, you get to color!
There were highly conversational children who’d ask, for example, whether you were married – and “How come?” if you said you weren’t! And there were those very polite children who, finished with your task, would soundlessly place their pencil down and wait until you happened to look up from your paperwork several minutes later to perceive that you’d just done your small part to help slow down the overall efficiency of the process. But just try getting mad at a tiny person with barrettes in her hair examining you curiously from behind her glasses who’s perfectly well aware of the fact that she’s being very good and exceptionally patient but also kind of wondering “So what gives with this guy, anyway?”
Looking back, a big part of the fun of this annual event was the contrast between two worlds. On the one hand, those of us over the age of five felt a lot of pressure. We were supposed to complete the testing by lunchtime so that those assigned to score the tests would be able to complete the task that afternoon. Otherwise we knew the Principal might yell at them. But aside from maybe two or three kids with a little separation anxiety during the first half hour, the five year olds kept pretty loose.
First Maryhttp://momandmama.blogspot.com/ and then Rosiehttp://smokeymountainbreakdown.blogspot.com/ nominated me for this awards meme for blogs that make you think. If nominated, then if you want you can name five blogs that make you think and then paste a thingy at the end. Mary terms this “snagging the image” – I love that kind of techno-talk. For me, it is deeply mysterious, like how come my cordless headset works or why stuff runs when I plug it into an outlet.
But first I offer the following to showcase myself in a striking and statuesque thinking pose – rather like The Thinker only I'm honoring myself with a poem instead of a statue plus I'm wearing clothes. (Please note: I am not sure which side of my brain I used for writing this post.) Afterward I’ll name a few blogs that make me think. I have trouble with html – that much I know – so five links will be a stretch.
I think I can, I think I can, I think I can...
I will close this performance art/blog post with an attempt to paste the think-meme thingy at the end. If you don’t see it, you can figure I was unable to figure this out. I don’t really know what it's for anyway. So far, when I click on it, I just keep seeing it and thinking “What’s this thing for, anyway?”
The Art
O Drear Dark Dream He thinks; therefore I seem?
The sky is drear this night. The muffled sea-surge surges, Urging me to dense and pensive thoughts. “I think, therefore I am” so Descartes taught; Yet this I never got. It leaves me in an angst, A funk, a purple mist of primal existential Doubt: for what if I am not?
Just because Descartes was satisfied To think his major, monumental thought That somehow satisfied to make him be, Doth necessarily it work the same for me? My thoughts, it seems to me, are weighty, Massive, deep and well thought out; Yet what if really it’s Descartes that dreamt me up?
Paul “The Thinker” Martin
Putting It All Together, Nearly
Here, in alphabetical order, are some blogs that make me think, assuming I’ve had coffee:
Perspective http://povcrystal.blogspot.com/ Crystal is my links guru; however, she is absolutely not responsible for the appearance of my links on this post. But she can come up with informative links relating to religious topics faster than anyone I know. Her posts are high in information content.
By “Holistic Mentalism” I've referred to an overstated view of the mind-body relationship that sees mental health issues as usually or always a leading cause of physical health problems and of non-recovery from physical health problems. This viewpoint exaggerates the role of mental unwellness in physical illness and minimizes the generally far more powerful physical and biological causes.
My April 12 post gives my major reasons for seeing this perspective as false. Here I’d like to point out two negative effects of Holistic Mentalism in health care practice.
1. Unprofessional mental health opinions: Alternative medicine providers with a mentalistic bias routinely advise patients who are unresponsive to their treatments that, since they didn’t respond to their treatments, they may have mental health issues. This is sometimes stated directly: “Have you considered seeing a psychologist?” More often it’s implied as in “Maybe you need to experience a health crisis...”
A parallel occurs in mainstream medicine when the tests ordered by a specialist turn up no positive findings and as a simple and direct consequence of this the physician, more often than not barely acquainted with the patient, states or implies that the patient is misreporting or exaggerating symptoms.
With the rare exception of a small minority of pain clinics that include psychological intake services, such provider-rendered psycho/spiritual opinions are based, in a word, on nothing. No psychosocial history is taken, no structured interview is given, and no personality testing is administered. There’s rarely even a significant conversation! Passing acquaintances at work have far more personal knowledge of us than providers have of clients that don't respond to their interventions and pass in and out of their offices in as little as one or two visits.
2. “Negative energy” for patients: Any human being who develops a life-limiting illness that is chronic, progressive, or characterized by slow or incomplete recovery, goes through some tough times adjusting. This includes those who enter and adapt to the challenge with average to above average mental resilience. When health care providers make negative and uninformed mental attributions of clients based on no more than the fact that their services didn't help along with conversations about weather, sports, and what’s new on American Idol, then clients are left feeling at least a bit disrespected and disheartened. At worst, the provider becomes a needless source of worry and self doubt for those clients who happen to be at a difficult juncture in mentally adapting to what has happened to them.
Disclaimer! I want to note that in over ten years of continual unsuccessful efforts to diagnose and treat a disease progressively affecting my connective tissue, muscles, skin, bones, and nerves, I did not find that most mainstream and alternative medicine providers played psychologist/spiritual counselor. However, it was a substantial minority.
