RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY

THE social work profession has never been one to shy away from controversial subjects. The National Association for Social Workers (NASW) claims that spirituality is at the centre of existence for many people and its reach is so broad, it is ideally suited to be integrated into responsible and respectful approaches to therapeutic intervention with clients (NASW, 2010).

It’s useful to clarify what we mean by ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’ before thinking specifically about how they might be incorporated in this article. Religion, in contrast, is an external entity that has been socially constructed. Religion refers to institutional groups like the Roman Catholics and Islam. Whereas spirituality should be viewed as a broad, multifaceted concepts much like the concepts of psychology and sociology.

Many of the specific manifestations of spirituality in clients are important to explore and can come alive in the helping process. Religion is important to spirituality because it is a major source for how many people express their spirituality.
The postulation is that the combination of spirituality and social work has implications in the end-of-life issues, aging, illness, cultural competence, addiction, ethics, relationships, forgiveness, mental illness, meaning of life and attempting to answer the age old question clients ask themselves; “Why is this happening?”

Social workers often address these issues in their own lives while helping clients face them. They are increasingly examining how their spiritual values affect practice of the profession, as well as how clients’ spirituality impacts world view, coping skills and the ability to manage adversity.

Our modern society, with its demands that for many are psychologically and emotionally overwhelming, plus its virtual displacement of community and family, has created myriad conditions of life that are spiritually and religiously shattering. Moreover, growing numbers of congregational clergy of all religions and denominations, responding to their members’ needs for counselling and therapeutic care, have sought secular education and training that would enable them to provide psychological and emotional treatment. They in turn have had a spiritual and religious influence on the individuals and institutions like theology and education that have educated and trained them for such practice.

In my work with people who have said they were seeking or had a spiritual experience, they were usually referring to one of two things. Typically they were talking about: A feeling or experience of unity or closeness with God or whatever they regarded as eternal and transcendent, or a feeling or experience of lightness or joy, absence of mundane consciousness, and diminution of anxiety and fear. Furthermore, the ability to experience faith and hope is a very large part of fulfilment and contentment at any particular moment in life. Common sense, confirmed by research and clinical findings, tells us that we are better able to get through difficult times if we have faith, trust and hope. All other things being equal, more faith and hope result in: issues like fewer suicides, fewer hospitalisation days, fewer days in jail or prison and so forth. So as social workers we ask ourselves, what kinds of interventions might we initiate to promote faith and hope? But first we have to answer the question, how are we to understand what faith and hope mean to our profession’s beneficiaries? Both religion and spirituality regard the capacity for goodness to have been created by God or a higher power. The external type of faith reflects a belief that God has created within us the wherewithal to believe that God can act in ways that are entirely outside of our reason and experience. Here ‘leap of faith’ means we set aside our reason and experience to believe that God will create greater goodness in the world. The internal type of faith reflects a belief that, because of what God has created within us, we can act in ways that are entirely outside of our reason and experience. Here ‘leap of faith’ means we allow ourselves to create greater goodness in the world even though our reason and experience reject that possibility. Most of us experience these two types of faith to a greater or lesser degree; they’re not mutually exclusive.

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