Fireflies

Dr. Kenneth Pargament shares the story of Alice, a woman who struggled with severe mental health issues and found solace in a sacred moment during therapy. In our conversation, he explores the concept of sacred moments, their characteristics, and their significance in therapeutic settings. Dr. Pargament emphasizes the importance of vulnerability and trust in fostering these moments, which can lead to profound healing and connection. He discusses his early work observing a colleague in the chaplaincy, the impact of sacred moments on therapeutic outcomes for clients, and the concept of wholeness.

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Transcript

Prelude

Kenneth Pargament (00:00)

And then she said “I started to have this warm feeling. It was a warm feeling in the, in the center of my chest, and then it began to spread all over me, all over my body.”

And then she said, “that feeling, that feeling, it spoke to me.”

I was stunned by what she was saying, and I asked Alice, “what did the voice say?”

And Alice said, “the voice told me ‘I'm with you. I'll always be with you.’”

I asked Alice who was speaking, and she said, “oh, that was God. God was telling me he'd be with me no matter how bad things got.”

Show Introduction

Nate Houchens (01:02)

Hi and welcome to Boundless Moments, the storytelling podcast that brings sacred moments to life through the voices of those who lived them. I'm Nathan Houchens. Support for Boundless Moments comes from the Sacred Moments Initiative. 

At Boundless Moments, we are careful to ensure that all stories comply with healthcare privacy laws. Details may have been changed to ensure patient confidentiality.

All views expressed are those of the person speaking and not their employer.

Some stories featured on Boundless Moments may contain themes or content that could be upsetting for some listeners. We encourage you to use discretion and take care of yourself while listening.

Introduction: Kenneth Pargament

Nate Houchens (01:50)

Dr. Kenneth Pargament is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Bowling Green State University and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Baylor Medical College. He has authored over 300 refereed articles on the relationship between religion and mental health. He has written The Psychology of Religion and Coping and Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy. Dr. Pargament is Editor-in-Chief of the two-volume APA Handbook of Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality. With Julie Exline, he has authored the recently released Working with Spiritual Struggles in Psychotherapy: From Research to Practice. He was Distinguished Scholar at the Institute for Spirituality and Health at the Texas Medical Center. His awards include the Oskar Pfister Award from the American Psychiatric Association in 2009, the Distinguished Service Award from the Association of Professional Chaplains in 2015, the first Outstanding Contribution to the Applied Psychology of Religion and Spirituality Award from Division 36 of APA in 2017, and an honorary doctor-of-letters from Pepperdine University in 2013. He was named One of the 50 Most Influential Living Psychologists.

Introduction: Fireflies

Nate Houchens (03:07)

In this conversation, Dr. Pargament shares the story of Alice, a woman who struggled with severe mental health issues and found solace in a sacred moment during therapy. He explores the concept of sacred moments, their characteristics, and their significance in therapeutic settings. Dr. Pargament emphasizes the importance of vulnerability and trust in fostering these moments, which can lead to profound healing and connection. He discusses his early work observing a colleague in the chaplaincy, the impact of sacred moments on therapeutic outcomes for clients, and the concept of wholeness.

The Story: Fireflies

Kenneth Pargament (04:04)

Welcome everyone. It's a pleasure for me to be with you today. I'd like to share with you a story. It's a story that happened several years ago now. A woman came to my office to see me for psychotherapy. I'll call her Alice. She was 35 years old, though she looked worn out and quite a bit older. She was plainly dressed, spoke very softly and hesitantly. I think was shy and embarrassed to be seeing me in therapy. Occasionally though, Alice would break into a smile, a warm smile, and I could see a sparkle in her eyes. Alice, as I came to know her, was a very kind woman. She rarely had a critical word to say about anyone else, though she could be quite self-disparaging. When able to, she liked to bring her therapy dogs to children and adults in hospitals and hospices. When I met Alice, I just liked her right away. 

I learned that for almost 20 years she had been dealing with bipolar illness. Her life had really been a roller coaster of moods. She was frequently immobilized by periods of depression that were so severe that she had been unable to finish high school, unable to hold on to a job, and unable to sustain long-term relationships. She lived with her mother and was on disability. Now, Alice had been seen by really a whole army of mental health professionals over the years, but she'd never been able to experience stability in her moods. 

