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The voice of God
Abstract
Prayer and verbally answered prayer would seem to offer powerful evidence in relation to the question of human agency. Forty members of an English Pentecostal group completed a questionnaire on prayer: 25 reported an answering voice from God, 15 of them hearing Him aloud. The latter groups were interviewed and characteristics of phenomenology and context elicited. The voice of God cannot be held to be ipso facto pathological and many reported its utility in situations of doubt or difficulty.
Forgiveness has a connection to religion and spirituality. Yet, little is known about how religious and spiritual people actually forgive. The present study investigated how religion and spirituality are used to make sense of forgiveness. The narratives of seven interviewees were chosen for close analysis of their experiences of forgiveness. McAdams’s life story interview method and narrative analysis were applied. Five themes were formulated: (1) forgiveness as Christian duty, (2) forgiveness as God’s miracle, (3) forgiveness through praying, (4) forgiveness through God’s sacrifice, and (5) forgiveness as God’s mercy. The findings indicate that God was important to the interviewees and supported their forgiveness process. Subthemes of revenge and justice suggest that sometimes forgiveness and revenge motives may be intertwined. Forgiveness was a divine process for the participants, and some felt that they would not have been able to forgive without God. Attributing forgiveness to God may serve the forgiveness process.
Spirituality and Psychiatry addresses the crucial but often overlooked relevance of spirituality to mental well-being and psychiatric care. This updated and expanded second edition explores the nature of spirituality, its relationship to religion, and the reasons for its importance in clinical practice. Contributors discuss the prevention and management of illness, and the maintenance of recovery. Different chapters focus on the subspecialties of psychiatry, including psychotherapy, child and adolescent psychiatry, intellectual disability, forensic psychiatry, substance misuse, and old age psychiatry. The book provides a critical review of the literature and a response to the questions posed by researchers, service users and clinicians, concerning the importance of spirituality in mental healthcare. With contributions from psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, nurses, mental healthcare chaplains and neuroscientists, and a patient perspective, this book is an invaluable clinical handbook for anyone interested in the place of spirituality in psychiatric practice.
The aim of this study is to explore experiences and perceived effects of the Rosary on issues around health and well-being, as well as on spirituality and religiosity. A qualitative study was conducted interviewing ten Roman Catholic German adults who regularly practiced the Rosary prayer. As a result of using a tangible prayer cord and from the rhythmic repetition of prayers, the participants described experiencing stability, peace and a contemplative connection with the Divine, with Mary as a guide and mediator before God. Praying the Rosary was described as helpful in coping with critical life events and in fostering an attitude of acceptance, humbleness and devotion.
Religious and spiritual (r/s) struggles pertain to matters of ultimate significance, such as moral dilemmas, religious doubts, and perceived conflict with God. Because people cannot offer absolute or objective solutions to such struggles, some turn to God for guidance and support. In a mixed-methods study of undergraduates from three U.S. universities (N = 976), we examined open-ended descriptions of imagined conversations with God during r/s struggles, and we tested whether conversation patterns differed for people focusing on divine struggles (n = 290) versus nondivine struggles (n = 680). Qualitative coding suggested that a variety of positive themes were common in expressions to God (e.g., gratitude) and imagined responses from God (e.g., unconditional love), whereas negative themes (e.g., questions about suffering; imagined abandonment) were uncommon. Examples of themes and conversation patterns are provided and interpreted. Scores derived from qualitative codes achieved evidence of reliability, and quantitative correlational analyses showed that more positive expressions generally associated with more positive imagined responses; however, people focused on divine struggles had more negative conversation patterns than those focused on nondivine struggles. In all, conversation themes and patterns were consistent with the view that people perceive God in relational terms and that one’s perceived relationship with God may be disrupted when focusing on divine struggles. Based on these findings, we suggest that providers working with clients reporting r/s struggles may explore imagined conversations with the divine to obtain potentially useful information about clients’ perceived relationships with God and facilitate greater understanding and resolution of these struggles.
