Nursing: The Balance of Mind, Body, and Spirit

International Nurses Council suggests to reflect on the theme Nursing: The Balance of Mind, Body, and Spirit for the year 2019.

The whole service of nursing is an engagement with the body. Weak and fragile, broken, wounded, rotten body is approached with care, tenderness and sacredness. At the same time bearing in their (nurses) own body the fatigue, hunger, sweat, drowsiness, and even illness. When fired, they try to raise their minds to hold it within themselves.The wounded healer is made alive in their own body. 

As the theme seems to suggest, nursing requires a well integrated personality both for the good functioning of the service in the hospital, and for the well being of the nurses themselves. A mere academic knowledge may not suffice for placing oneself into such a service. Developing human sensitivity may be the beginning. It is carefully being attentive, first of all to oneself, then to other members of the staff and to the patients. Being attentive to oneself is most important because it is important to be aware of what happens to one's mind and body when we engage in the healing process of others. It is the compassion we give to ourselves that flows to the patients. Since it is dealing with the mysteries of human lives, we may not be able to predict what comes next. So an absence of a healthy network can often burden others. Lack of interest, dedication, alertness can hurt the other members of the staff as there is a collaborative work is necessary. In case of attitudes of carelessness or laziness in correct reporting and offering attention can risk the life of the ones given in trust. Usual 'adjustments' done for covering the mistakes from one's part can be heavily affecting both the life of the patient, and it is cruel as such adjustments sometime load the poor families even for the medicines that have not been used for them. It is  a genuine effort for development and sincere encounter of oneself in order to place oneself properly into the dignity of a nurse.

While keeping the humanness and tenderness as the basic attitude, mind too requires strong base to act on. One has the right to safeguard personal uniqueness of oneself from which one may approach the patients concerned with absolute tenderness and humane heart. Compassion also calls for being alert and offering timely care. One needs to be able to discern the areas where one could be used in the name of service. There one must follow strictly a professional approach, absence of which can end up in one doing the works of everyone and some remain lazy. A strong mind is also required to form a disciplined life. It is necessary to train the mind to balance between work, leisure and rest. When one is missing it can affect the integration of our personality.

Just as one is a unique person, there is something that makes a nurse out of a person, the inner motivation to be a nurse which is much beyond a profession. Only with such a motivation there can be the healing transmitted. These form a spirituality of nursing, concerning oneself, other members of the staff, and the patients. When we consider this in the form of spirituality, here all who are present are highly sensitive. They are thinking, anxious, worried, tired, in pain... only if we can be attentive to this we can form in us the virtues of healing. We will realise that in every attempt here there is a prayer mode, perhaps a prayer that does not require words.

Summer Sprouts: Stories for Bad Days

We require an extraordinary courage and hope to speak of a blooming flower in the heat of summer. In the moments of pain and fear  we often use the categories of danger and death. People can easily identify that it is their own story, but what they need is a cause that they can look beyond. Some periods in history are times of crisis. They can be of natural calamities, crisis in values and culture, or deadly sickness. At times they may be repeated, long lasting, or devastating. The worst thing is that often people have no explanation for what is happening.

People who hold on to retributive theology are most likely to conclude that the world has become very sinful and God has sent punishments. They often develop a crisis mentality. Since it is urgent that we need to be saved from the crisis what is important is to repent, and to withdraw from the world. Gradually it becomes a negative spirituality of detachment that promotes a total disengagement with the world. It's devotional intensity promotes depriving the body of its needs calling it 'desire' with a negative connotation. The opposite is understood to be spiritual and really 'desirable.' Thus we live a Platonic spirituality than a christian life.

A good example is how Europe responded spiritually to the situation after Black death. In our own lives, how happy and excited we are to condemn and hate the body and the world! Are they too bad to be treated so? Why do we keep a kind of unbearable feeling regarding the body? We cannot think of body and soul separately. The inferior status given to the body is a wrong christian anthropology. As it was done earlier we too repeat the same art forms to show that the body is the cause for temptation and sin. Good and evil fight for the human soul, and the evil tempts to yield to the 'pleasures' of the body. These perspectives have made us to feel the body and our natural surrounding as some unbearable burden and made our life and devotions with a melancholic orientation. It can lead us to form a guilt culture that accuses ourselves constantly, and longs to be accused though we may not be consciously aware of it. We may begin to see 'sin possibilities' everywhere ans in ourselves. We can also think of the Puritanism among the Protestants and Jansenism among the Catholics.

