6 Provide religious/spiritual resources that are appropriate to given care recipients, their spiritualities/religions, their contexts, and their goals.
8 Facilitate care recipients’ own theological/spiritual/philosophical reflection.
PPS 6 is all about the spiritual/religious resources. These are texts, objects, prayers, meditations, and more. You will need to recount a time when a resource was offered to a care recipient and explain your reasons behind selecting that resource. The bigger the range of resources the better. The more specific, the better. I have given out Care Notes before and found them to be quite helpful in addressing a broad range of specific topics. Interfaith Resources has been a consistent supplier of devotional booklets covering multiple religious views. You might want to give some local clergy a call and ask around for what resources are best used for their belief system. Do not sleep on those coloring books either as they have been shown to have a positive spiritual care enhancement, especially for non-religious people.[1]
During seminary, you might not have expected to be ordering Qur’an’s in bulk but now is the time. PPS 8 functions well with PPS 6 as you must demonstrate how you can facilitate the care recipient’s own reflection. The example within the rubric is about the meaning of their lived experience in light of an aspect of their spirituality and their spirituality in light of their lived experience. It is an exploration of life in terms of spirituality and an exploration of spirituality in terms of life. This is a good spot to bring in Carl Rogers and the concept of Unconditional Positive Regard. Rogers emphasized the purpose of this regard was to facilitate “conditions intended to promote the self-realization of the client.”[2]
VanKatwyk (creator of the Helping Style Inventory) offers three therapeutic roles the communicator can take in a conversation: representative, reflective, and reconstructive. My preference is reconstructive communication in that this method acknowledges the meaning-making drive of the human experience and joins others in processing that.[3] Two other names that have been informative for this competency are Martin Buber and Miroslav Volf. Neil Holm applies these (and other) authors’ work to the practice of chaplain presence in a way that gives us a great quote, “discernment of the potentiality of the other, lies at the heart of the ministry of presence.”[4]
[1] Emma Dresler and Palana Perera, “‘Doing Mindful Colouring’: Just a Leisure Activity or Something More?” Leisure Studies 38 (6, 2019): 867.
[2] Peter L. VanKatwyk, Spiritual Care and Therapy: Integrative Perspectives (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003), 25.
[3] Peter L. VanKatwyk, Spiritual Care and Therapy: Integrative Perspectives (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003), 58.
[4] Neil Holm, “Practising the Ministry of Presence in Chaplaincy,” Journal of Christian Education 52, no. 3 (2009): 31.
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