Being born into a house named after a portal to the underworld, and having a near-death experience as a child, means it is probably no surprise that tending to the human spirit as one navigates the living and dying of life is the increasing focus of my work and sense of calling in the world.
In a couple of weeks I take up the position of Spiritual Care Coordinator in a hospice. I am looking forward to being of service within an organisation, within my community in this way. As I contemplate this work, I keep circling back around to the job title. The term ‘spiritual’ can be a bit loaded for some, and can often make thoughts leap to religious institutions, structures and doctrines. My personal take on spiritual and spirituality is not so easy to fence in.
There is an American doctor, Dr. Kevin Dieter, who after 30 years of palliative medicine says, “Dying is primarily a spiritual event.” When I think about ‘spirit’, I think first and foremost about the individual. Their human spirit. I seem my role as helping them, and their loved ones care for that beautiful, extraordinary, ephemeral thing in each of them.
The human spirit is extraordinary, and the things that light it up, give it meaning and connection, courage and release can take many forms (as can the things that bring it distress). Over the years I have been with people (and their families) who are facing the end of life, I start from the human spirit and what nourishes it, working my way outwards and inwards to find its places of meaning and belonging. This includes helping them find ways to feel still connected to the things they have loved in life. I hold space for them to explore the things that matter to them and things that may help them release burdens and distress, find peace. Sometimes this, if they say it’s important to them - may include religion. More often than not it doesn’t. But they lead any conversation around this - I follow where they wish to go.
These stories, traditions, and evocations of something so much bigger than us keep me curious.
There are times when we get nudges from the universe that put us on a course for the things that fill our cup. That near-death experience as a child gave me a peek beyond the veil. My mother’s death showed me that even when love is there things can still get messy, while my father’s taught me more about love than I ever thought possible. These experiences made me lose my fear around death, and be curious about the mysteries of life. They have helped me hold space for many people nearing or contemplating their death, and help families find ways to feel less helpless in caring for them and for themselves.
Being with individuals from different cultures and stages of life makes me privy to positive and negative reckonings with faith, belief, and no belief. Curiosity and a desire to increase my fluency across a range of paths, culminated in being ordained as an Interfaith Minister in 2024. People have asked me, “so what about all this interfaith stuff?” and the question is a reasonable one. I did my Interfaith training and spiritual counselling to help me understand different traditions better, in order to serve people better. For me being ordained as an Interfaith Minister was an act of signing up to the commitment to be open, respectful and curious of all traditions, but not to be signed up to any one path in particular. So, religion is not something I bring up, unless someone talks about it with me. I may not follow a particular path, but I can see beauty and meaning in many. I do, however, talk about spirit, and soul, and the sacred, because these don’t necessarily need to be attached to a faith, and also, I am happy to meet people in their faith path if they wish for that to be so. At the heart of my approach is an exploration of the things that animate an individual’s spirit and feed their soul. And when someone is dying this form of spiritual care is a key part of caring for them as a whole human being. Put simply, I try to do all I can to ‘meet them where they are’.
At the heart of my approach is an exploration of the things that animate an individual’s spirit and feed their soul.
There is a saying that spirituality is one river and that traditions are the many different wells that people drink from. My spiritual lineage is slaked from many wells. My father was an Anglican who went to church on Christmas Day and Easter mainly so he could sing hymns loudly and out of tune. My mother was an atheist and hated the very notion of religion. A godfather of mine was Muslim; and to bring in some Catholicism into the mix too, at the V&A Museum in London you can find the Langdale Rosary, a huge solid gold thing that once belonged in our family. It’s the only known rosary to survive the reformation and is believed to be the only gold one of its era in existence. Clustered around the rosary’s provenance is a constellation of family nuns, priests and a mysterious Cornish saint. And if we return to those ancient portals, swallets, (that David Abram writes of and photographs so beautifully) so often the location of neolithic sites… the ceremonial neolithic axes that have been found in sites such as these are often carved from the green rock from Scafell, and are known as Langdale Axes, due to their origin amid the Langdale Pikes in Cumbria. All of these touchpoints and traditions are woven into the spiralling helix of my spiritual DNA. And I welcome them all in.
These stories, traditions, and evocations of something so much bigger than us keep me curious. I have deeply studied my own nature-based spirituality of the British Isles, studied the mystics from different traditions, trained with shamans, and Buddhist end of life care, I have gone on retreat in Benedictine Abbeys and Buddhist temples. I love myth and legend and the points of commonality across cultures and traditions, as well as some of the beauty in the differences. I think of my own spiritual and soul-based life as being one lake fed by many springs, of which spirituality is just one. Physical experience, emotional, intellectual and sensual are all other springs feeding this deep water of the soul.
For me spiritual care is care of a human’s spirit. Nature is where much of my sense of the sacred resides. Whether yours is in a church, or a mosque, by a campfire, or neolithic stones; perhaps we glimpse each other under the orbit of planets and stars offering up our dreams and prayers to the rhythms of the cosmos and the whisperings of the ancestors and gods that offer us guidance. Or perhaps we both sense the mystery of the beckoning earth and the greening bough, or the hold of a perfect note, and the beauty of an imperfect mark on canvas. If our paths may cross, I hope we can see the spirit in each other and fill each other’s cup with compassion, curiousity and the invitation to explore the things that give our lives meaning.
