Hope is what gives us strength in life

Jorge Hessen discusses the efficacy of prayer in lay hospital experiments and religious environments, in the special issue of this edition entitled "Faith and prayer as therapeutic openings of contemporary nosocomials."

"Researchers at the University of Alabama in the United States have applied a treatment called 'hope therapy'. The process consists of helping patients to build and maintain hope in the face of disease, according to the maxim that it is necessary to give strength to the spirit so that the body recovers." (Jorge Hessen, in the article quoted.)

Hope is responsible for the protection and sustenance of the human mind and heart. Of the three theological virtues - faith, hope and charity – it is the hope that sustains man in the struggle of the spiritual struggle with our inferior impulses.

Paul tells us about the helmet of hope, which earned from Emmanuel the following comment: "Helmet [...] is an outfit of struggle, effort, defensive. And the disciple of Jesus is an effective combatant against evil, who does not have much time to think about himself, nor can he demand too much rest, when he knows that the Master himself remains in active and edifying work. Let us therefore guard our thoughts with the helmet of faithful hope and proceed to the supreme victory of good." (Fonte Viva - Living Source, Chapter 94.)

"Insofar as the patient makes introspection to enhance the faith, it is possible to recognize his identity and the reconstruction of his self-esteem, which leads him to regain hope and confidence in his own adaptive resources." (Jorge Hessen In the cited article.)

Empowering faith through introspection! Yes, since the source of faith is all in the divine spark that is in each one of us, and that we access through the immersion in our being, knowing ourselves, thus enabling the promotion of self-esteem, developing trust in us and in God and discovering the source of hope.

"Spiritism explains that it is through a process of personal development that the patient gains the strength to neutralize the disease. Spiritism seeks to persuade the patient to reorient their mental behavior by intelligent, reasoned faith, suggesting an ethics of charity, which must result in a particular way of motivating a life of greatness and of overcoming the appeals of the physical world." (Jorge Hessen In the cited article.)

Faith finds in hope its immediate and characteristic product. But, as we know, faith and hope are not enough for us. The struggle against adversity and against evil, inside and outside of man, must be plastered with an active virtue - charity, although faith is also an active virtue, though introspective.

"At the General Hospital in San Francisco, California, 'it was possible to prove that patients who received prayers had significant improvements, necessitating less medication.' For us, spirits, it has special characteristics, for along with ‘ordinary medication, elaborated by Science, magnetism gives us the power of fluid action and Spiritism reveals another powerful force in the healing mediumship and the influence of prayer’." (Jorge Hessen, in the article quoted.)

We cannot do without the resources of medicine. Even in a treatment with passive therapy, where significant improvements are evident, Allan Kardec says that a single therapy is not effective in certain cases, such as in the treatment of obsessive processes, in which the therapeutic resources of the patients must be combined passes with medicines from medicine.

It was the time when it was believed that all illness was exclusively of a spiritual nature and that medical resources could be abandoned, which unfortunately it is a common idea among many spirits.

Of course, in the last analysis, every disease is from spiritual origin, because it comes from an imbalance of the soul, whether with or without the influence of a third. But somatization makes the disease also become a material phenomenon, for which human medicine is obviously necessary.

In this sense, it is useful to recall the lesson signed by Allan Kardec, when referring to the treatment of the obsession:

"A very prolonged obsession can lead to pathological disorders and sometimes requires simultaneous or consecutive treatment, both magnetic and medical, to restore the health of the organism. Destroying the cause, it remains to combat the effects. (The Gospel according to Spiritism, chapter XXVIII, item 84, "Observation".) [We wrote in bold]