At the Monastery, I can watch the light enter and create magic through the panes of the old wooden windows. White is king here. It even dominates the silence, which is lost in murmurs escaping from the rooms called “authentic”. We enter here like a good idea, realizing how it is possible, sometimes, to create beauty with these things to which an entire society has turned its back, forgetting everything they had also given it.
Here, the years leave their mark on the origins: 1639, the first hospital in North America, the Hôtel-Dieu, was founded by three sisters from the Augustines community who came from Dieppe. The walls have retained something sober and soft in memory, it seems to me. Like life sometimes is when you go back inside yourself after being swallowed up in the vortex of overactivity.
We walk quietly through the corridors where objects that tell the story of the life of the Augustinians, their vocation, dedicated to the care of the sick and the most deprived. Everything in gestures leads us to slow down, sometimes beyond what we feel able to take. The quilt on the small single bed recalls childhood and this feeling of stripping ourselves of certain automated things in our adult lives.
I am here to work on my thesis and attend a training day which focuses on one of the themes in which this one is interested. Organized by the Faculty of Theology and Religious Sciences of Laval University, the day arises at the intersection of care, ethics and spiritual experience, to explore the issues that arise in a health care system where maintaining one’s quality as a subject is already a challenge for all those who work there, patients and caregivers alike. The question of meaning, although it is ontologically involved in the experience of every patient, is often discredited in the rational and technical arsenal of patient care.
The day opens with a distinction, posed by Professor Guy Jobin, holder of the Religion, Spirituality and Health chair at Laval University, between “spirituality” and “spiritual experience”. Because when we say “spirituality”, we tend to objectify it, considering it as a whole which would thus be separated from the subject, he in fact prefers to speak of the “spiritual experience”, which crosses the subject of a deeply intimate way and therefore difficult to standardize.
The spiritual question is, in fact, often also affected by our contemporary logic of extraction, which consists of considering the human as a territory divided into pieces, each of which can be studied and treated in isolation from the others, in consistency with the territorial division of the professional or scientific fields that it calls for. The instrumentalization of the spiritual thing is also beginning to emerge in certain research where we will, for example, quantify the positive or negative impacts on mental health of religious beliefs and learn how these beliefs can become levers of intervention. However, the division of the subject is an issue which, in a fractal way, dehumanizes both the sick person, but also an entire network which continues to be reflected in pieces which are autonomous from each other.
Reflecting on questions of dehumanization of health care systems in the former novitiate room of the Monastery establishes between us and a not-so-distant past a measure of what we, perhaps, let escape, when, as the saying goes Véronique Chagnon in an essay which will be published on May 9 by Atelier 10, “we pulled the cork at the bottom of the bathtub, and [que] the Catholic Church was evacuated in a great whirlwind.” On the other side of the world. On the revolutionary potential of spirituality is my bedside reading in the evening, lying in my bed in an “authentic” Augustinian bedroom.
Reading it has the same effect on me as the quilt placed at the end of the bed: an all-encompassing effect, as if, all of a sudden, I was living a life that carries a meaning that carries me. “And with the corrupt system [de l’Église] Gone is everything that was greater than us in our lives. The spiritual baby thrown out with the bathwater,” continues the woman who writes an essay of such great relevance that it will undoubtedly find its audience.
She documents in complete humility, but in a no less frontal manner, her own spiritual quest, driven by a form of existential anxiety that she says she has experienced since childhood. In doing so, she raises the complex and ambivalent nature of the relationship we collectively have with spiritual experiences. “But in wanting to heal ourselves, have we not fallen into an excess of concreteness? » she asks after having brilliantly painted the portrait of a mentally suffering society, obsessed by the rational and capitalist ideal, seeking its “vocation, a word which once meant “call of God, mission, priesthood” and which now represents , it seems, our only hope of injecting meaning into the money-making machine.”
Because yes, the question of spiritual experience, even if it makes all those who say they are freed from the yoke of institutionalized religion roll their eyes, remains at the heart of our lives. People who suffer have a tendency to look where the blinding light of rationality cannot reach. It is in the dark that certain details are revealed: a sentence that carries us for entire days, a tarot card that seems to speak to us about a possible future, a bird that visits us while we are thinking of our grandmother. or this conviction that our father forgives us for not having been there when he died, alone, in the CHSLD.
These kinds of details tell something about this dimension of our existence which concerns the relationship with mystery and the efforts of meaning that we, humans, must make to survive.
Because we are beings steeped in spirituality, in a world that cannot speak about it openly, under penalty of losing all credibility, I want to take advantage of the release of this little gem of an essay to begin an entire month on the question of spiritual experience.