Posted on: Saturday, August 4, 2001

Expressions of Faith
Spiritual diagnosis brings relief

By Glenn Sackett

Glenn Sackett

How healthy is your spirituality? What questions would you ask if you wanted to improve your spiritual well-being? Spiritual diagnosis is a tool to evaluate one's spiritual health.

Suppose your uncle is anxious (along with the whole family) because he has been losing considerable weight without explanation. Suppose the family believes that "whenever God brings a new life into the world, he takes an old one out." Suppose, knowing one of the cousins may be pregnant, the family wondered: Has Uncle been chosen to die to make room for the new arrival? For Uncle, a medical diagnosis could be helpful; for the whole family, a spiritual diagnosis could be important.

I once met such a family in Hawai'i. Their sense of helplessness was tremendous. How do you fight God's plans?

Could this family be helped? How could we tell if their spirituality was healthy or if it was contributing to their problems?

Spiritual diagnosis was born out of the endeavor to improve the outcome for people whose lives are broken.

Diagnosis means discernment, or coming to know the condition of something by seeing it clearly. This requires both objectivity and genuine interest. This is different from religious judgment, which implies making a "good/bad" pronouncement. Spiritual diagnosis involves discerning what is working and not working in one's spiritual life.

Paul Pruyser, a psychologist at the Menninger Clinic, was an early proponent of spiritual diagnosis. His book, "The Minister as Diagnostician" (Westminster John Knox, 1976) provides a framework. The "review of systems" idea centers on seven dimensions of spirituality; each could be identified as a strength or a vulnerability in a particular situation, usually explored in a conversation between the subject(s) and someone trained in spiritual diagnostics.

It didn't take us long to discover key strengths and vulnerabilities for Uncle and his family.

In Pruyser's terms, their sense of "the Holy" was strong. They believed in God and in God's power, and that God would listen to our prayers. A weakness also became apparent: Their lack of a sense of grace or flexibility in God's system of dealing with humans was inconsistent with the Scripture and with their church's teachings. It also defied simple arithmetic: There could be no population growth in the world under such a system. All this contributed to their fear, anxiety and helplessness.

So we built on their strengths, praying for the health of both young and old generations in the family, and for a medical diagnosis of a treatable condition that would shift attention away from the belief that was causing difficulty. Prayer provided immediate relief; a subsequent medical diagnosis provided hope for a healthy life ahead for Uncle.

Glenn Sackett is director of pastoral care at Castle Medical Center in Kailua.