Spiritual Care in the 21st Century – Chapter 4 excerpt

Spiritual reflection draws on a chaplain’s interreligious and multireligious literacy, but doesn’t require expertise in all religious traditions. Chaplains also do not have privileged knowledge about the nature, content, or function of people’s spiritualities. Rather, chaplains are experts in the process of helping people identify, explore, and respond to spiritual resources and the spiritual dimensions of experience. This entails engaging how people make meaning and how they understand ultimacy or the basic and fundamental nature of reality. Chaplains lead and facilitate reflection by drawing on a person’s spirituality, rather than providing or prescribing specific religious content. Chaplains are careful not to impose their own spiritual-religious traditions and understandings.

Gaining skill in reflection

Knowing about and demonstrating these skills is a first step; learning when and how to use them effectively is a process that involves training and practical wisdom gained through experience. Most chaplains, especially those certified by the Board of Chaplaincy Certification, Inc., gradually learn to use spiritual reflection to make meaning through a years-long process of formation that can involve clinical training and supervision, peer consultation, and ongoing education.

How spiritual reflection helps

When such difficult and compelling questions arise, spiritual reflection can help people make sense of life in ways congruent with their spiritual and religious commitments. It provides an opportunity to clarify values, explore how people relate to the sacred, and develop stronger and more trusting connections to transcendence. This means engaging moral values and aims, constructing a coherent vision of life, and identifying beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality, such as whether the universe is benevolent. Chaplains who effectively lead and facilitate spiritual reflection embody a “constellation of capacities” –attitudes, understandings, and skills that include self-awareness, authenticity, openness, and tolerance.

In our view, a chaplain who wants to lead and facilitate effective spiritual reflection must be able to recognize and engage spiritual experience and to access and influence a person’s worldview without misusing power. In many graduate-level courses in spiritual care and in CPE, chaplains are trained to hone these abilities, attending to how a person relates to the sacred and to how transcendence and meaning make themselves known and influence a person’s life. Chaplains normally strive to explore a person’s spirituality with curiosity and openness, working diligently not to impose norms foreign to the person but to help them identify and clarify the values, commitments, and preferences embedded in–and congruent with–their own ways of relating to the sacred. But most chaplains do not stop there. They also help people respond to their experiences as part of an ongoing conversation with the sacred. Ideally, these responses take place once people make meaning of their experiences. Responses might be formal, involving, for example, prayer and ritual; they might also be informal and include practices such as offering thanks, serving others, creating something, or committing to new actions and understandings.