“Spirituality is essential to healthcare. Why? Illness, life stress, and loss can trigger profound spiritual questions in people’s lives that address the very core of one’s humanity” (Taylor, 2007, p. ix). In addition, the relationship that occurs between the healthcare or spiritual care provider and client is a deeply spiritual one and results from the sharing of intimate experiences such as birth, death, life-threatening illnesses, emotional chaos, and the issues that arise during healing.
This relationship can provide both parties with a sense of awe, strength, inner peace, healing, reflection, harmonious interconnectedness, and deep meaning. By caring, listening, and engendering trust, the healthcare or spiritual care provider and his or her client can form a spiritual relationship that can heal each other.
The provision of care and the illness experience can be deeply personal experiences that cause fundamental questions of “why” and “how” to be raised. “Why me?” and “How do I view my relationship with God, Sacred Source, or a Higher Power?” are just some of the questions that lead the care provider (as well as the client) to examine their experiences of pain, suffering, life and death, and injustice. Yet why is this spiritual relationship often difficult to achieve?
Consider the following example:
Doctor, you have just told me I have cancer and I may not survive. I have a wife, three young children, and responsibilities. What happens if I do not survive? What happens if the pain and suffering become more than I can bear? I am afraid. I am afraid that I haven’t been as good a person as I could have been. I am afraid of the pain. I am afraid I will leave my family and never see them again. I am so afraid.
In the above example, the patient is asking several spiritual questions that are critically important to him. How should the physician (or other healthcare provider) answer those questions? What resources does he or she have to assist the patient? How can he or she access those resources?
Healthcare and spiritual care providers are in a unique position to help clients and their families with their spiritual concerns. Since most clients are met as strangers and lack the “baggage” associated with family and friends, they often feel safe sharing their unspoken fears and secret feelings with healthcare or spiritual care professionals (Taylor, 2007).