So she came looking to me for the help that she'd been unable to find through other psychiatrists and psychologists. And I have to say that for the first few years of my work with her, I was no more successful than anyone else. In the first year of our work, for example, I had to hospitalize her three times for suicidality. Now I tried everything that I could think of to help her. I tried to energize her when she was becoming vegetative. I tried to help her identify and avoid the triggers to her periods of depression. I tried to talk about her troubled past, including an abusive father and brother. I helped her find a psychiatrist that she was comfortable with. And I tried to help her draw on her coping resources in ways that might foster hope for herself and sense of greater control or mastery of her life. But none of my efforts were successful. I just wasn't able to help. 

One day she came in upset. Once again, she was crying hysterically and she was talking about killing herself. She had a very concrete plan in mind, so I had to take this quite seriously. Once again, I knew I was going to have to get her to the hospital. And I was just feeling awful and frustrated with myself that I'd been unable to help this, this kind woman who was suffering so much. And at one point in her tears, Alice began to wail. And she wailed, “oh, when will my suffering end?” Alice had said earlier that she wasn't particularly religious, but those words had a biblical sound to them. So I decided to respond in a similar way.

And I asked her, “Alice, where do you turn to for solace in the midst of your suffering?” And I usually don't talk like that. I'm not a solace kind of guy. But she hesitated for a few seconds. And then she said, “well, I trust you, so I'm going to tell you something that I've never told any of my other therapists before.” She then went on to tell me the story of her very first hospitalization. She had been only a young teenager at the time, and in the hospital she was placed in what they called the rubber room in restraints. The rubber room was a room with cushions on the walls to prevent their patients from hurting themselves. Alice told me she was very confused at the time. She didn't know what was going on, but she felt like her life was ending.

And she couldn't stop crying.

And then she said, “I started to have this warm feeling. It was a warm feeling in the center of my chest. And then it began to spread all over me, all over my body.” And then she said, “that feeling, that feeling, it spoke to me.”

I was stunned by what she was saying and I asked Alice, “what did the voice say?” And Alice said, “the voice told me, ‘I'm with you. I'll always be with you.’”

I asked Alice who was speaking and she said, “oh that was God. God was telling me he'd be with me no matter how bad things got.”

We both stopped talking. Her story had really taken my breath away. And Alice too seemed to be deeply moved as she recalled her experience so many years ago.

And after a while I asked Alice whether she had ever had a similar spiritual experience like that since that time. And she said, “oh yeah, I've had it when I feel like I've hit the very bottom and feel totally hopeless.” I said, “do you ever feel it other times?” She said, “well actually I do. I feel it when I'm with someone who truly cares about me.” She hesitated and then she said, “like now. I feel it with you.” And then she asked me, “do you feel it too?”

Now, now in the mental health profession, we're trained not to share our own personal feelings with clients. But Alice, I thought, had taken the risk of sharing something with me that she had never mentioned to anyone else. And I felt like I had to respond to her in a personal way. And when I checked myself for what I was feeling, I realized I was experiencing something precious. This was a precious moment, a sacred moment, in which I was feeling a deep connectedness with Alice. She was seeing me, and I was seeing her not as client and therapist, but as human to human.

I was also feeling that we had shifted from our ordinary experience to an experience that was something really extraordinary. She had shared something, I think, of profound meaning, power, and truth for her. And I think we both were experiencing the emotional power of the moment, the sense of awe and uplift. And I know I felt tremendous gratitude to Alice for her willingness to be really vulnerable to me by revealing something so private, so sensitive, so important. I knew this experience would stay with me for a long long time and it has even now and we're talking about decades later, I can recall this precious moment, this sacred moment as if it happened yesterday. 

So back to that therapy session, I noticed that after Alice began to share her story with me, she had stopped crying. She no longer seemed distraught and she was just much more composed. She wasn't talking about suicidality and that was striking because in my years of working with her, I had never found a way to stop her once she started spiraling into suicidal depression.

We talked about her spiritual experience for the rest of the hour. But towards the end, I asked her whether she was feeling suicidal still, and she said, “no, I think I'm safe. I'm not going to hurt myself.” So on the way out of the office, I asked Alice, “you know, you said something that really struck me. You said that you'd never shared your spiritual experience with any of your psychologists or psychiatrists before. I'm wondering why not?”

