Bogoslovska smotra, Vol. 82 No. 2, 2012.
Izvorni znanstveni članak
Oculis Spiritualibus - Nursing in the Mirror of the Spirit. Nursing Spirituality Above the Gap between Profession and Practise
Tonči Matulić
; Katolički bogoslovni fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Sažetak
In this article the author questions the urgency of the spiritual dimension of nursing which in recent times is being presented more as a problem but also a matter requiring urgent attention. In the introduction the author explains the conditions and opportunities of expressing the unspeakable in nursing which due to modern advancement of professionalization and modernisation of nursing has consciously been suppressed or consciously denied or both. The author places and simultaneously discloses the spiritual dimension of nursing in the deepest interior and intimate nursing practise which cannot be expressed in technical language that follows the logic of behaviour efficiency and productivity. The spiritual dimension of nursing as the deepest and as such, most realistic dimension of nursing possesses a different logic compared to the technical. That fact tells us that the spiritual dimension is vitally different from all other professional dimensions of nursing even though, as a constitutive dimension, it permeates and follows them all. While ordering the dimensions of practise in the nursing by value the author gradually deepens the meaning and significance of the spiritual dimension of nursing and as a logical presumption for later concrete and contextual design of spirituality in the nursing. In that regard the author explains the Biblical meaning and significance of the heart as a metaphor with which we identify man's interior and intimacy but also expresses the meaning of the completeness of the human being. The author then explains the meaning and significance of borderline human experience such as illness, suffering, dying and death which nurses are faced with every day and in which the author recognises clear signs of the breakthrough from transcendence to immanence, from the spiritual to the bodily starting from a complete vision of the human being as a real spiritual-bodily or transcendental-immanent unity. Based on awareness of transcendence which is an unquestionable constituent of human experience, the author continues to show that it is from this awareness that the need for an answer to the question about the meaning of human existence emerges, particularly in tragic situations in human life. That need also raises the question of spirituality, also being the case with nursing which the author equally comprehends to be care for the patient. The practise of nursing therefore is care for the patient and that care, by virtue of its valuable charge, is such that it requires a spiritual environment, spiritual behaviour and spiritual approach with regard to nurses and the patient. Toward the end of the article the author shows that the meaning of spirituality in nursing is clearly expressed in the idea of nursing as a calling which then supplements the precise content of spirituality in the nursing, particularly Christian spirituality in the nursing which springs from and on the Christian experience of reality starting from Jesus Christ the sufferer. Christian experience is always shown and realised through an intimate bond between transcendence and immanence, that is, through the actions of super-natural mercy for man's natural state. In conclusion the author gives a closer analysis of the dignity of nursing as a divine service which unambiguously points to the extraordinary need for spirituality in the nursing but also discloses the true spiritual strength and speciality of the practise of nursing as caring for the patient, i.e. one's neighbour in need in whose face we recognise the face of Christ the sufferer.
Ključne riječi
nursing; nursing profession; nursing practice; spiritual dimension of nursing; transcendence; immanence; human being; patient; divine service; God
Hrčak ID:
84377
URI
Datum izdavanja:
12.7.2012.
Posjeta: 2.298 *