Casualities of bad religion
A man is scrunched up in his hospital bed, face turned toward the wall, and there is absolute stillness as you come through the door.
You know there has been a history with this fellow of sad events happening without explanation: His dog died, his car broke down, his kitchen caught fire, one of his children died unexpectedly, and his wife is in a senior care facility. There is enough grief in this one hospital room to keep several people sad forever.
Your job is not to wipe away the grief but to promote healing and help this guy get his life back on track. The problem is, you're just an ordinary person with no medical skills and no special training in psychology or behavior. You just want to bring a new perspective into this person's life.
The most important thing for you to know -- whether you are clergy or a layperson -- is that graceful religion helps in the physical process of healing. I was reminded of that truth the other day by a newspaper article about the capacity of negative religion to slow down healing or to destroy the regenerative power of the human body. Several studies have shown that a hope-filled religious message can work wonders with seriously ill patients. That's one reason that most hospitals have highly trained chaplains who visit the sick daily.
But it is also known that judgmental messages will retard the healing process. For instance, in regard to the older man in the opening paragraph, he may be at a vital crossroads of his life. If a visitor comes to him with a message of condemnation, his life could begin to ebb away.
What if a visitor, for instance, indicates that our man's illness is due to a lack of faithfulness? "I've been telling you for years, Ezra, that God condemns an unfaithful heart," the visitor says. "You have to get back to church. How long has it been since you said a prayer or thanked Jesus for your bounty? Years, it has to be years, and Satan has taken over your life."
It's hard to imagine any visitor bringing that kind of dangerous message, but it happens, and very often the immediate reaction of the patient is to hit the skids.
But what if the opposite kind of message is heard? Then healing might begin in earnest. But the patient has to be reminded many times that hope is an option.
The old studies, dating back to the 1960s, said many people in the hospital were sick because they had suffered some kind of major loss. The stress of grief and uncertainty, especially when the losses are not answered by reasonable solutions, make people ill.
Our man Ezra lost a dog, a car, a kitchen, a child and his loving wife, all in a few months. Of course, those losses are not equal in value, but they're all important, and they signal big changes in his life. He may have concluded that he could not handle the huge shift. For a moment, he gave up.
And the answers brought by bad religion are not reasonable -- they are mouth-rubble that gets uttered when people don't know what to say. What bad religion does is put a lid on life. It shoves us down into a little tube with no escape but the narrow way. In that kind of thinking, there is no future, no horizon, no hope of a better life.
Our man Ezra was my patient. I visited him twice a week for more than a year. He wavered between hope and calamity, week after week slipping slowly toward death. My competition was a neighboring pastor who came weekly to deliver a message of condemnation.
"He tells me," Ezra said, "that I'm not going to make it -- that I ought to join his church and then I would be OK."
I would speak a message of hope, and Ezra would rally for a day or two. The end finally came, and he was buried from the other pastor's church, by order of his daughter. I walked into his room the day of his death and found his bed empty. No more Ezra, the latest casualty of bad religion.
Clark D. Morphew
8-25-01