And she said, “well, they already think I'm crazy.”

What a sad commentary, I thought, that Alice had withheld the single most important experience in her life from her mental health professionals. But this sacred moment was a turning point. And in our work together, we shifted in our focus of treatment to helping her cultivate this capacity, this capacity for sacred moments that she could access her spirituality more fully. Not just when she hit bottom, but at other times in her life. This is the most helpful thing I did with her in my years of work with Alice. 

Over the next 10 years, through our work together, she became more stable, she became more able to involve herself fully in her life, and she was only hospitalized one more time, and that was when her dear mother died. 

And with my strong encouragement, she began to cultivate another path to the sacred, which was her love for writing. Now, Alice had never finished high school. She had always loved to write, though. And for her, I learned, her writing was a conduit to a sense of connection with the sacred, with God. That, I think, was a key to her recovery. I stayed in touch with Alice for many years and she would often send me her poems. I think I'll stop by sharing one of the poems she wrote. It's called Fireflies.

Remember when you were a child? Remember when you were a child in the summertime at night? There were tiny yellow lights going off and on continuously. I always thought they were flies carrying lanterns so they could see their way in the darkness. Sometimes the fireflies blend in with the stars. Remember when you feel in the darkness, look around. There's always a flicker of light. to give you a glimmer of hope. Think back when you were a child and remember the fly carried his lantern. He found his way. You will too.

Interview

Nate Houchens (15:17)

I'm joined by Dr. Ken Pargament, one of the absolute key architects in the field of sacred moments, particularly within psychotherapy, and one of the pioneers in showing other fields ⁓ about sacred moments and educating us about how they can be applied to these different areas. Welcome, Dr. Pargament. It's such a wonderful pleasure and privilege to have you on the show.

Kenneth Pargament (15:44)

Thank you, it's great to be here, Nate.

Nate Houchens (15:47)

So Ken, you describe this ⁓ really profound moment with Alice in your practice where she describes this warmth, this light that sort of emanates out from the center of her chest ⁓ and very much is for her the voice of God and represents this spiritual connection. And you describe it as a sacred moment. I'm curious, you've done so much work around the topic of sacred moments. How do you distinguish a sacred moment from other forms of emotional resonance or therapeutic breakthrough with your clients?

Kenneth Pargament (16:24)

I think sacred moments are moments that are set apart. They're extraordinary. That's what we mean by sacred. Sacred has to do with something that's set apart from ordinary experience. And certainly Alice's experience and also my experience with her as she talked about it. These were unusual, extraordinary, I'd say even transcendent moments. 

There are other qualities of a sacred moment that I think define it. One is in a sacred moment with other people, we often feel a sense of deep connection – the kind of connection that oh, some have described it as a soul to soul connection where the other person sees you into who you truly are and I see the other person in a similar way, I can see who they truly are. And when Alice shared her story with me, particularly when she asked me whether I had that feeling too, of something special going on, and I said, Yes, that's one of the qualities of a sacred moment of deep connectedness. 

Other qualities include feeling like a sense of some ultimate meaning or truth in that moment. It's not superficial, it speaks to us deeply. And I think, for instance, with Alice, I had the thought that, you know, we were connecting at a level that was not superficial. And it just, it reminded me that we had very different backgrounds and educations and all of that. But in spite of that, when you get down to it, we're all human beings yearning to know each other. And that was to me a truth that I carried with me for a long time, trying to remember that. 

And sacred moments are also boundless. They're timeless. So I said that I remember what happened with Alice as if it were yesterday. And now it's decades ago. They're seared into our memory. In some ways, I see them as kind of a un-PTSD type of experience. PTSD experiences can be very traumatic in a very negative, disorienting way. But sacred moments also are seared into our memory, but in a positive way. These are, I think of, as experiences that we may treasure for the rest of our lives, that lend our lives meaning. And if we ask ourselves what was most worthwhile in our lives as we age, I think oftentimes we may think of a sacred moment, something that happened 30, 40 years ago.

And finally, sacred moments have the quality, I think, of generating powerful, what I'd call spiritual emotions, a sense of awe, a sense of being uplifted through the experience. And deep gratitude for having the moment because it just comes as if it were a gift. And actually, I think it is a gift. 

