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Sarah Masters reviews the film

Essene

The brethren in a Michigan monastery go about their lives continually questioning G_d. Award-winning documentary film director Frederick Wiseman gained extraordinary access to the inner workings of this monastery, and in his classic film Essene, Wiseman focuses on these Benedictine monks as they struggle to resolve the inevitable conflicts that arise between their individual needs and the institutional needs of their community.

Wiseman was one of the first to shoot in cinema verité style and his cameras capture the Abbot and twenty monks under his supervision as they strive for what they refer to as “corporate consciousness.”

Essene hones in on the constantly changing relationships between faith, personal need, and the inner turmoil of each monk. In one instance, the viewer follows the monks as they handle the anger of Brother Wilfred and the Abbot’s pointed response to their conversations about Brother Wilfred. The brethren must cope with the same issues that the outside world must cope with and it is striking the myriad and unique ways that the monks view their “sense of community.”

New York Times critic Malcolm Boyd described Essene as “…one of the best religious films ever made. It is a fluid, extraordinarily honest and non-theatrical experience. Essene raises the question of God urgently and eloquently.”

Completed: 1972
Running Time: 89 Minutes
Director: Frederick Wiseman
Photographer: William Brayne

If you are interested in renting or purchasing this film, you can do so at www.zipporah.com/orders.

Sarah Masters is the Managing Director of the Hartley Film Foundation, a non-profit foundation dedicated to cultivation, support, production and distribution of the best documentaries and audio meditations on world religions, spirituality, ethics and well-being.

Book Review

Rev. Dr. John Bauman reviews

Faith and Mental Health: Religious Resources for Healing

Dr. Koenig wrote Faith and Mental Health: Religious Resources for Healing as a resource for two targeted audiences: mental health providers, researchers, planners and trainers who may have a negative or benign experience of religion; and, religious professionals who serve those with emotional illness or train others to do so. It is intended as a source of practical information about the relationship between religion and mental health (also, religion and psychiatry), and a source of how world religions deliver mental health services today. As one who has been in the trenches working with the mentally ill, has been involved in conducting research on how religion affects mental health, and as a person who describes himself as someone who recognizes and respects the role that theology plays, Dr. Koenig writes from the perspective of one who is promoting a collaborative, mutually respectful, and hopefully improved and much more productive relationship between the religions and the mental health field.

The book is divided into four sections: historical background; research on religion and mental health; faith-based mental health care; and barriers and solutions. The sections on history and current research provide exciting and new information, while the sections on current faith-based mental health care and barriers and solutions provide valuable information on what is happening in the field today. Koenig defines mental illness as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other long-term psychoses or severe personality disorders, while emotional illness traps people in prisons of fear, despair, confusion, and loneliness.

Koenig cautiously asks whether those afflicted with mental illness have a “calling” in that they provide others with the opportunity to care for them, to reach out to them, to sacrifice the comfort of their life to minister to them. Could those struggling with mental illness serve as beacon lights illuminating the “narrow” way to real life that few ever find? Could they be pointing the way for people of faith to follow so that the care provided to the mentally ill would demonstrate to the world what it is to be human?

Significant historical facts include the earliest hospital providing care to the mentally ill constructed and operated by Muslims in Cairo in 872. Muslims established in 1365 in Granada, Spain, one of the first hospitals designed for the treatment of the mentally ill in Europe. Koenig quotes a passage in the Qur’an that emphasizes the need to provide humane care for those with mental illness. He also notes that St. John of God from Granada, Spain, who is considered the inspiration for the order of brothers called “the Hospitaller Order of St. John of God”, began caring for the homeless and mentally ill following his own hospitalization for psychosis in 1538. St. John of God’s story is the story of every person of faith who feels moved to do something out of compassion for those who suffer mental illness. From his own experience with mental illness, Anton Boisen also understood the need to help those with mental illness. He helped develop a new form of theological education in a clinical setting for student chaplains that soon developed into Clinical Pastoral Education.

Koenig presents current research that addresses crucial questions in the religion and mental illness field. For example, the question whether religious beliefs and practices are associated with worse mental health as claimed by Freud and Ellis; questions regarding religious beliefs associated with demonic possession and exorcism and current research on the subject; questions whether religion improves coping with emotional illness and, if so, how can this information be used to design treatments; and, what are the results of studies that have evaluated such interventions?

He then presents a very informative section on the role that clergy and religious organizations play, both historically and currently, in caring for those with mental and emotional illness. Faith-based care for the mentally ill began in the United States in the early 1700s with the care provided by Catholic Charities. The YMCA in 1851 and the Salvation Army in 1852 and the Settlement House Movement in the 1890s all began providing social services that included care for the mentally ill. During the 1850s the US Government entered the field with the Freedman’s Bureau for newly emancipated slaves. Of religious groups in the United States in the 1940s Mennonites led the way in addressing deplorable conditions in mental hospitals and in response established faith-based hospitals to care for the mentally ill. Currently, clergy and pastoral care givers provide an enormous amount of mental health services but a lack of training on how to diagnose and treat mental disorders needs to be addressed with training and preparation for this role. Koenig provides very valuable information regarding the many faith-based organizations that currently provide care for the mentally ill.

The last section identifies possible solutions and calls for overcoming barriers to further research on the religion-mental health relationship, for research to better understand the effects of religion on mental health, for research on the effects of interventions by religious professionals and congregations, and for an attitudinal shift among scientists conducting research and the clinicians conducting the research.

I highly recommend Faith and Mental Health as an excellent resource for pastoral care professionals and to scientists who study the religion and mental health field.

Koenig, Harold G., Faith and Mental Health: Religious Resources for Healing, Templeton Foundation Press, Philadelphia, 2005, 343pp.

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