Does God listen and respond to prayers? This project provided initial validation for a brief measure of perceived divine engagement and disengagement in response to prayer. As part of a larger project on religious/spiritual struggles among U.S. undergraduates, we used Sample 1 (n = 400) for exploratory factor analysis and Sample 2 (n = 413) for confirmatory factor analysis and initial validity testing. A two-factor model with four items per factor provided acceptable fit. On average, participants reported more divine engagement than disengagement. They endorsed items about God listening more than those about God responding. Divine engagement showed strong positive associations with religiousness and positive-valence variables involving God. Divine disengagement showed strong positive associations with variables suggesting divine struggle or distance. Importantly, both subscales also showed evidence of incremental validity: Divine engagement predicted positive-valence God variables (e.g., secure attachment, collaborative religious coping, gratitude to God, and awareness of God) even when controlling for religiousness and positive God concepts and attitudes. Divine disengagement predicted more spiritual struggles and more negative-valence and distance-related God variables (divine struggle, anxious and distant attachment, and self-directing religious coping) even when controlling for doubt about God’s existence, negative God images, anger/disappointment toward God, and concern about God’s disapproval. In short, this brief new measure shows promise as a tool to assess beliefs about God’s responsiveness to prayer.
For mental health researchers and others committed to a bio-cultural understanding of religious experience, there is a need for empirical studies capable of shedding light on the interplay between beliefs, personalities, and the occurrence of anomalous sensory experiences. Absorption, a trait linked to one’s tendency to become immersed in experience or thought, may be key for understanding that relationship. Spiritualist mediums (N = 65) completed an online questionnaire assessing the timing, nature, and frequency of their auditory (clairaudient) spiritual communications – including scales measuring paranormal beliefs, absorption, hallucination-proneness, and aspects of identity. These measures were compared to a general population group (N = 143), with results showing higher levels of auditory hallucination-proneness and absorption among the Spiritualists as well as correlations between spiritual beliefs and absorption, but not spiritual beliefs and hallucination-proneness, for the general population. Findings are discussed in relation to attribution models of religious experience and the complexity of “absorption” as a construct.
en Some hostages of the FARC held in the Colombian Amazon spoke of how they believed a certain radio voice could result in an action. For over 20 years, every Saturday night a radio programme broadcast messages from the hostages’ families and loved ones. A small number of these captives recycled the prophetic radio voice in a dialogic interaction with prayer in their inner speech, and this resulted in what they believed to be the voice of God. By assigning them new identities, the hostages were through a process of performative listening ‘doing things’ with voices in the Austinian sense. This article takes Austin’s work in a new direction by exploring the primary performative function of voice. By analysing localised ideologies of voice through the complex discourse of prisoners’ reflexive self‐analyses, it adds the dimension of vocality to speech act theory. Research with Colombian hostages shows that inner voice can be used to invoke linguistic representations of God in the absence of any tuition.
Faire des choses avec la voix: la ‘radio kidnappée’ colombienne et le son de Dieu
fr Certains otages détenus par les FARC en Amazonie colombienne ont raconté leur croyance qu’une voix radiophonique pouvait déboucher sur une action. Pendant plus de vingt ans, chaque samedi soir, une émission de radio diffusait des messages des proches des otages. Dans leur discours intérieur, quelques‐uns de ces prisonniers réutilisaient les voix prophétiques de la radio pour créer une interaction dialogique mêlée à de la prière, donnant naissance ainsi à ce qu’ils pensaient être la voix de Dieu. En attribuant à ces voix de nouvelles identités, les otages ont suivi un processus d'écoute performatif et, au sens austinien, « ont fait des choses avec des voix ». Cet article examine la fonction performative primaire de la voix, et élargit ainsi les travaux d'Austin. Par l’analyse des idéologies localisées de la voix, à travers le discours complexe des auto‐analyses réflexives des prisonniers, il ajoute la dimension de la vocalité à la théorie des actes de langage. Les recherches menées auprès d'otages colombiens montrent que la voix intérieure peut conjurer des représentations linguistiques de Dieu en l’absence de tout enseignement.