So those are the qualities that I think distinguish the sacred moment of the kind I had with Alice from other positive, meaningful experiences.

Nate Houchens (19:49)

I'm struck by a question that I want to pose and I don't know the words to ask it. You describe all of these qualities and I've always wanted to know how people know that they've experienced a sacred moment. How do they know? ⁓ Is it something that is tangible? Is it something that they can recite and say, yes, that's what it was? In my conversations with others in healthcare, I will say this term to people and say, have you ever heard of a sacred moment before? And by and large, they will say, I don't know what that is. And then I will describe it, and I will use those qualities, and I will ask them about instances in their lives where they may have felt that. And they say, without hesitation, yes, I have absolutely experienced that, sometimes many occasions. I'm curious how people define this for you and how you personally define it for yourself?

Kenneth Pargament (20:46)

Well, I think, ⁓ unfortunately, I think in our culture, we're not very spiritually literate. And so when it comes to these extraordinary experiences, they're often ineffable, meaning we can't find the words to describe them. And yet it is possible to describe them if we begin to learn more about spiritual experience. We can talk about them. And I think it's really important to have a language to describe them so we can share them. We can cultivate them if we can talk about what they are. And I think the process of being able to talk about them, I think, is a way of being able to ⁓ broaden and deepen our language and our capacity to experience life most fully. 

Now, it's interesting because in my own work as a researcher, I found that when I ask people to share a sacred moment with me, and I say, you can define that moment any way you like, I've rarely had people question it. I just say, well, you know, just think about what that means to you and define it in your terms and go ahead and write. And people write these experiences and it's the writings of their experiences that helped us generate these qualities of sacred moments. 

So, ⁓ again, I think people intuitively have a sense of what these moments are about. And once you just prod them a little bit, encourage them to tap into that dimension, they can begin to describe something of that experience for them.

Nate Houchens (22:33)

So well put, it sounds like when you know, you know.

Kenneth Pargament (22:37)

Yeah, it's like jazz is what it is.

Nate Houchens (22:41)

Right, exactly.

Nate Houchens (22:57)

You mentioned your research and ⁓ you mentioned the importance of a common language and the ability to work to cultivate these moments more readily. It certainly worked with Alice, it seems. I wonder if you could share with us some of the early stages of your research, like how you began studying something like this, how you began studying something intangible and what kinds of methods or frameworks have you used so far?

Kenneth Pargament (23:29)

As with a lot of my research, I start by talking with people, sometimes even following them around as they experience things. And that's really what got me started in this. I was really intrigued by how hospital palliative care chaplains, and these are chaplains who are working with patients and families at the most difficult, challenging times of life. I was wondering how do palliative care chaplains sustain themselves and not burn out over the years. Because I'd known several palliative care chaplains who had been doing the work for 30, 40 years and they were still to my, as I saw them, still engaged and energetic and enthusiastic about their work. And I was just so impressed. So I asked the hospital chaplain at the MD Anderson Cancer Treatment Center. I asked him to give me permission to walk around with them and kind of, you know, follow him. And he did. He was very gracious. 

And during that day, I just saw him have these incredible encounters with people. I remember he was asked to talk to a ⁓ man, young man with a wife and three young children. She was in the palliative care unit because she had terminal cancer. And he asked the chaplain, he said, I don't know how to talk about this with my children. And I'm sitting there and my heart is pounding and I'm thinking, what is the chaplain going to do? And he just pulled up a chair and very gently looked him in the eye and began to talk about how you can explain ⁓ sickness and illness and even dying to children in a way that they could understand. And as he's talking, the young man was crying and just listening. And this was only a three or four minute encounter. And the chaplain says, you're welcome to call me anytime, 24/7. And as they separated, I was just so struck with the power of what I had just seen. Again, I'm remembering it now and this was a good 20 years ago. And that's what I asked him afterwards, I said, how often do you have experiences like that? How often do you have, and I just said “sacred moments,” and I had never used that term before. And he said “sacred moments, huh… I never thought about it that way, but yeah, I like that.” And he said, “well I have them all the time.” And I thought well I think I understand how it is that you can stay involved and so and you know, so committed to your work and so good at it over 30 years. 

