Espiritualidade, saúde e perdão: ressignificação e sentido na vida

Abstract

The objective of our study was to analyze how forgiveness can be considered an experience of resignification and search for meaning in life in the context of the relationship between spirituality and health. To this end, we apprehended the meaning of the forgiving experience of leaders of Christian spirituality, considering the aspects of spirituality and health involved in these experiences, as well as analyzing the narratives of the forgiving experiences of leaders of Christian spirituality from the reflections of Paul Ricoeur and Viktor Frankl. We adopted as a methodological perspective the phenomenological attitude of suspending all our judgments about the phenomenon concerned. Based on this perspective, we assumed the posture of letting the subjects narrate, in a free way, their experiences of forgiving. Participants in the survey were six leaders of Christian spirituality, Catholics and evangelicals from some churches in the city of João Pessoa. Three priests and three pastors were selected. The interviews were fully transcribed. The analysis of the narratives was made through hermeneutic phenomenological analysis, which consisted in the understanding that the researcher had the task of discovering the phenomenon interrogated through the description of the subjects' experiences. We analyzed the descriptions of the subjects' experiences by following these steps: a) Transcription of the speech about the subjects' experiences of forgiveness; b) Organization of speech by means of the unity of meaning of each subject that stands out through words that expressed the personal sense of forgiveness; c) Construction of a network of meaning that was woven linking the units of sense of each subject with the conceptual constructions of Paul Ricoeur and Viktor Frankl. Based on the analysis carried out, we concluded that forgiveness can be considered an experience of resignification and search for meaning in life as an experience of overcoming suffering, pain and resentment. Moreover, we found the result that the path of forgiveness means to establish paths to a healthy life, in that the act of forgiving, besides being an experience of re-signifying the past in the context of memory, is also a search to re-signify one’s existence.