The arts and spirituality have been close allies throughout history and across many faith and healing traditions, and acknowledgement of their synergistic healing potential is returning. The arts continue to demonstrate their ability to provide categorical evidence of their impact on spiritual and existential concerns. The arts offer a poignant spiritual language for alternative pathways to being and knowing. Fortifying benefits include transcendent powers, internal work and connections. The arts provide a way to practice spiritual care with a diverse range of careseekers. In this Forest Find, a transdisciplinary approach will be presented to encourage members to reflect on how these approaches to care might serve them. Please note that in the Community Discussions there are multiple spaces dedicated to film and visual arts. Post your thoughts and share your examples there for the community.
Art As Care Tool
The significance of art is intertwined with the beauty and sorrow that we experience as Chaplains.
Incorporating art into our spiritual care practices, whether for others or ourselves, provides a means of expressing love, care, and presence. Whether it's through poetry, music, singing, dance, paintings, mantras, or any other of a hundred media, each can be utilized creatively to form deeper connections with others and with oneself. How many times has a song or poem been the gateway to meaning making moments with a careseeker? Awareness and knowledge of specific cultural contexts of those we care for make possible authentic connections through the use of well-selected artistic references:
CHAPLAIN OFFERING: “Jim, you shared that your father used to feel a lot of joy singing I Walk With The King when you were a boy when we spoke last week. I took the liberty to find an original recording of it. Might you be interested in hearing it?"
Many chaplains bring art to their practice. There is a strong belief that process-based art practices are powerful tools for transformative personal growth. Our harsh inner critic can be temporarily silenced by removing the focus on quality, so that anyone may receive the many physical, emotional, and spiritual benefits that art-making has to offer.
Five Recordings from Library of Congress
Listening to Taylor Swift from Prison
Chaplains are often trauma first responders. We partner with careseekers in moments that may need to be marked, remembered and honored through ceremony and ritual later.
Super Power Cape for Careseekerss
CHAPLAIN OFFERING: “Mary, do you want to claim some space to to honor the power and self determination you are talking about feeling now? You talked once about your own super power cape, what might we do with that?"
Consider
Find out from careseekers what medium of artistic expression they connect to. Finding and sharing that image of a painting they remember from a museum, or listening to and contemplating the lyrics of that Gen X Hip Hop song or that Baby Boomer Joni Mitchell song can become powerful means of connecting with your careseeker.