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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. For this membership drive, we're ending each show with a 10-ish minute explainer on how to take care of yourself now that our listening area is slowly emerging from the pandemic. We pick five different topics based on what we've been hearing from you and seeing around the internet. Last week, we touched on mental health and physical health.

Today, we want to turn to another important factor for a lot of us with respect to our wellness, spiritual wellness, whether or not we are religious. Joining me now to talk about how tuning into spirituality can help health and mental health outcomes post-pandemic is Reverend Dr. Eric Hall, President and CEO of HealthCare Chaplaincy Network Inc.

He also wrote an opinion piece called Why COVID shakes the faith: The science behind the spiritual reckoning, which you can read on the website of NBC News. Thank you so much for joining us, Reverend Doctor. Welcome to WNYC.

Dr. Eric Hall: Hey, Brian. Listen, thanks so much. It's great being with you today.

Brian Lehrer: How did the pandemic affect your ability, first of all, to connect with sick patients? Did it change the way you work?

Dr. Eric Hall: Oh, sure, absolutely. Listen, Healthcare Chaplaincy Network has chaplains all throughout the country that provide care in hospital settings. As you can imagine, with the pandemic, the challenges for nurses and doctors, and all those staff also were equals to us as well. What we really found was that we became a really true conduit, we became the conduit between the patients and also their families because the families weren't allowed to visit in the hospital institution so our chaplains really served a vital role there.

Then additionally, because so many of those patients were significantly ill, and some actually in the process of dying, our role helping them with their spiritual distress was really quite pivotal. I think, as a field, we were really very much needed at this point in time.

Brian Lehrer: For you, as a chaplain, who likes to serve both religious and non-religious people, you explain in your NBC News piece, that although you use religious rituals, when that's what's meaningful to a particular person, supporting meaning and hope is possible for everyone, how would you, as a chaplain, help foster hope, in the midst of a global pandemic for people who are not religious?

Dr. Eric Hall: Yes, what you bring up, Brian, is a great point, we're not talking about religion here when we're talking about spiritual care. I'm not talking about religion when I'm talking about spiritual care for ourselves.

In fact, the existential questions, and especially this pandemic brought them up, the questions we asked ourselves, "Why is this happening? How bad can this possibly get? Why is this happening to me?" Was really a big question that a lot of folks who had COVID, or loved ones had COVID, was really part of what we're talking about when we're talking about spiritual distress.

These are existential questions. These are big questions that most of us perhaps have a faith tradition that has scripture and traditions that actually have and provide answers to those questions. For many of us who don't have a faith tradition, even that itself, even not believing in God is a belief tradition and yet at the same time, those same existential questions apply to them as well.

Chaplains are trained that no matter where you are, no matter what your background, that we walk with you through your journey as you believe. It's not about a propagation of faith, our chaplains might be rabbis, they might be Buddhists but in the end, we walk with the patient, and we help the patient in their own experience to find meaning and purpose, where they are and by looking deep within and searching, that people come to a point of peace and hope.

Brian Lehrer: In your piece, you cited Duke University Medical Center study that found that religious struggle is a predictor of mortality in medically ill elderly patients by 6%-10%. What does that finding mean?

Dr. Eric Hall: It really says that what the philosophers have talked about and what we've always cited about the fact that the human experience, our experience as human beings is body, mind, and spirit. It pretty much has come to be proven true now by research and Healthcare Chaplaincy Network has been the leader in that field of doing the research around this.

Again, not looking at the religious tenets, but really what is the spiritual aspects of the human experience and how do we tap into that? How do we cultivate that so that it actually becomes part of our healing process? I know a lot of people might be turned off by religion and the like, but what we're really talking about here, what we're really positing is that there is this deeper consciousness side to ourselves that really needs to be addressed.

Yes, the findings that this study at Duke and others have found is that if you're not caring for the spiritual distress, for instance, when people have a serious illness, they end up saying to themselves, "Oh, God," or, "Why me?" Those types of questions, those are those existential groanings of our human spirit.

The research really finds that if we're not providing care for that, that a person's rebound if you will, or healing can actually be negatively impacted by not providing as much as it can be positively impacted by providing spiritual care. Again, this isn't just about theologies, or faiths, or faith traditions, this is really now demarcated and really very well documented regarding research and data from research that has been done in very prominent studies in schools all around the world.

Brian Lehrer: Now, that we're emerging from the pandemic, and our listening area is opening up, how can we apply the lessons that you've written and spoken about regarding wellness moving forward?

Dr. Eric Hall: Listen, we all have to be honest and say that the COVID pandemic all by itself would have been challenging for humanity, would have been challenging for the globe. Here in the United States, add to that a very tumultuous period of time in politics. Add to that the financial challenges that many of us were experiencing by loss of jobs, and add to that some of the racial tensions that we were experiencing as a nation.

Those four factors all coming together really have overwhelmed us, and maybe we're not even aware of it. I'm not even sure we're fully aware of how the mental and spiritual crisis is still present, and how going back to whatever we think is normal, I'm not really sure is going to be possible. We're going to have to be honest with ourselves and begin by admitting that these have been difficult challenging times, we have to take a really good account of ourselves and see how are we doing inside?

What did we really feel through all this process? Did we feel that we were somehow being punished because we were bad? What is our relationship with God? What is our belief system? Is our belief system actually helping us at this point in time? If not, we really should take a look at it.

If we have dismissed it altogether because of our issues related to say, religion or traditions or whatever we might agree with or what we don't agree with, I just don't want us as human people to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The traditions are one thing but really, this existential yearning that we have for hoping for peace and for understanding is really critical.

Brian Lehrer: We leave it there.

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