SPIRITUAL PERSPECTIVES: An Interfaith Discussion
This Sunday, April 27th, the North Shore Medical Center in Salem is hosting an interfaith event titled, It’s Your Choice: Life-Affirming Conversations about Death, Spiritual Perspectives on Advance Care Planning. Spiritual leaders from the Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Muslin, Buddhist, and Humanist traditions will present their views on key end of life issues followed by an interfaith discussion with audience members. This is a community event, described by its planners as “grassroots activism” about which we at Honoring Choices are very excited.
To know some of the background is to understand our excitement and our interest in this community event. To begin with, the event planning group is itself made up of doctors, hospice social workers, and spiritual leaders most of whom have been working in their respective fields for 15-25 years. They came together on their own initiative to bring their message directly to the community with the express goals to inform and to empower families, to educate and inspire spiritual and religious leaders, and to help adults to explore the manner in which their particular faith impacts their individual health care planning and decision making.
The planning group chose quite purposefully to assemble an interfaith panel because they understand that our spiritual leaders, individually and together, are powerful community forces for helping their congregants initiate and develop conversations about health care planning early on, before a medical crisis begins. As Nate Lamkin, LICSW, ACHP-SW, Director of Bereavement Services & Program Development, Care Dimensions, one of the event planners says, “as a hospice social worker, I see the results in a positive way when patients and families come to us having had thoughtful conversations about their choices for care, and I’ve counseled many people through a lot of additional heartache, struggle, and angst when these conversations didn’t happen in advance.”
Howard Abrams, MD, Director, Psychiatric Consultation Services, Salem Hospital, Spaulding North Shore Hospital, another of the planners adds, “advances in medicine proceed at a pace that seems to be beyond people’s ability to understand the implications on a practical level.” At these times people often turn to their spiritual backgrounds and their spiritual leaders, and so we have come to understand that “the better informed the public can be, the better prepared they will be to approach the medical system with the information and readiness they need, rather than suddenly having to discuss end of life issues at a time of high emotional stress with little time to consider decisions.”
The panelists are an exquisitely diverse group of spiritual and humanist leaders, each bringing their experience, point of view and teachings to a discussion that promises to be remarkably engaging, with time reserved at the end to exchange ideas.
Given Honoring Choices mission as a consumer oriented organization operating as a platform to provide comprehensive information on health care planning, our excitement in spreading the word about, and supporting our Community Partner Care Dimensions in co-sponsoring this event, is obviously well placed.
Read more about the event and the interfaith leaders panel