So that's how really the whole thing got started and that led me to look to study sacred moments more systematically through working at a psychotherapy study down there that I did with Jim Lomax, a wonderful psychiatrist at Baylor College of Medicine. And then we began to expand it to look at sacred moments in other contexts among professional musicians who I thought, wow, they should be in a special place to have sacred moments through their music. And we've gone from there.

Nate Houchens (26:48)

It's incredible. You know, it reminds me of sort of a mini ethnography of just going and observing and walking a mile in the shoes of people who do this work day in and day out.

Kenneth Pargament (26:59)

Yeah, my research tends to be very much ground up.

Nate Houchens (27:03)

I love that. Yeah. And ⁓ I'm also reminded of the fact that our institution has employee, you know, satisfaction surveys. ⁓ And this past year, ⁓ the only service that was higher than ours, we get a little friendly competition because we're in health care. We can't help it. ⁓ The only service that had a higher job satisfaction than ours was the chaplains. And who could argue with that, being able to have these transcendent moments day in and day out with people that ⁓ you're meeting for the first time or have a longitudinal relationship with. It's really incredible.

Kenneth Pargament (27:44)

Yeah, I agree.

Nate Houchens (27:47)

I'm curious, what are some of the key themes or elements you've identified that tend to be present in sacred moments across therapeutic relationships? Aside from the qualities, are there any ⁓ sort of themes that you've noticed?

Kenneth Pargament (28:03)

Yeah, and we actually did some research on this too, in our study of therapists and clients. 

It looks like one of the key factors that that's tied to sacred moments and maybe creates part of the fertile soil for a sacred moment is vulnerability. You used that word earlier, but vulnerability. ⁓ Being at a place in your life where you recognize that you don't have the answers, that you're kind of being pushed to your limits, and ⁓ that you need something more than what you have yourself. That kind of vulnerability. And with that comes the courage and strength to be open and to share and take the risk of sharing one's vulnerability with someone else. Those are two, I think, really key themes. 

And then tied to that is having someone that you're with who you really trust. Who you feel like is not going to respond with disinterest or derision, someone you feel like might be able to listen to you in your most naked, vulnerable moment of your life. 

I think those set the stage for sacred moments, and that's why we can see them in psychotherapy. But that's also why we can see them in other medical contexts where we're talking about such ⁓ central, vital, pivotal healthcare issues that trigger all of our existential fears and anxieties and struggles. I think that's another context in which we often find sacred moments emerging pretty naturally.

Nate Houchens (29:51)

I so appreciated your description of that shared vulnerability. You were seemingly really out on a limb ⁓ describing what gives her solace and ⁓ meeting her where she was at really seemed to resonate with her.

Kenneth Pargament (30:08)

Yeah. And I think she sensed my openness and responsiveness to her sharing something so central that made her so vulnerable. And I think she appreciated how I was open with her in return. You know, if I had responded in a traditional professional psychological manner, when she shared that experience, I might have, and asked me how I feel, I might have just deflected and says, well it sounds like it was really important to you. Because that's how we're trained to keep the focus on the client. I think if I had, I would have missed a wonderful opportunity to deepen our relationship and identify the resource that was really pivotal to her own growth.

Nate Houchens (30:55)

It sure feels, at least in healthcare, that we keep, so often we keep people at arm's length ⁓ and don't take that step to sort of share in that vulnerability, that authenticity, that openness to be able to allow these kinds of moments to occur.

Kenneth Pargament (31:13)

Yeah, I think unfortunately, the context of health care has changed to the point that ⁓ health care professionals don't have the time, the luxury of time to form a relationship in which sacred moments might emerge because, you know, being in a rush, having to see so many patients in a certain period of time, having to be focused on the problem and then having to deal with all the other challenges of health care and medicine. It seems like there's very little room for anything else. 

And yet it doesn't take that much time and energy, I think, once you become more sensitive to this dimension to just accept it as it's happening and just a few comments and questions. And all of a sudden you're in a sacred moment.

Nate Houchens (31:59)

And they come up unexpectedly sometimes. Those are the best moments. And I suspect that they are not without consequence. In what ways do sacred moments influence outcomes for your clients or their therapeutic progress?

