Praying for a Miracle Part II: Idiosyncrasies of Spirituality and Its Relations With Religious Expressions in Health

Abstract

As a continuation of the previous paper, Praying for a Miracle – Negative or Positive Impacts on Health Care, published in this research topic, this second paper aims at delving deeper into the same theme, but now from a simultaneously practical and conceptual approach. With that in mind, we revisit three theoretical models based on evidence, through which we can understand the role of a miracle in hospital settings and assess its impact in health contexts. For each of the models described, we seek to illustrate the possible outcomes of belief in miracles as a modality of religious coping in situations of stress and suffering experienced by patients and caregivers in the face of gloomy diagnoses on coming across the limits of medicine to revert certain illnesses (e.g., child cancer) or biological conditions (e.g., fetal malformation). We posit that the judgment about how such a mechanism is healthy or not for each of the people involved (patient, caregiver, and/or health professional) depends on the modulation between the conception of the miracle adopted by the patient and/or caregiver and the concrete outcomes of the way of responding to the situations that accompany the gravity of the illness or condition. To better understand this process of psychological modulation that accompanies belief in miracles, we revisit the concepts of spirituality, religiosity, and religion, pointing out the connections and distinctions between them from a phenomenological perspective. We then present a conceptual model that takes these connections and distinctions into consideration to foster an understanding of miracles, their relations with the diversity of experiences of people who meet in hospital settings (patients, caregivers, and health professionals), and their respective impacts on healthcare.

Role of belief in miracles in clinical settings – a literature review

“…11 This is particularly well illustrated, for example, in five articles found in this review. 3,14,[23][24][25] These works reflect a serious interdisciplinary effort to understand the different categories of nurturing belief in miracles, avoiding mere reductionism of the rational and organicist perspective of the human experience. They recognize the harmful consequences of such reductionism for clinical practice and for research in the field of health.…”

“…After all, studies developed only with the professionals tend to exclude the component of experience and the existential dimension of transcendence manifested in the belief in the miracle, and its relationship with spiritual and/or religious experiences. 14 The lack of a clear explanation of the epistemological grounding adopted by the majority of empirical studies must also be highlighted. This absence, which tends to be explained by the adoption of a model based on knowledge through evidence, shows another weakness in the literature on the topic.…”

“…Thus it may indicate optimism in relation to treatment and to the possibility of healing, maintaining hope and accepting a bad prognosis, being a form of religious-spiritual coping, as pointed out by several studies. 3,14,[31][32][33] An example of this is a study that evaluated the religious-spiritual coping of expectant mothers whose babies had congenital malformations, in which it was observed that 88% of women participating in the study prayed for a miracle and that 92% of them tried positive religious-spiritual coping. 3,34 In another study, with children undergoing chemotherapy treatment, caregivers and/or family members celebrated small victories in the children's treatment as miracles, generating hope and giving new meaning to the fact of hospitalization.…”

“…It does not properly contemplate people's experiences when they are victims of serious illnesses, often lethal, and all the existential processes that accompany such experiences, among them the belief in miracles, lived as an experience that transports them to a transcendental dimension and which cannot be quantified in the same way as biological and factual sciences. 14 In this sense, it is interesting to know the research scenario on the topic in question, in order to identify whether and how it has been approached in contemporary times, what perspectives and methodologies have been adopted in published studies, what results they have achieved, and the degree to which they converge with or divergent from each other in terms of the implications for clinical practice. In fact, as the belief and desire for a miracle occupy a relevant place in society and in the lives of so many people around the world, and are therefore very present in clinical contexts and in the work of many health professionals, this work, therefore, seeks to contribute to qualifying the topic, giving it greater visibility.…”

Religiosity and Indigenous Cosmology in a Brazilian Hospital Setting: The Challenges Faced by Health Professionals

“…In the current work, an effort has been made to avoid any of the reductionism indicated above, thereby adopting a conception of spirituality, religiosity, and religion inspired by phenomenology (Freitas and Vilela 2017;Freitas et al 2022), by promoting, at one and the same time, a differentiated, integrating, and qualifying interpretation of these three phenomena and their manifestations in human experience, be they that of the health professionals or that of indigenous patients, their family members, or leaders representative of their cosmology. From this standpoint, spirituality is understood in the Husserlian sense, referring to an existential demand for meaning and being directed "exclusively to human beings as persons, to their personal life and activity, as also correlatively to the concrete results of this activity".…”