Going by the previous two posts and comment threads, it looks like all of us see plenty of mind/body/spirit interconnections. One that hasn’t even been mentioned is the body-mind effect. We all know that we can change our state of mind in a hurry simply by ingesting a little rotten food or banging our thumb with a hammer! More to the point: we inevitably experience unhappy emotional responses to the onset of serious disease or bodily injury and its repercussions – for example, the limitations on one’s way of life that it imposes.
In the previous post I outlined what I called “the mentally emphatic” view of the mind-body relationship, implicit to many of today’s holistic health perspectives. I rejected it in favor of what I discussed as “the physically emphatic” view. I noted that the mentally emphatic view exaggerates the role of the mind and minimizes the greater role that is generally played by physical and biological sources of physical illness.
Additional Terminology
Words have implications.
As described in the previous post, the physically emphatic view is a balanced perspective that fully acknowledges the variety of connections among mind, body, and spirit without downplaying the strong evidence for the primary role of physical and biological sources of physical illness. I’d suggest “Integrative Holism” to refer to this point of view.
And I’d suggest calling the mentally emphatic view “Holistic Mentalism.” It favors underlying psychological and spiritual difficulties over physical and biological causes as primary sources of physical illness despite strong evidence to the contrary.
To summarize:
1. Integrative Holism: The primary causes of physical health problems are generally physical and biological. However, dealing well with such problems psychologically and spiritually in some cases contributes to recovery. This perspective includes an openness to further research and discoveries concerning mind, body, and spirit in relation to physical health and illness.
2. Holistic Mentalism: Underlying psychological or spiritual difficulties are usually or always a leading cause of physical health problems and of non-recovery from physical health problems. This is held as an assumption or an article of faith without regard to evidence. What do you think? While some commentators have appeared to disagree with this analysis on previous threads, I believe that I’ve responded to criticisms satisfactorily. If not, please let me know - also if you think I’ve overlooked additional viewpoints on the causes of physical illness that are not variations on one or the other of these two perspectives.
Mind/Body/Spirit: Getting in Touch with Our Inner Thinker
Consider these two opposing views on the connection between mind and body when it comes to physical illness:
1. The Physically Emphatic View: The primary causes and cures for physical health problems are physical and biological.
2. The Mentally Emphatic View: The primary causes and cures for physical health problems are psychological and spiritual.
(For more complete statements of 1 and 2 see previous post.)
1. Inclusive and Holistic: The physically emphatic view does not rule out possible and known situations in which the mind may make the body sick or contribute to recovery. For example, there are the well known phenomena of psychosomatic illness and the placebo effect. Mental stress is known to exacerbate many medical conditions. And with regard to certain illnesses, for example cancer, some studies suggest that psychological and/or spiritual factors may in some cases contribute toward recovery. Note that the correlations are not nearly strong enough to substitute mental health approaches for drugs and surgery as the mainstays of treatment.
2. Distorting/Deceptive: The mentally emphatic view is contradicted by the fact that there is already overwhelming evidence that most physical health problems have primarily physical/biological causes and treatments. Here are just a few examples.
Public health policy centers on sanitation, hygiene and germ theory, not spiritual counseling or guided imagery. The strong cause-effect relationship between unsanitary living conditions and a wide variety of major illnesses is well documented and well known.
AIDS: The staple of AIDS counseling isn’t promoting emotional wholeness and healing; it’s advocating safe sex practices. Treatment consists of a cocktail of drugs now known to be effective against the AIDS virus, not positive visualizations.
Malaria: If you travel to an area featuring malaria-carrying mosquitoes, chances are you’ll pack your mosquito netting and not your relaxation tapes if you don’t have room for both.
Lung cancer was a rare disease prior to the rise of the tobacco industry.
Sickly Chickens and Stuff…
The mentally emphatic view has to contend with any number of further contradictions. Examples:
Last post I cite the good physical health of violent criminals. Even if it should be the case that they're not really as physically robust as they appear (as one commentator suggests), a minority of physically healthy violent criminals still doesn't fit well with view #2.
Last discussion thread SusieQ (linked at right in blog roll) mentioned that something eventually goes wrong with everyone’s bodies and kills them, tending to suggest a physical and not mental basis for ill health. I suppose we could attempt to resolve this by trying to wed New Age thinking with old time religion: if death is the wages of sin, then the reason all of us eventually get sick and die is because our negative thoughts eventually catch up to us and kill us. Saints are bad people too.
Even if this makes sense, it does leave you to wonder: what’s behind the deaths of trees and flowers?
And what’s up with those sickly chickens vs. the healthy ones? Too much time spent brooding?
Looking over comments to the previous thread, I see two essential contrasting views on the connection between psychological/spiritual wellness and physical health.
1. The primary causes of physical health problems are physical and biological. However, dealing well with such problems psychologically and spiritually in some cases contributes to recovery.
2. Underlying psychological or spiritual difficulties are usually or always a leading cause of physical health problems and of non-recovery from physical health problems.