Kenneth Pargament (32:15)

Well, there are a couple of ways that we've been able to identify through our research. In our therapy studies, we found that sacred moments are really strongly related to the development of a therapeutic alliance, a relationship between therapist and client of genuineness, openness, trust, positive regard. And we know from many many studies that it's that working alliance between therapist and client that is the best predictor of change. It's not your treatment orientation. It's not any medication you may be on. It's the therapeutic alliance. And if you have that strong working relationship, then good things generally happen. And we know sacred moments tend to produce a strong working alliance. 

They also are tied to greater satisfaction in therapy and in life, and interestingly, greater sense of meaningfulness of oneself and one's life, even among therapists. Which I find very interesting. And it ties to the chaplaincy work that we had done too, that in some ways, I think having sacred moments is an antidote to burnout. It lends meaning to what we do. Our work becomes more of a vocation. It's something that takes on deep seated sacred value. And through sacred moments, we find a strong purpose in our lives. 

And finally, sacred moments in therapy have been tied to a more successful realization of therapeutic goals. So they help clients get to where they want to go, which is great.

Nate Houchens (33:58)

Classic phrase. Our search for meaning ⁓ really can be summed up by some of these moments for many people.

Kenneth Pargament (34:08)

Yeah. I can share a little another story if you might if you don't mind about that because it was very relevant to my clinical work with another client. This is a woman I'd worked with for many years and she had unfortunately developed a whole series of major medical illnesses that she had been fighting for really for many years. And at one point later in her life, she was told that she had to go on dialysis. And this, my client was very sharp and she knew what that meant. She knew how painful and disruptive that dialysis might be. And so she asked me, she said, I've fought long and I fought hard in my life. Why should I go on dialysis? Why don't I just call an end to it now? And I said, well, let me think about it. And so I did. And I came in the next session with her and I said, you asked me why you might choose to continue to live on dialysis. And I said, I think you're right. It's going to be tough. There’s going to be some pain and suffering for you, no doubt. I said, but here's one reason why you might want to consider continuing. You're going to have an opportunity for more sacred moments. Moments when you can have meaningful, deep connections with people. Moments when you can reflect on your life and maybe finish some unfinished business. Moments when you can continue to be there for other people, which is something that's meant so much to you in your life. And you can have moments like those till the very last days of your life. And it's not going to take away from the pain but may give you some reason for living. And she thought about it. And she said, OK. And she decided to go on dialysis. And she lived for another, I believe, three years. It was tough for her, for sure. But later in her life she said, you know, I have had sacred moments and they've really been special to me and I've been able to do some things in my later years that have really been important. So I'm glad I hung around.

Nate Houchens (36:14)

I wonder if it was just that slight shift in perspective ⁓ for so many people, I think, that are despairing or despondent or really just grappling in one way or another. It is hard to see the possibility for those sacred moments in the future. And I think just having another individual like yourself, like a trusted individual, say that and say that there are other things yet to come can be very powerful.

Kenneth Pargament (36:44)

I think being more articulate about sacred moments and being more aware of their potential is really an important part of training and teaching our professionals to be more, I guess, holistic in their approach and add this deeper dimension to their work that sometimes can really, it may be a little thing, but it's also a huge thing and it can make a big difference in people's lives.

Nate Houchens (37:31)

What have you found to be the most surprising or unexpected aspect of your work or your research?

Kenneth Pargament (37:38)

What is most surprising to me is how common these experiences are. We find them among diverse groups, even among atheists. You know, some people think, well, using the term sacred means you're going to focus on people who are religious or deeply devout. And certainly religious individuals and the most devout among us have sacred moments, that's for sure. But they're not limited to people who are religious, even atheists speak the language of sacred moments. They may not use the term, but when we talk to them about it more explicitly, they are not offended and they can share with us the sacred qualities that have made their moment precious or sacred and deeply, ⁓ that touch them at the deepest levels. So I think these are pretty universal experiences if we just start to look for them and study them more globally.

Nate Houchens (38:36)

I'm really grateful to you for sticking with the term “sacred.” It ⁓ is a word that I think captures the profound nature of these connections, these transcendent moments. And ⁓ for me, when I think about the language around these moments, I don't know if there's another word that really effectively captures it like sacred.

Kenneth Pargament (39:01)

Yeah, I agree. I've had people, you know, who wonder whether sacred moments is the best way to describe them. But we brainstorm about it. And I don't think anyone's really come up with a better term. I think there's something, I don't know, the term sacred does capture something of the deeper dimension to the experience.

