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The middle class prepares itself for work by getting an education, working, recovering from work, and trying to raise children who can successfully enter the work world. Clearly, work is at the center of adult living. --Matthew Fox On Spirituality and Work Rev. Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley More and more people are asking what it means to be a spiritual person who lives out one's faith. To be a spiritual person, I believe, means to live in relationship with other people and the great universe to bring about more goodness, more caring, more compassion, more justice. But in the language of Meister Eckhart, many people are "worked" instead of working--earning a paycheck, but not finding expression of the soul's innermost desires. Indeed, some of the most valuable work in our culture is not rewarded monetarily--serving on a church board or committee, being a caretaker for a child, a disabled or elderly person. While some hold up the sanctity of private beliefs, others yearn to express their spiritual values in workplace settings, where many spend the majority of their waking hours. The dignity we assign to work is intrinsically related to our values and understanding of the meaning of life. We experience a multitude of feelings--honesty and dishonesty, belonging and alienation, joy and suffering, oppression and justice--as core issues in our individual and community life as well as in the workplace. As such, workers need support and preparation to respond ethically, morally, responsibly, and effectively to the emotional and spiritual issues that undergird us in finding a sense of meaning in workplace settings. Members of the Universalist Church of Minneapolis have been thinking about these things in a small group setting. In the article that follows, they provide a step-by-step guide for people in many workplace settings who wish to engage in structured reflection of their spiritual life in relation to work. Reflections from Therapists at First Universalist Church in Minneapolis Group members and authors: William Doherty, Joyce Abel, Tim Balke, Barbara Benner, Paul Coyne, Tom Greenspon, Susan Kirkpatrick, Anne McBean, Mary Tomes, and Peggy Trezona. We came together to deepen our understanding of how Unitarian Universalism informs our identities as psychotherapists, inspires us to find religious depth in our everyday work, and calls us to name and overcome the obstacles to justice and community in our profession and in society. In a series of deepening conversations, we explored our beliefs and our struggles with a kindred group of people who share our faith tradition and our work in the world. We wrote this document to pull together what we learned and to share it with other UU therapists, our fellow members of First Universalist Church of Minneapolis, the larger community of UUs in North America, and therapist colleagues from other religious traditions. We had another goal as well: to develop a workable model for other groups to explore the religious dimensions of their own work. Unitarian Universalism has resources to illuminate the spiritual depths of every domain of work, including the professions and business, the arts and the human services, and the crafts of building and repairing. The core idea that led to our getting together was that the work of social justice and building community should not be relegated to a volunteer, weekend activity to be squeezed out of over-busy schedules. We spend most of our waking hours in our paid work and with our families; if we do not see these as venues for promoting justice and democratic community, we miss the most accessible opportunities to deepen our religious spirits and make a difference in the world. We met weekly for five weeks and then a sixth time later to review our written report. We developed a group process for ourselves and other groups who might want to follow our lead. (The group structure and process are described in detail in the appendix.) Using the seven Unitarian Universalist Principles to orient our reflection, we explored a number of themes in the public and private worlds of psychotherapy. The report is organized around these themes. The seven guiding UU Principles are listed here:
For each theme that follows, we describe first the beliefs and conclusions we affirm and then the challenges and unanswered questions we continue to grapple with. Theme 1: Therapy is spiritual work. What we affirm. Psychotherapy is more than a treatment procedure for people with psychological problems. Therapy is inherently spiritual work, a healing art fueled by compassion and by an unshakeable faith in the capacity of people to find health and meaning in their lives. We bring our deepest selves to our work and help others to see that their deepest selves are imbued with inherent worth and dignity. Psychological and interpersonal healing are forms of spiritual healing, and psychotherapy at its heart is a spiritual practice. How we are challenged. In this world of bigger, faster, and cheaper, we are continually challenged to be spiritually centered in order to be fully present to our clients. The tendencies in the health care system to characterize people by their diagnoses and to see their treatment in terms of cost units challenge our ability to focus on persons and capacities rather than on symptoms and deficits. We see the need to nurture our personal spiritual practices and to live out our religious beliefs more consciously in our work settings and, where appropriate, to expand the discussion of mind, body, and social health to include the domain of the spirit. Theme 2: The UU Principles Have Powerful Resonance for Our Profession What we affirm. If taken seriously and not just as pious ideals, the UU Principles can deepen how our profession deals with ethics. Most ethics codes in psychotherapy confine themselves to avoiding actions