Susan McFadden - Malcolm Goldmsith lecture

1. Maintaining the Fabric of the World:
Spiritual Gifts of Persons with
Dementia
Susan H. McFadden, Ph.D.
Fox Valley Memory Project
Appleton, WI (USA)

2. Spiral aloe (photograph by Pei-Pei Ketron)

3. “They maintain the fabric of this
world, and their daily work is their
prayer.”
Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:34
Goldsmith, 2004, p. 173
Goldsmith, 2011, p. 166

4. Spiral aloe (photograph by Pei-Pei Ketron)

6. Themes
• creation, embodiment, and
spiritual care
• creativity, imagination, and
spiritual care
• the spiritual gifts of creative
dementia care

7. Creation, embodiment, and spiritual
care
Cross-section of a foram (single-celled ocean-dwelling organism)
(photograph by Richard Howey)

8. “…confining what is essential about
selfhood to the brain is to overlook how
bodily sources of agency, grounded in
the pre-reflective level of experience are
fundamental to the constitution and
manifestation of selfhood in Alzheimer’s
disease” (Kontos, 2003, p. 555)

9. Spiral aloe (photograph by Pei-Pei Ketron)

10. “Human embodiedness is thus seen to
be deeply spiritual in shape and
function. Our bodies are the locus of
God’s creative activity and the place
where God meets and sustains us”
(Swinton, 2012, pp. 169-170).

11. Creativity, imagination, and spiritual
care
The “Whirlpool galaxy” (NASA)

12. Art “may be defined as the practice of creating
perceptible forms expressive of human feeling”
(Langer, 1958, p. 2).
Art “presents forms—sometimes intangible
forms—to imagination….Imagination is probably
the oldest mental trait that is typically human—
older than discursive reason; it is probably the
common source of dream, reason, religion, and
all true general observation. It is this primitive
human power—imagination—that engenders the
arts and is in turn directly affected by their
products” (Langer, 1958, p. 6).

13. Bob: You touch the very, the little strings in the
centre of my heart. What do you think of that
now?
Maria: I touch the strings in the centre of your
heart? Is that how you feel when you listen to
music?
Bob: Oh yes, oh yes I do, yes. It’s something
you can’t explain. That’s the way it is. There’s
something in you, like, I suppose mental as well
as naturally, and I don’t know, you can’t explain it,
that’s the way it is. (Killick, 2004, p. 147)

14. Spiral aloe (photograph by Pei-Pei Ketron)

19. The spiritual gifts of creative
dementia care
Cut-away of nautilus shell (photograph by Paul Licht)

20. “Perhaps this is one of the keys to creative
dementia care, to be always on the lookout for
gifts, for invariably, those who seek ultimately
find” (Goldsmith, 2001, p. 150).
“With a little time and imagination it is possible
for us to reflect on what we might do for
[people with dementia], but the bigger question
is to reflect upon what we might learn from
them and in what ways they might contribute to
our common life” (Goldsmith, 2001, p. 136).

21. “The profound Christian hope is that as everything
about our life diminishes and falls away, as it surely
must for all of us, there remains a source of loving
acceptance which takes the fragility of our nature
and the multitude of compromises of our life and
receives it home. Free at last, free at last, thank
God almighty we are free at last – from everything
which has diminished our body, but not necessarily
our spirit” (Goldsmith, 2004, p. 40).