Nate Houchens (39:22)

And you said it. When you describe it, when you say, tell me about a sacred moment, people know, right away.

Kenneth Pargament (39:27)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nate Houchens (39:30)

Has your research changed how you personally prepare for or enter into therapeutic sessions with your clients?

Kenneth Pargament (39:38)

What's happened with me is I've just become more alert and attuned to the possibility that any moment can be a sacred moment. I try to be open to those possibilities in even the seemingly most innocuous kind of action. 

In one of my, in one of the stories I read about sacred moments of someone, ⁓ a patient who was working with a physician shared his sacred moment. And it was after a very difficult meeting with a physician who gave him some sad news. And the patient left and as he was leaving, the physician put his hand on his shoulder and just looked him right in the eye and the patient looked him back. And it was a wordless encounter. And the patient remembered that as something that was sacred because he knew that his doctor was seeing him and he was seeing his doctor and his doctor’s letting him see him as a human being.

And so I think that for me, I just try to be alert to all possibilities in the hour. Now, that's not always possible. You know, sometimes I'm drifting away, but I try to be ⁓ really alert. But, you know, even in the drifting away, there can be possibilities for a sacred moment, because I once had a client catch me drifting away and she said, she said, where'd you go? You just didn't seem to be with me. I could have kind of just tried to, you know, change the subject again. But I thought about it and I said, you know, I didn't get much sleep last night and I'm sorry, I really wasn't tuned in and I hope you'll forgive me for that. And then she said, yeah, I'll forgive you. And we were talking and I'm not sure it reached quite the level of a sacred moment, but it was something very special.

Nate Houchens (41:25)

Clearly very tuned in to you and to your tuning in to her. In my work, I do a fair amount of ⁓ teaching ⁓ around medical students, around resident physicians, around others. I'm curious about your training programs. Do you see potential for work in the sacred moments space for the training of future therapists? And what would that kind of look like?

Kenneth Pargament (41:55)

Yeah, I think it's an exciting possibility in the whole area of how do you cultivate sacred moments and attentiveness to sacred moments in training process is really the cutting edge of this whole, this whole area now. 

I think the very first step in all of this is addressing the skepticism among health care professionals, mental health care professionals, around the whole topic to begin with. Because ⁓ those in the field, we tend to be much more secularized than the general population and ⁓ more, I think, a little jittery around this whole topic. 

And so one of the things I’ve found really useful to deal with that is, and this can be early in the educational process, is to get people together and ask people to share a sacred moment with each other. I've found in small groups and in large groups that again, people are able to do it. It may take a few seconds for a person to volunteer, the first person, and they tell a story. And oftentimes these stories are very powerful stories, the story of the birth of a child, the story of being with someone who was dying, the story of caretaking someone with dementia who maybe we thought was no longer cognizant of other people, and yet, for a minute, the light goes back on. These kinds of stories. And as people share the stories, other people become more willing to share their stories and start to see again how common they are and that there's nothing unusual or weird about these experiences. 

But the other thing, and I point this out, sacred moments are so powerful. Just the act of sharing a story of a sacred moment has the power to elicit a sense of sacredness in listeners. I’ve found in the groups and in even large lecture halls, as people share their sacred moments, everything gets quiet. Everything gets hushed, as if we're in the presence of something that's unusual, extraordinary, and people start to feel things deeply. That itself is a teaching experience. And I point that out, that something vicariously sacred is happening here.

And so then I can say, I think we need to attend to these moments because they have great power in our lives and they can have a healing power as well. So that's just one teaching method that I found really helpful.

Nate Houchens (44:30)

I love that. And again, we have done this, we have encouraged ⁓ something we call reflective rounds where ⁓ a series of willing volunteers will share their own sacred moment stories. And you're right, it usually, of course, takes a few minutes for people to get warmed up. And almost always one of the facilitators shares their own sacred moment and demonstrates that that vulnerability will be embraced and appreciated. And then I think it's off to the races. Then people recognize what it is and want to share. And then there's this ripple effect of sacredness that goes throughout the entire group.