that harm clients, and they are almost exclusively focused on the individual and not on the community. The UU Principles offer a vision of human dignity and human community that transcends this narrow focus and are framed in a universal, non-doctrinal language that could resonate with therapists of different religious traditions. The Principles deserve wide circulation in our field. How we are challenged. We noticed tensions among the UU Principles as they might play out in our profession. In particular, Unitarian Universalism's devotion to individual self-worth and self-determination can be difficult to integrate with social obligations stemming from the families and democratic communities that form the matrix of our lives. Most "pop" psychology and some forms of psychotherapy practice are excessively individualistic in value orientation, as are some aspects of our religious tradition. Along with other contemporary UUs, we struggle to find a way to blend individual self-determination and communal ties and obligations. We wonder if the seventh Principle—respect for the interdependent web of all existence--should be stated as the first Principle. Theme 3: Larger Systems are Venues for Enacting the UU Principles What we affirm. The UU Principles of justice and equity offer values that go beyond the technical and programmatic fixes currently being debated by health care leaders and public officials. These Principles can form the basis for evaluating the U.S. healthcare system and the work systems that we are part of. We see the private healthcare sector as awash in corporate takeovers and narrow, bottom-line thinking that lacks ethical and clinical vision. We see the public sector lacking even the basics of good mental health care to those who are poor or coping with chronic mental illness. The requirements of justice and equity mean equal access to high quality, humane healthcare for all who live in our land, irrespective of employer health insurance, citizenship status, health condition, and income level. How we are challenged. The problems seem far greater than our individual capacities to make a difference, and yet we feel called by our religious beliefs to name these problems and do something about them. Our need to respond is not just altruistic because our work systems sometimes adversely affect our own psychological and spiritual health. We need the prudence to decide which battles to fight and the courage to fight them in our local work systems, our professional associations, and in the larger health care system. We note in particular the impoverished response of our profession to the needs of immigrants in our community whose cultures remain inaccessible to us 25 years after their immigration began. Theme 4: Democratic Principles Are a Cornerstone of Good Therapy What we affirm. Our religious faith celebrates democracy as a central way to value the voices and energies of all people equally. We affirm this democratic process as core to our work as therapists. We try to minimize the power differential inherent in our professional role and to engage our clients' capacities for being agents of their own lives in community. We see the therapy room as a microcosm of democratic action within the larger world and our work with individuals and families as contributing to the broader common good. How we are challenged. We struggle with how to respond to power imbalances in society that diminish human agency and undermine the democratic process, while our everyday clinical work focuses on one individual or family at a time. We feel challenged to help create venues for citizens to build community, solve health and social problems, and revive democracy. Creating a dialogue with our fellow UU therapists about these issues is a start. Theme 5: UU Therapists Have Something Unique to Offer Our Profession What we affirm. We recognize that therapists in other faith traditions share much of what we have affirmed about the spiritual dimension of our work. But every religious tradition offers something unique as well. We see four qualities that might especially define a UU therapist: a) embracing the full range of human diversities, b) openness to new perspectives that challenge traditional thinking, c) encouragement of critical reflection, and d) a reverence for the democratic work of free citizens. These values can make special contributions to the profession and practice of psychotherapy in our time. How we are challenged. Seeing ourselves as enlightened religious liberals opens us to the temptation to react arrogantly and without understanding to people from other religious traditions, especially those that seem to us to lack sufficient freedom of conscience and belief. As UU therapists, we can fall prey to the intolerance we abhor in other groups. We can overlook important religious values, such as concern for history, tradition, and community solidarity, that have not been as strongly emphasized in Unitarian Universalism. Ours can be an important religious voice in the field of psychotherapy if we do not hold ourselves aloof but rather engage in respectful dialogue with other religious voices that also search the depths of the human spirit and ask ultimate questions about human destiny. Where do we go from here? Our group project ends with the distribution of this report, but we hope that we have started something that will continue in different forms and in different groups. We invite reflections on this report and on the process we have developed. We hope to benefit from the reports of other groups of Unitarian Universalists within our congregation and beyond, from a wide range of occupations. We want to know how others respond to the principles of our faith in their vocation. If enough seeds germinate, who knows what will grow? Appendix - Recommended Structure and Group Process for UU's at Work Groups |
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