Whereas previous research in the medical humanities has tended to neglect theology and religious studies, these disciplines sometimes have a very important contribution to make. The hearing of spiritually significant voices provides a case in point. The context, content and identity of these voices, all of which have typically not been seen as important in the assessment of auditory–verbal hallucinations (AVHs) within psychiatry, are key to understanding their spiritual significance. A taxonomy of spiritually significant voices is proposed, which takes into account frequency, context, affect and identity of the voice. In a predominantly Christian sample of 58 people who reported having heard spiritually significant voices, most began in adult life and were infrequent experiences. Almost 90% reported that the voice was divine in identity and approximately one-third were heard in the context of prayer. The phenomenological characteristics of these voices were different from those in previous studies of voice hearing (AVHs). Most comprised a single voice; half were auditory; and a quarter were more thought-like (the rest being a mixture). Only half were characterful, and one-third included commands or prompts. The voices were experienced positively and as meaningful. The survey has implications for both clinical and pastoral work. The phenomenology of spiritually significant voices may be confused with that of psychopathology, thus potentially leading to misdiagnosis of normal religious experiences. The finding of meaning in content and context may be important in voice hearing more widely, and especially in coping with negative or distressing voices.
Of all the forms of adversity experienced during childhood, childhood abuse is known to have the largest impacts on mental health. Yet, we have a limited understanding of factors that may cushion the blow of these early insults, and it remains unclear whether stability or increases/decreases in religiosity facilitate or hinder the ability of religion/spirituality to act as a buffer. Using two waves of MIDUS data, results suggest that increases in positive religious coping (seeking comfort through religion/spirituality) during adulthood buffer the association between childhood physical and emotional abuse on psychological distress, while decreases in religious comfort exacerbate it. Religious attendance had no discernible buffering effect. Taken together, results show that the stress-moderating effects of religion depend on changes in religious coping processes over the life course.
Poor health often motivates people to engage in religious and spiritual approaches to healing. However, there is limited research on such experiences from a northern European perspective. This article investigates healing experiences related to Christian faith and practices in Norway by thematic analysis of 25 semi-structured interviews with individuals who have experienced healing of different ailments. In so doing, healing events across diverse contexts are characterised, and the results show that such experiences not only feature practices in which other people are present in prayer, preaching, and the laying on of hands, but also spontaneous extraordinary encounters with a divine being through visions and voices. The healing events are further described as experiences of transformational, powerful touch. In light of the lived body theory, these transformational experiences can be understood as re-inscriptions of health that are manifested in the intertwined bio–psycho–social–spiritual aspects of the body.
The first new religion in the Caribbean since Rastafari, the Earth People draw on West African sources, assert a renascent African identity, and celebrate female creativity. They argue that Black people are the guardians of a natural environment, which is constantly under threat from European science. In this 1993 book, Dr Littlewood, who is both a psychiatrist and a social anthropologist, criticizes received ideas about pathology and creativity. The founder's ideas emerged in her experience of cerebral disease, and Dr Littlewood shows how the Earth People reinterpret radical personal experiences to build a community. While naturalistic and personalistic interpretations of human life are both valid and necessary, neither can be reduced to the other.
60 18–44 yr old undergraduates listened to a 60-sec sample of glossolalia (defined to them as pseudolanguage) and then attempted to produce glossolalia on a 30-sec baseline trial. Afterward, half of the Ss received 2 training sessions that included audio- and videotaped samples of glossolalia interspersed with opportunities to practice glossolalia. Also, live modeling of glossolalia, direct instruction, and encouragement were provided by an experimenter. Both the trained Ss and untreated controls attempted to produce glossolalia on a 30-sec posttest trial. About 20% of Ss exhibited fluent glossolalia on the baseline trial, and training significantly enhanced fluency. 70% of trained Ss spoke fluent glossolalia on the posttest. Findings are more consistent with social learning than with altered state conceptions of glossolalia. (13 ref)
