“You don't have to talk too long to patients and their families, as well as doctors and nurses, before they express a common feeling that contemporary medicine, for all its technological virtuosity, lacks something,” he said. “Patients and families will talk about how the medical establishment is just so huge and they feel like a piece of machinery. When I tell them about how images and architecture can transform a healing environment—about how the way a hospital room looks and feels can be a part of healing—they are a little surprised, but they know what I am saying. So I seem to be giving people a language for talking about things they know intuitively."
http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/45/23/14.full
I’ve never read Moore’s bestseller, “Care of the Soul.” It’s a book that appeared in the 1990s at a kind of apex of technological efficiency, a time when there seemed to be no ceiling on the stock market (remember that?), when it seemed we had mastered even the dynamics of conflict (remember the end of history?). The trend, it seemed, was relentlessly up, but Moore’s book came along just then to say that there was a great poverty of soul at the heart of this technologically triumphant age. Magic, mystery, a sense of the sacred, and the sacraments and rituals that honor these seemed to have been banished from our culture. The book struck a chord. It seems relevant to recall that some commentators, marveling at the worldwide extravaganza of excess that was Princess Diana’s funeral, saw it as a great cultural portent, a yearning on the part of millions, however vicarious, for participation in the magic and poetry that Diana’s life seemed to embody, and to mourn for its demise (so the story went) at the hands of a soulless, tabloid culture.
I’ve never read Moore’s bestseller, “Care of the Soul.” It’s a book that appeared in the 1990s at a kind of apex of technological efficiency, a time when there seemed to be no ceiling on the stock market (remember that?), when it seemed we had mastered even the dynamics of conflict (remember the end of history?). The trend, it seemed, was relentlessly up, but Moore’s book came along just then to say that there was a great poverty of soul at the heart of this technologically triumphant age. Magic, mystery, a sense of the sacred, and the sacraments and rituals that honor these seemed to have been banished from our culture. The book struck a chord. It seems relevant to recall that some commentators, marveling at the worldwide extravaganza of excess that was Princess Diana’s funeral, saw it as a great cultural portent, a yearning on the part of millions, however vicarious, for participation in the magic and poetry that Diana’s life seemed to embody, and to mourn for its demise (so the story went) at the hands of a soulless, tabloid culture.
My exposure to Thomas Moore came more recently, with his book, “Dark Nights of the Soul.” He carries the same message—that the soul, however you define it (or however you deny it) yearns to be nurtured. And our darkest nights can be, he says, when our souls are born or reborn.
I’ve become a believer. Faith is a problem to me (though I can’t seem to shake it) and I am not certain of many of the articles of the religious faith. But the soul, my soul, is something I can believe in, if only because I can feel it. I know my own soul, and can marvel at how it seems to have fed on my darkest nights. I am more of a person—more of who I am—as a result of these dark nights. And I am more aware than I have ever been of how much I need the things the soul requires—ritual sacraments (even the secular kind, like a trip to the coffee house every morning before walking my dog in the park), sacred places (the lake, the park, the sanctuary of the church I attend), and silence.
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