Soul Care of the Spiritual Self 

A soul care conversation is an intermingling of hospitalities. The soul carer offers the hospitality of soul to attend to another’s soul. If the offer is accepted, the other extends hospitality by inviting the carer into their spiritual home.

The spiritual home is a metaphor for our spiritual self, comprising a constellation of spiritual connections.¹ Or, as Louis Nieuwenhuizen explains, “The spiritual self is not separate from the physical, psychological or social self; it is simply a natural, interconnecting dimension.“

This concept is supported by an ever-expanding body of literature supporting the “idea of multiple complex connections between the psychological, physical and spiritual components of individuals.”² The soul is an embodied and encultured entity that embraces the whole person and the whole of life. Spirituality of the soul focuses mainly on how a person makes sense of life or finds meaning in life and death. The soul of every person comprises a multilayered, interconnected web of beliefs, values, experiences, emotions and relationships held together through a spiritual web with overlapping religious, moral, spiritual and existential dimensions. We might consider the religious, moral, spiritual and existential dimensions of the spiritual as distinct yet interconnected domains within the concept of sense-making or spirituality.

These interconnected domains form the most profound and fundamental components of the spiritual self and cohere around the individual’s core beliefs.³ Soul care works within the multifaceted spirituality of an individual’s spiritual self. Each domain of spiritual the spiritual self represents a different dimension of the self and approaches questions around meaning, purpose and belonging from a different perceptive.

For the purposes of soul care and facilitating spiritual wholeness, or spiritual health, it is possible to think of the spiritual self as a spiritual home and the different domains as rooms or spaces. This spiritual home has four rooms or areas: religious, moral, existential, and spiritual. The spiritual home has a verandah or porch for the chatter that passes the time of day on the weather, other people or other things of a social or general nature. Not everyone who visits a spiritual house is invited to enter the spiritual home. To cross the threshold, one entered through a door that was opened for the inside.

The religious space within the spiritual home contains the personal and social connections and practices clearly defined by objective aspects of religion – such as shared beliefs and traditions, habits, patterns, liturgy, rituals, rites of passage, symbols and signs. Now, many people might be thinking about the people who identify themselves as spiritual or not religious. Philosopher James A K Smith observed, that to be human is to follow a set of cultural liturgies. We might find these rituals in malls, stadiums and universities, and these habits and liturgies, are shaped and in turn, shape what we love or desire.⁴

Symptoms of religious distress are exhibited through disbelief, dismay, a loss of faith or trust, or a sense that there is nothing behind the drama and theatre of the belief system. The believer has become disillusioned, believing that the rituals do not represent any larger reality, the signs do not signify anything more substantial, and the symbols are merely hollow trinkets. Yet, even in disbelief and loss of faith, there are other sets of liturgies and rites of passage such as the burning of books, desecration of sacred things, or the removal of wedding rings or the formal desacralisation of religious property or items. 

The moral space contains the person’s internal compass, guided by their deeply held corresponding philosophical values, ethics and morality. Their moral space will be directed by their sense of fairness, justice, good and evil, ideas of retribution, forgiveness and grace. The overlap between religious and moral spaces will depend on how religious beliefs form and influence a person’s moral intent. Symptoms of moral distress arise when there is an inner conflict between one’s own values and what one is required to do or witness. Soul care will witness and attend to the other’s inability to reconcile their morality events with their belief about what should have happened.

The existential space relates to the experienced reality of when stuff happens. Our Existential spirituality is a closely related relationship with the external world through our body and mind and our physical and cognitive responses to the existence, and how we make sense of events and find meaning through the events. Philosopher Martin Heidegger coined a term to describe our experience of these events, and he called this our thrown-ness into life. This thrown-ness may be positive, negative or neutral, but is mainly beyond an individual’s control and includes birth and death, ethnicity and nationality, disease and heath, war or peace, poverty or prosperity. Existence includes all events of life and things that matter. These events include genetics, history, environment, culture, family and shared spaces. Our response to existential events is variously described as resilience, thriving or despondency, fatalism, survival or acceptance. Symptoms of existential distress include suffering, pain, anxiety, pain, loss, grief and soul care provided focused attention and awareness of the expressed losses and suffering.  

 The spiritual space relates to inwardness, subjectivity, and personal experiences that connect people to something beyond themselves. This space is experienced as a state of creativity, flow state or being in the zone where perceptions of focus and time are experienced differently. Spiritual experiences and practices include prayer, meditation, yoga, scripture reading, connectedness to nature, gratitude, thankfulness, sport, dance, and music. These are times we are functioning in a non-self-conscious way from our heart or soul. It could be said we are performing out of our spiritual self, not mediated through a persona.

In this state, we can be others who also are also relating as their selves and find harmony or symmetry felt as being on the “same wavelength” “in tune with” or “in step with.” Symptoms of spiritual distress exhibit disharmony, discordance, disproportion and may be exhibited variously as guilt, shame, fear, depression, being overwhelmed or feeling trapped.

Spiritual health is evident when a person’s spiritual self can predominantly participate in their regular liturgies, process, and grow through life’s challenges. They have a moral framework that can accommodate sin and tragedy and find comfort and peace even in trying circumstances, as described in Psalm 18. Conversely, Psalm 137 describes people experiencing religious, moral, spiritual and existential spiritual distress. Psalms 42 and 43 describe someone held by fragile threads of grace that hold in the face of distress. In the 23rd Psalm, we observe the spiritual health of someone who can place their religious, moral, existential and spiritual distress in the shepherd’s care and is restored to spiritual health even in the face of physical death.

Central to the Christian faith is the belief that the spirit of Christ dwells within the spiritual home of the believer, (Eph 3:17; James 4:5) experienced as the peace of Christ which passes all understanding (Phil 4:4-7).

¹ Louis Nieuwenhuizen, “Lived Experience of Hospital Patients and Its Integration into Theory,” Chaplaincy Today Vol 24. No 2. p3.
² ibid p4.
³ ibid p4.
⁴ Cultural liturgies” is a term coined by philosopher James K. A. Smith. The term refers to communal habits and patterns of worship seen in all human cultures.