SPIRITUAL HEALTH IN OLDER MEN
Professor John J Macdonald,
Director, Men’s Health Information and Resource Centre, MHIRC
Paper presented 21st February, Interactive Seminar on Older men and Community Building. Paramatta
OVERVIEW
Western society, especially the white Anglo Celtic one which has dominated our world falsely divides up the mystery of our lives into separate bits: we have a body and we have a mind and these are two separate things. People are now writing books to tell us what we knew already, that the mind and the body are not separate like we thought, but one reality, the human person. If your body is bashed about or neglected, it affects your mind. If someone is cruel to you, or you worry about having enough money, for yourself or to buy presents for your grandchildren or if people no longer look up to you the way they used to since you retired, people might say these are mental things, but they will affect your body. The mind and the body are united.
And then, there’s this thing called the spirit. What on earth is that? Maybe another bit stuck on, or hid somewhere between the body and the mind? Or a thing floating around on Sundays, if you are a Christian, or Fridays if you are a Muslim, or Saturday, if you are Jewish? Is spiritual health the same as religious health? I’ll come back to that one. For the moment, I want to argue that in Australia we have a chance to break away from the unhelpful division of mind and body that we have from our European heritage.
When I first came to Australia, I was in a pub and someone, telling me about themselves, as we do in pubs — thank God for pubs — said he wasn’t religious, but was a spiritual person. I thought, Oh yeah? And smiled. Odd. But then I met another and another and students told me that what they liked about such and such a person was that they seemed to be spiritual. And they didn’t mean holy and they didn’t mean church going. I knew the people they meant and, what is more I realised that I knew what they meant, although it has taken me some years to realise I knew it, or to admit that I know it. There IS such a thing as spiritual well being and so spiritual health and in Australia something has loosened us up so that we are able to move away from the European idea of a mind or soul imprisoned in a body. I think that, consciously or otherwise, we have been influenced by the Aboriginal culture and or by the great expanse of land, sea and sky in which we live in Australia and it has helped us get our act together about being spiritual beings in a way Europe has lost if it ever had it.
What is this spiritual reality then? And what does it mean to talk of spiritual health?
Of course, I am not going to do justice to that question here. Just hint at what I see and feel about it.
I have hinted at part of the answer: the spirit is not OUT THERE, it is the whole person, mind and body together. We can see it as the united person, body and soul. Spiritual health would mean a person who is together. A spiritually healthy person would be someone who is keeping together a sense of themselves, at whatever stage of life they are.
I want to go further by exploring the idea of health. My model is about the person as he interacts with his environment .
Salutogenesis!
Much health work is actually disease work. Doctors and nurses and the so called health system focus on what is wrong with us and try to fix us up. This is a necessary part of a total health system, but it is only part. It has too much of a focus on what is sick and broken and not enough on what is good and strong and builds health.
This is particularly true of men: the health system doesn’t really look at addressing men’s health needs and it tends to look at them only as machines to be fixed up. It also sees the negative in them: men don’t go to the doctor, don’t take care of themselves, don’t get in touch with their feelings etc. The health services also focus on the dark side of men: men as violent, men as perpetrators.
We need a health service which looks to men’s health and starts from what is positive in men. At a conference on suicide later this year we in MHIRC will present a paper which basically says that all this negativity about men in our society cannot be good for the positive sense of self we all need to face life. We are also having a conference on men’s health later this year in which we will say it’s good to be a boy and a man, no apologies necessary.
Western Society confuses religion and spirituality.
Does spiritual health mean the same as mental health?
They are, of course, related, but are not the same thing. Mental health has to do with feelings of well being, not being depressed. Spiritual health has to do with the world of values and meaning.
What values?
Most important, perhaps, in terms of values of the spirit is generosity, the capacity to give to others, one’s time, one’s support and even sometimes, one’s money, without the hope of return. In much of modern society people see value in terms of money, of their possessions: their house, their car, clothes etc and they often perceive their own value in these terms. In a world which values things that money can buy, young people can get depressed because they have less things than their peers.
