Reinscribing the Lived Body: A Qualitative Study of Extraordinary Religious Healing Experiences in Norwegian Contexts

Abstract

Poor health often motivates people to engage in religious and spiritual approaches to healing. However, there is limited research on such experiences from a northern European perspective. This article investigates healing experiences related to Christian faith and practices in Norway by thematic analysis of 25 semi-structured interviews with individuals who have experienced healing of different ailments. In so doing, healing events across diverse contexts are characterised, and the results show that such experiences not only feature practices in which other people are present in prayer, preaching, and the laying on of hands, but also spontaneous extraordinary encounters with a divine being through visions and voices. The healing events are further described as experiences of transformational, powerful touch. In light of the lived body theory, these transformational experiences can be understood as re-inscriptions of health that are manifested in the intertwined bio–psycho–social–spiritual aspects of the body.

A Dutch Study of Remarkable Recoveries After Prayer: How to Deal with Uncertainties of Explanation

“…Most of the available empirical research on HP has been conducted with the use of Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) (Hodge, 2007 ) and usually reflects scepticism about the positive effect that prayer can have on a person’s health (Roberts et al, 2009 ). Only a handful of published empirical studies make use of qualitative methodologies (Austad et al, 2020 ; Harris & Koenig, 2016 ; Helming, 2011 ).…”

The development of group healing storytelling model in multicultural counselling services in Indonesian schools: Examination of disciplinary cases

“…Group counselling is a group service to assist counsellees in alleviating existing problems [14 -16]. Healing storytelling is a part of counselling in group counselling to build therapeutic change [17][18][19].…”

Introduction to the Special Issue “Religious and Spiritual Experiences”

“…In more recent research such experiences have been termed extraordinary, non-ordinary, paranormal, anomalous, or (within a psychiatric context) religious hallucinations. These experiences are still of interest to today's scholars in the discipline of psychology of religion (Hood et al 2009;Geels 2003;Hood 2005;Wulff 2000) and are represented in this special issue as out-of-body experiences (de Boer 2020), religious visions and voices (Ouwehand et al 2020), religious hallucinations (Noort et al 2020) and extraordinary healing experiences (Austad et al 2020).…”

“…As spiritual and religious experiences are interwoven with their contexts, what is perceived as extraordinary in one milieu may be viewed as part of daily R/S congregational life in another. As described in the article by Austad et al (2020), extraordinary experiences are included in religious narratives and thus may be familiar to religious communities, and even expected. Recent research has shown that an R/S milieu may influence the religious or spiritual experiences of its members, not only by welcoming such experiences or providing an interpretive framework, but also by modelling and thus facilitating the learning of how to hear voices and receive visions from God.…”

“…The importance of the relational aspects brings us to the contribution of Anne Austad et al (2020). As an alternative to the notion of a duality of body and mind, as well as the suggested holistic solution that is often referred to as the 'bio-psycho-social-spiritual' dimension, the authors take the concept of 'the lived body' as their starting point, articulating that the previously mentioned aspects are 'not only interrelated but also intertwined'.…”