Each view acknowledges that the mind can play a role in physical illness and recovery; #2 greatly overstates the impact of the mind on the body by ignoring evidence that would put it in perspective.
One small sample of the ignored evidence:
If view #2 is correct and poor physical health necessarily indicates significant underlying psychological or spiritual issues, then, conversely, a lack of health problems indicates significant psychological and spiritual integration. As a group, rapists, murders, thugs of all kinds, and brutal dictators are at least as physically healthy as average. It would therefore follow from view #2 that their level of psycho-spiritual development is at least that of average citizens and well above that of non-violent human beings who have physical health problems.
And to think: All this time we’ve been having them work on license plates instead of advice columns!
The fourth in a series of posts on the experience of adversity.
If you experience any of the following adverse reactions…
There seems to have been quite widespread agreement in these comment threads on what might be conceived of as two forms of adversity:
1. “Stuff happens” as they say… Adverse events outside our control sometimes occur.
2. Our reactions to stuff happening can themselves be negative, adding to our experience of adversity; this is something that we all need to watch for.
…then consult a psychologist/spiritual advisor immediately?
One comment brought to mind a view I’ve encountered at times among practitioners of alternative medicine. Not, in my experience, from most; but from a sizeable minority.
In this view, illness is never something that “just happens” to us as in category one above. Physical health problems are always caused at least in part by the patient’s psychological issues or spiritual difficulties.
In recent years this view has gained considerable popularity among the general public. Lectures, books, and tapes on “mind/body/spirit” abound. The category itself suggests that the psychological, the physical, and the spiritual are all of a piece.
Can you be sick in the body without being sick in the psyche and/or spirit?
The third in a series of posts on the experience of adversity.
The climax of the crucifixion narrative occurs when Jesus asks God why he has forsaken him. It seems to me that sometimes these words are downplayed or even explained away. Abandonment is difficult to contemplate.
Many people face the reality of abandonment directly and personally. The overwhelming majority of them are not only uncelebrated but anonymous. Dying from hunger or from treatable diseases, for example, are commonplace in the world as we have arranged it to date.
To die with others unable and often unwilling to offer help or comfort is a profoundly terrible experience. Yet still more deeply, we are not alone; not abandoned; not left on our own in the way that it can feel.
Crossing
His head was lifting; then pain Shot from underneath both arms Into his contorted palms. He slumped and slipped Some fraction of an inch, hearing himself moan.
Like an animal, he thought, Feeling his two feet curled in upon themselves, Tangled in the burning. With every breath He felt a tearing through the tightening
Length of muscles in his chest, between each separate rib, It seemed, when in another half-dream, he found himself A child again, running to his mother’s arms For safety; but there were soldiers and he knew
He’d taken his last step, then slept a second time. He woke to find his breath constrained; His chest felt flattened in the starving air, A pressured pain, submerged and weary.
The gray sky drizzled intimately, drowning His whole skin. Eyes on the horizon, distant white shapes - Houses; and yet he thought of sails against The sea and slumbered deeply into weariness again.
Once more he woke, now in near-dark: My God, My God, he called: Why have you forsaken me? Then still more deeply thought: How I have forsaken you, My God, never meaning to, never thinking it could end
So soon. And Lord, I know they haven’t understood The way that we’ve been one, and how your kingdom, With us like a mustard seed, is sown to raise a Word We do not hear until we learn to speak, Our Father;
And not as though the Father of my self alone, or any other lonely Mortal self; but now I’ve failed, my God, my God - They never understood! Denied his only purpose and desire, Regretting everything, his eyes were lost behind themselves
To find the only Ocean’s face Salted bright with fire.
The second in a series of posts on the experience of adversity.
In Original Faith: Becoming Our Truer Nature, I paraphrase St. Paul to define God as “the One in whom we live and move and have our being.” According to your own views, in what follows you may conceive of this greatest Context for our lives as a supernatural entity existing in distinction from creation or as word for nature, being, or reality itself in its full dimensions.
It has come across, occurred somehow, That God has gotten into me rolled and rounded Something like the way a mountain faces distant eyes: Always with a hidden side. And I have gotten grounded into God, Feeling that strong and steady current keeping me Safe as molecules of air among a falling house of cards. Such slight things as rubber bands and spider stings, And the vibrations ring upon the slight weak thing I am. Yet God breathes the air I breathe by every breath, And although hidden in a housebound Hollow of the cosmos, my mind rides God’s: Springing into high skies and wide fields, roaming and rolling Implicitly to things no longer possible for me: running Over dirt paths mighty with the calls of crows, White puffs of breath beneath my eyes Across each wintry season’s fields of snow In dawns that only see me indoors lying low. And steadily I visit all those places I will never know In teeming cities; workplaces; cross-country drives I’ll never do; early morning folks in diners, Waitresses with voices still gravelly from sleep; Heart open to a heartland where I’ll never go.
I am out at recess now with every child in every elementary school: The ones who always have the ball and those who only Lean against the wall in shadows. And even if I learned God didn’t want me now, I would follow like a holy ghost, shading in the places That God leaves behind and pointing toward most High While hidden in the valley low.