A spiritual person knows that money cannot buy the most important things.
A spiritual person is one who values what cannot be seen; the beauty of nature, the generosity of others, the dignity of every other living thing.
Religion and spirituality are, of course, related, but they are not the same thing. Religious practice is often the means of nourishing people’s spiritual life. Religion helps people feel that they belong and have a purpose. It is intended to nourish people’s spiritual selves and often does this. It reminds us that the world of money and its values are not the only ones and is often a deceptive world.
There are many spiritual paths in our world and everyone has a right to follow the one which they were born in to or feel at ease with. The main problem, from my point of view, is the need for many religious people, of whatever denomination or creed, to believe that their group has the truth or more truth than others. Disputes of 6this kind and assertions that my religion has more truth than yours I see as being non-spiritual positions.
Here in Australia we have a chance to break away from the non spiritual aspects of Christianity which are more to do with Europeans’ need for emotional security than with spirituality. Aboriginal culture has a sense of the sacred: the value of life, of the earth, of communion with others, which does not depend on seeing others as less than they. All religions and spiritual traditions can, as I have said, nourish the spiritual in us. But they can also foster negative messages of men. I was upset very recently by a book subtitled, Reflections on male spirituality which seems to buy into a certain kind of feminist negative view of men. It says
One of our first tasks of male spirituality, therefore, is to come to terms with what we are and to realise that what we have become ill equips us for what we have yet to become.
R Rohr and J Martos1996, The Wild Man’s Journey: Reflections on Males Spirituality, St Anthony Messenger Press, Cincinatti, p.70).
I think this is dangerous anti-male spirituality. There is an assumption that we must bring out the feminine in us to be spiritual. This is clearly wrong. We must honour and respect what is good in the male in us and value it in ourselves and others.
A spirituality which is based on the notion that to be spiritual is first of all to "find the femine" in us cannot be whole-some (even Judaism and Christianity, when they accept that God humans are created in the image of God have to believe that being God-like is not to be equated with female-like). There must be a male spirituality, building the male spirit, looking for the completeness of the human being, male and female, yin and yang, whatever. But this cannot begin with the denial of maleness as wholesome.
The world of spirituality is the world of values, the world of meaning. The characteristics of a spiritual person, a spiritual mature man must be many. I want to concentrate on two which attract me: one is the characteristic of acceptance and the other is the characteristic of generosity.
Acceptance of self and of others. I see this as something really worth striving for: the acceptance of the togetherness of things that we spoke about already is part of this: acceptance, positive acceptance of the stage we are in life, the journey traveled and the journey still to travel. The acceptance which is an embrace of the day and not just grudging tolerance. The multiple acceptances which make up a day: I roll out of bed to put on my socks, accepting that some years ago this wasn’t quite as difficult a task as it is now, acceptance of the other person as he or she comes down to breakfast and thinking, well I suppose I look the same as that. But also acceptance of the day, the rain, the sun, the smile of the young person on the bus, in the store. Men are sometimes accused of being too stoical, too enduring of pain. This criticism can be turned on its head and seen, when not self-destructive, as a virtue: men endure, they can endure in a positive way, embracing what life sends, changing what they can, accepting what they cannot.
Men have this spiritual characteristic in abundance. Who is it rushes to put out fires, jumps in rivers to save children and dogs? Some women, of course, but mainly men. We all know what generosity is and recognise it in others.
We need to foster spiritual qualities like acceptance and generosity in ourselves; we need to foster environments which nourish these and other spiritual qualities in men.
We need a male spirituality, a way of strengthening the spiritual man in us and others which is not apologetic about being men. Of course, a spiritually healthy man is also one who harnesses what energies he has and takes control over these energies: this sometimes means containment of the selfish in each of us, but it also means compassion for not being always what we might.
As older men we need environments, hopefully like OMNI, which, perhaps simply by accepting us, assuring us of a place to be and talk and respected, help us to continue to grow and to walk quietly through the open door of each day.