Padre's Corner - Coping with stress and life’s challenges: spiritual resilience
August 9, 2022 - Padre Kevin Sam, 1 Service Battalion
Ever felt like you’ve lost your life’s balance or felt off‑kilter, but couldn’t pin‑point why or how you got there?
We have all been there at one time or another.
There are different avenues to cope with stress and life’s challenges. One is to find a practical solution. The second is more abstract; it is spiritual resilience.
Spirituality helps guide our understanding about our journey in life. It is part and parcel to a person’s health and overall well‑being.
What we all have in common is walking difficult paths throughout our lives; each person experiencing something different. When we are stressed and under pressure, we have a tendency to find our own solution. Sometimes, we might find ourselves making the right choices – and sometimes the wrong choices.
Before we make these personal choices in life, we often contemplate our options or courses of action. We also seek sources of help like the wisdom of experienced persons, inner contemplation, reflection, prayer, etc.
Whatever your religious or spiritual persuasion, one can benefit from developing one’s own spiritual resilience. Spiritual resilience is not necessarily religious, although having a religious bearing helps to add to a person’s spiritual framework.
Spirituality and spiritual resilience are like the muscles that give us strength; religion can be thought of as the skeleton that holds our muscles in place. Having one without the other is difficult, but both together can complement each other. A developed spiritual resilience builds immunity to spiritual‑emotional burn out. Much like our physical muscles, one’s inner person can also become tired. Our spiritual ‘muscles’ also need rest in order to rebuild.
I have found that without spiritual rest, I can get spiritually tired, weakened and run‑down. If this persists, I will also become vulnerable. A person’s healthy emotions and spiritual inner person is the only defence against hard times.
Think of it like facing the enemy. When a soldier is at the pointy end, faced with a barrage of attacks from enemy forces, the only defence is to be properly equipped with weapons, munitions, effective defensive armour and a good strategy to win.
A healthy spiritual resilience is like this good proper defence. When we are equipped with inner strength and resilience, we can overcome hard times. We can walk out the end in this life and win.
I’m sure we have all experienced anger, fear, anxiety, envy, bitterness, a lack of self‑control and other negative emotions. The advantages of spiritual resilience become more apparent when under stressful times in our lives, e.g., being on critical military operations, going through divorce/separation, difficulty on the job or losing a loved one. We all face difficulties at one point or another. Under a barrage of attack, we can be open to vulnerable areas in our lives. People who are less vulnerable under stress will have a more developed spirituality.
People practise spirituality in different ways – sometimes religiously and sometimes without much of any religion. Some might be religious persons, some might be ordinary people. As soldiers, sailors and aviators, without spirituality and spiritual resilience even the best of us can lose our ways and lose our balance. Every so often, an ordinary person can veer off the virtuous path and lose hope, their moral beliefs or one’s desire to live. Every person has the potential to fail at one point or another.
Just like military equipment and vehicles need maintenance, we as people need a good spiritual tune‑up every now and then. It might be a good time this year to reassess our spiritual readiness. If we are spiritually in the red, orange or yellow, it might time to get ourselves onto a good maintenance schedule.