Praying for a Miracle: Negative or Positive Impacts on Health Care?

Abstract

The belief in miracle, as a modality of spiritual/religious coping (SRC) strategy in the face of stress and psychic suffering, has been discussed in psychological literature with regard to its positive or negative role on the health and well-being of patients and family members. In contemporary times, where pseudo-conflicts between religion and science should have been long overcome, there is still some tendency of interpreting belief in miracle – as the possibility of a cure granted by divine intervention, modifying the normal course of events in a bleak medical diagnosis – as having unhealthy impacts in the care and treatment of health. This position seeks to find a base in the three characteristics of hoping in a miracle, frequently pointed out by psychological literature: (a) it would imply a negation of reality instead of its confrontation; (b) it would be a coping strategy focused on emotion instead of the problem; (c) it would imply seeking to modify the supposed desire of God by extra-natural facts. In this study, we shall critically discuss this position and the dangers of its crystallization by the use of SRC scales in which the act of praying for a miracle is previously classified as a negative strategy. We revisit some tendencies in psychological literature about the subject, taking into consideration the various facets of miracle, sociocultural facts, elements of idiographic nature, and their profound outcomes in the lives of people especially in health contexts. We illustrate the dangers of a hasty generalization of the results of nomothetic studies about the role of belief in miracle with two examples of research in the Brazilian context: one carried out with pregnant women with fetal malformation and the other with family members caring for children and adolescents with cancer under chemotherapeutic treatment. In both studies, the results do not confirm the predominance of the negative aspects associated with the act of praying for a miracle, which we discuss and analyze in light of the phenomenological perspective. In this perspective, “pray for a miracle”, as experienced by patients and caregivers, can be recognized as an act of openness to life (instead of isolation in a bleak perspective), bolstering hope, and the resignification of reality in the psyche.

Praying for a Miracle Part II: Idiosyncrasies of Spirituality and Its Relations With Religious Expressions in Health

“…As demonstrated in another paper of this same research topic -Praying for a Miracle, Part I (Leal et al, 2022), the simplistic perspective of the notion of a miracle may pave the way to understanding it as an extraordinary event not applicable to the laws of nature, and, consequently, to the interpretation that the hope (by patients and caregivers) of its occurrence would necessarily imply the refusal of recognizing and assuming the gravity of the organic conditions resulting from illnesses, traumas, accidents or whatever concrete limitations scientifically diagnosed by medicine. Nevertheless, such a reductionist conception, much common among medical team members; sometimes reinforced by psychological theories that created the stereotype that religiosity and religion are coping strategies focused only on emotion (Pargament et al, 2005), on phantasmagoric illusion (Ghsymala-Moszcynska and Beit-Halahmi, 1996), or alienation from reality (Chagas, 2017), maybe a disguise that absconds graver problems.…”

“…In light of the above, there arises the necessity of a deeper discussion of this question in scientific settings and in an interdisciplinary perspective, where the psychology of religion, in dialogue with other fields like theology, medicine, and philosophy, can contribute to a better understanding of the psychological aspects involved in the belief in miracles and its impacts on physical and mental health, either for patients, caregivers or for health professionals themselves. This paper, therefore, in conjunction with the aforementioned study by Leal et al (2022), aims at contributing to this end. The first study focused on the problematization of the dichotomy around the positive or negative role of the belief or hope in miracles, and presented a critique grounded on a phenomenological perspective, pointing out the risks of a conception that hastily judges them as harmful to patients' (or caregivers') physical or mental health -and as such, tags them as negative spiritual/religious coping (NSRC) strategy.…”

“…One of the models already proposed for understanding belief in miracles in health contexts is directly derived from the conception of spiritual/religious coping (SRC) elaborated by Pargament and his collaborators (Pargament and Hahn, 1986;Pargament, 1990;Pargament et al, 1990). As pointed out in the previous paper by Leal et al (2022), such a model, contributes to a pragmatic approach to the subject, promoting studies of nomothetic nature in the field of psychology of religion and investigating SRC on large scales, led to a dichotomous classification of miracle into positive and negative. This is well illustrated, for example, in the elaboration of the North American SRC scale (called RCOPE), created by Pargament et al (2000), and later, translated and adapted to Brazil by Panzini and Bandeira (2005).…”

“…Considering the modulation referred to above and its concrete reflections in health settings, we can understand the implications of belief in miracles from the standpoint of a second model, as proposed by Shinall et al (2018), and elaborated from the concrete results observed, for example, in palliative care settings. As was seen earlier, in Praying for a Miracle -Part I (Leal et al, 2022), the above-mentioned authors classify the various modalities of belief in miracles into at least four patterns: (1) "Innocuous", which occurs when motivated by a belief in miracles, the patient or caregiver expects a plausible positive result, but improbable for a cure, without, however, sparking off conflicts with the health professionals monitoring the case;…”

“…This second study, Praying for a Miracle – Part II , in its turn, aims at deepening the subject from an approach that is simultaneously practical and conceptual. Therefore, three models based on evidence already presented in the previous paper (Leal et al, 2022 ) will be explored here from a phenomenological perspective and, posteriorly, placed in dialogue with the concepts of spirituality, religiosity, and religion. It is assumed that such a perspective provides an axiological and epistemic grounding capable of offering a theoretic-conceptual underpinning that would permit health professionals, including the psychologist, to situate the experience of believing in a miracle in a complex network of meanings, symbolisms, and existential meanings, and understand its relations with the human dimensions of spirituality, religiosity and religion, and the respective connections between them.…”