Another focus during such times of crisis is on the imaginations of hell and judgement. What we see as the worst things are given to the imaginations of hell; rotting dump with worms and dead bodies was a good image to think of the worst. In the context of war, columns of fire and smoke would fill our hell. Coming ages our imaginations of hell might include the torturing machine monsters.

A vision that is integral with the beauty and goodness of nature and our own body can help us to stand with our own limitations even in the moments of crisis. We do seek interpretations and explanations, but the denial of the world is not an appropriate approach. We must rise above the moments of crisis, but we cannot hold the world responsible for it. The negative things we blame on the world actually proceed from our own ill-spirit or improperly formed 'soul', and not from the body. They may be giving an explanation that offers a solution in dilemma. But the life that we live must be worth lived, and we need 'true' stories for it. We cannot live a true life on 'convenient' stories, whether it be about our body, our world or anything that weaves our life story.

Humanity ... Spiritualities, that we may not all perish

Religion that looks for the continuity of its systems and institutions alone, can be at risk of losing its spirituality. Spiritualities can compliment well because they make up the whole of the human. One who practices the values of love, forgiveness and sacrifice from christian spirituality is in no way objected to look deeper into universal compassion from Buddhism, universal harmony from Hinduism, courage for justice from Sikhism, or peace from Islam. 

The crisis today is a thought that the religious systems are in danger. It is a social phenomena, but the east blame the west and the west blame the Muslims, or chose either new age trends or fundamental approach. The Muslims also react against the western domination and react differently. Instead, in loving and showing compassion no one is irritated but our lost humanity can be rebuilt. The disaster is the preference to religious structures above God.

But it is to be noticed that the religion is often a language used for political moves. Often it is the immature political interventions and international policies that sustains market economy that create domination and tension. There, 'Jesus' 'Bible' and 'temple' can become powerful political icons that gathers support for vested agenda.

Anywhere, the building up of the sense of victimhood and insecurity is a potential formation of hostility and suspect about other communities. Need of our time is to gather the courage to come together as human family or even as an earth community. Towards this purpose not only religious leaders must come together in dialogue, the political leaders also need to come forward to to rethink of their economic and political policies. Surviving alone is a vain hope today! If we live together we can live, otherwise we all perish.

No emperor in nature

Nature was seen to be the caring, nourishing, and protecting presence that embraced us.
We were all children ...
Even the earliest human consciousness concerning the divine were of a caring and protecting mother.

We began hunting, fighting, dominating, battling, ruling and conquering; and our imagining of God too became that of a ruling and controlling.
some became rulers and speakers, commanders, and managers
others became slaves, hearers, sinners and doers.

In nature there is no emperor or king, and so, learning from nature we could re-imagine of ourselves and our gods.

The Word was from the Beginning

A lived faith is something that is to be listened together from one another. It is not something that is suggested or commanded. Truth is revealed in the untold pains of fragmented selves today. Christ's message is there, we can recognise this message and the person of Christ only if we are able to listen as a community. Only when the continuity through traditions meet the social consciousness of today, this listening and living of faith can be fruitful and witnessing. The revelation of Christ is recognised and lived as a community. Since we are human beings and with different cultural perspectives we may realise this presence in different ways. Perhaps this understanding may have been dominated by a western perspective. If we are to realise the unknown Christ, we must be open to the recognition made by Asian, African and many indigenous consciousness. A uniform appearance is never the nature of any form of presence in nature. The differences are not just tolerated but they are necessarily placed in mutual integration.

Christ, the wisdom of God, through whom all things were made, also has inspired cultures and civilisations. These cultures were there even before Abraham was born. They have lived well throughout the centuries according to their conscience. As any religious traditions Christianity too has religious factors which we need to acknowledge. (There are texts, institutions, and significant personalities. There is a cultural-historical context where a religion originates, develop and proceed to deeper directions). Those religious traditions also have inspirational and graceful contents just as Christianity as a religion. If someone has a claim that one has wholly understood the mystery of God and Christ and remain intolerant to others that would be a heretical attitude. We are gradually realising the revelation of Christ for us and in us, as the church, as the community of believers, community of humanity, and as community of all beings. All must be there to complete the body of Christ.

He (the Word) was from the beginning; he is the alpha and the omega. We are familiar with the Word within the annunciation-ascension setting. If Christianity is willing and open to look at the reality of the Word beyond how the Semitic cultures recognised him, it can have a new vision of Christ to come together as a community of all beings, a larger vision of the Church. The Word being the form of the universe, is showing himself in different ways in its journey, visible and unfolding. Even within the human consciousness he is revealing himself and gradually taking it to the purpose of humanity. Then in the Bread of thanksgiving we raise, we proclaim every sacrificial death that the Word unfolds in the universe.