HOW TO TREAT SUFFERING?

Suffering, short of ending survival, has compelled a confluence of framings in the contemporary religious scene.  One is the idea of “healing” which then defines sin as sickness or damage.  (Christian Science results from this merging.)  In the days when hospitals were run by nuns and every hospital had a chaplain concerned with spiritual “health”, the connection was more plain, but now religiously-affiliated people are considered not necessary in hospitals, even an interference in a “scientific” setting.  With a population of people with different heritages, how can any one religion be appropriate?  

  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_CWBjyIERY   Discussion of framing in case you didn't know about it.            

And yet, because of reciprocity, religion is “medicalized” in several ways.  The framing, largely unconscious, goes both ways, so if religion is excluded from hospitals, then religions claim the ability to heal for themselves, so the church becomes a hospital.  The hospital, meantime, has become psychological, using a clinic model for therapy groups and recovery plans to address contemporary sin/diseases like alcoholism or overeating.  One root of this goes back to early Methodism as a way of coping with the ills of society through mutual support and the method of abstinence.

Even surgery qualifies as a therapeutic measure: plastic surgery for presenting a better social face, sex changes, bariatric stomach clamping.  A better body stands in for improving the soul.  Organ transplants are salvation requiring a regime as strict as monastic life.  (Hospital as monastery.)

Replacing religious safeguards against sin, spiritual malaise and estrangement, therapy is a second-tier compassion-driven sort of help, both physical therapy (manipulation and exercises) and psychotherapy, which in this “New Age” has sometimes introduced or reverted to the idea of “medicine” in the sense of indigenous or shamanist approaches.  This links to institutional church in vague ways, but is less likely to draw on the logical religious theologies of a male-oriented priest “class” identified with science than the more innovative groups served by women, esp. Wicca or the more liberal denominations with female clergy.  Nurses rather than doctors.  An analysis of sermon topics might reveal this correlation of therapy with church: how to be happy, getting to yes, finding joy.

Another point of framing overlap between religion and medicine is ingesting substances, from ayahuasca taken in a South American ceremony, to the effect of placebos on those who believe they are powerful medicines, to the magic of what Trump calls “that little cracker” at Communion.  So many people take street drugs without the frame of either medicine or religion, that it has lost those frames and become a good-time party framing, a belonging frame.  This is a frame that many congregations underestimate and therefore neglect.  Others make religious exaltation act as a drug, Pentecostal.  The authority class will use the state to demonize, regulate, and bureaucratically manage access to both medicines and street drugs, but they cannot control emotion.

A strong component of the great institutional religions around the world is compassion.  What could go wrong with compassion?

First of all, it is vulnerable to the tension between the individual and the whole — that is, does one have compassion for one’s own or must one include the others?  Or all living things, or . . .?  The least Christian thing that today’s right wing does is to exclude everyone but themselves from compassion — even babies, the impoverished, the aged, the ill.  Instead ways are found to stigmatize them and find them perpetrators of their own shortfalls.  (Being captured is a sin.)  If afflictions are “their own fault” there is no obligation to waste resources on them.

The next problem is using compassion as a disguise for entraining people into a program meant to make them obedient, useful, and — alas, lesser.  Thus it is "kind" to make convicts work and require street people to attend religious services.

Another is that compassion can degenerate into pity without doing anything about it, so that sentimentality replaces real care.  This was Hitchens’ complaint against Mother Theresa, that though she had a LOT of money which could have been spent on hospitals and schools, she chose to stay at the level of hospice, preparation for inevitable death which is a religious function, not medical.  Many are in love with their own image holding big-eyed needy babies.

This next point is liable to be controversial:  those who groom the vulnerable for sexual enslavement use “compassion” in the form of sentimental gifts, romantic assurances of protection, in exchange for being owned and ordered to do what is not natural.

“You are mine,” has a range of meanings.  One is that “owned” is beloved, another is that being owned is being controlled (see domestic abuse), and another is that one person is subsumed into the identity of another (two become one).  They are easily confused and converted.  This is the subject of many a novel or film, these shifting frames of meaning that confuse understanding and prevent action to address damage.

In the context of vengeful Puritanism, “clients” are enchained by the necessity of access to health care, meds, food, and so on — BUT only if they are obedient.  The defense of the righteous overseers is that requirements are “for their own good.”  Good being narrowly defined by Puritans.  Consent is excluded.

As well as forcing acceptance of other people’s standards, compassion can demand access to persons in intimate and possibly inappropriate ways, ranging from demanding breath, blood samples, and cavity searches as a condition of work or legal status, to expecting access to authors or artists as the price of valuing their work.  (Part of this commodification of the humanities leaves out the educating of people to understand and interpret the work itself — therefore, they turn to examining the creators, whom they can at least interpret in social terms.)  This is very parallel with people who want to “do good” to ethnic categories, but not on their ethnic terms.  There is also an echo of Confession in order to obtain forgiveness.

Framing is a crucial basis of embodiment theory that connects the way the brain works — through composing a Gestalt or hallucination of the world to be the working premise of life — through the living individual person to the society as a whole, which has its own “frame” of what is accepted or rejected.  In the individual the frame is actually physical, created in the connectome of neurons.  In the group the frame is an idea that impacts the physical life.  Sickness can be a true result of bad framing, not recognizing suffering or the causes of death, or it can motivate resistance to social oppression.

To make it personal, when I was a child who did bad things out of being cranky and stupid, my mother would assume I was catching the flu.  Later, after reading a lot of advice about raising children, she would say, “It’s just a stage you’re going through.”  I resented the trivialization, the denial of my identity and autonomy, but in a blind childish way.

Her sister was a nurse who medicalized her daughter to the point of brain surgery.  Neither woman was very good at understanding something so subtle as “framing.” Their father was a domestic tyrant requiring obedience as the definition of love.  They did love him, but they had no intention of surrendering themselves.  Today resistance like that is medicalized by calling it "oppositional defiance syndrome."

How did I escape this pattern?  By enrolling in seminary, preparing for ministry.  Not much compassion there, but a vast realm of understanding, which is a strong precursor, the creation of a host of neural connections to support new framing.

The title of this song is "Medicine."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hbu2vkN98k