Kenneth Pargament (45:12)

You know, I've done many workshops and talks over the years, and I’ve found that when I do these talks, and some of them are day-long workshops, or I'm talking about, spirituality and psychotherapy, the one thing people come back to at the end and want to talk more about, and this is very consistent, is sacred moments, because somehow that touches them so deeply and so personally.

Nate Houchens (45:37)

For me, it feels like sacred moments are the lanterns that Alice shared in her Fireflies poem at the end, which was just so immensely powerful. 

Kenneth Pargament (45:48)

Oh, I love that, Nate. That's beautiful. Thank you.

Nate Houchens (45:50)

Our ability to just see through the darkness with sacred moments. 

I have one more question for you, Ken, if you have a moment. ⁓ Where is your research headed next? Are there questions that you're currently exploring or hope to study in the future? What's next for you?

Kenneth Pargament (46:07)

Well, you know, I'm ⁓ towards the latter stage of my academic career. And so at this point, I'm trying to, pull things together and see how everything fits. And so I've become very interested in the whole concept of wholeness. What do we mean by being whole? We talk a lot about holistic care and whole person-centered health care. And it's very appealing to me. But I wondered, what does it mean? And for me, I think a neglected dimension in wholeness is the spiritual dimension, including sacred moments, that we've talked a long time about being biopsychosocial beings, but something's been missing, we're biopsychosocial spiritual beings. And so I think by adding the spiritual dimension to our approach to healthcare, and with sacred moments being an important part of spirituality, I think we become more capable of dealing with the whole person when they come to us and you know, in times of pain and suffering. So I’m very interested in fleshing out that notion of wholeness and looking at how we actually become more holistic in our approach to helping people live more meaningful lives.

Nate Houchens (47:31)

In this world that can sure feel fragmented sometimes. And our ability to be whole in all senses of the word is challenged. And I think that's really laudable work.

Kenneth Pargament (47:42)

Yeah. And the reality is that we are all wounded. No one gets through life unscathed. We have our wounds. And we experience our breaks and brokenness too. Wholeness isn't about not being broken. It's about how do we put the pieces of our lives together again in ways that make us ⁓ maybe better than we were. So we may be broken, but we can glue ourselves back together again. And in doing it, we can become kind of like Kintsugi works of art, which is a Japanese art form where you break pottery pieces and then glue them back together again with gold filigree or silver filigree. And the end product is this work of art. And somehow I think that's how we can be as well. We can put ourselves back together again and be more whole and we can also become works of art.

Nate Houchens (48:33)

One of the things I still remember to this day when you and I first met, when we were meeting to discuss sacred moments with our research group, was what we were going to call things. What the names were going to be for this initiative, this podcast, these ideas. And I remember talking about the golden thread as one potential option. And what a nice metaphor for how each of us are all broken in some way, shape, or form and the golden thread in that Japanese pottery art form of stitching us together in a beautiful way. ⁓ I can't think of a better metaphor. 

Ken, thank you so much for your time, for sharing your wisdom and your experience and your expertise in this field with us. ⁓ We are better for it, and I personally am so grateful to be able to chat with you about this today. Thank you.

Kenneth Pargament (49:31)

Well, thank you. And I'm grateful for the chance to speak with you, Nate, and to be able to speak with and listened to by your audience.

Nate Houchens (49:40)

It's an honor. Thank you.

Kenneth Pargament (49:42)

Take care.

Postlude

Nate Houchens (49:59)

We would love for you to be a part of this movement, and we would be honored to hear your story. If you have experienced a moment of grace, connection, or empathy that changed you, we invite you to submit it for consideration to be shared on Boundless Moments by sharing, you not only contribute to a collective celebration of human connection, you may also inspire others to recognize and cherish the sacred moments in their own lives. To discover more about sacred moments and to share your own story, please visit sacredmomentsinitiative.org.

This episode of boundless moments was produced, edited, and mixed by Nathan Houchens. Our program manager is Jessica Ameling, and our publishing and social media manager is Rachel Ehrlinger. Our podcast is made possible by the Sacred Moments Initiative, a humanistic project whose aim is to study, catalog, and share sacred moments. Learn more at sacredmomentsinitiative.org. Boundless Moments is also made possible by donations from listeners like you. Thank you so much for supporting our work in sharing sacred moment stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts and drop us a rating or review to help others connect with us. I'm your host, Nathan Houchens. Thank you for joining and until next time, be well.