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When I think of the benefits of spirituality and religion for mental health, I am reminded of the old hymn, “Amazing Grace.”  It is a wonderful old hymn that talks about human brokenness that is healed, human failing that is redeemed and human dysfunctionality ttransformed into a functional and meaningful lifestyle.  It is a wonderful old hymn, but its meaning is as fresh today as the day it was written because there are still broken, hurting and dysfunctional people who look to the future with dismay because they have no sense of how things can change for the better.  They do not understand how or even if their lives can change and because of this, they exchange hope for depression and despair.

The message of the old hymn is not one of pessimism, however.  It is a message of hope for it proclaims that the heart of change is grace and grace is something that can heal tbroken of lives.  Grace is the empowerment that comes with a meaningful form of spirituality.  The power behind the graciousness of life is not a condemning or judgmental power.  It is the sweet sound of redemption that seeks to make people whole again, empowering them to live meaningfully even in the midst of life’s most precarious circumstances.

It is my conviction that when this type of spirituality is combined with sound therapeutic practices spirituality or religion is not an impediment to mental health, but its catalyst.  However, if this is true, we need to know more about “this type of spirituality.”  What is it and can just any type of spirituality successfully bring about change that is important to mental health.  In this section, I want to examine this question.  I will do so by first examining why the psychiatric/psychology professions have been so suspicious of spiritualityand
religion in the first place.  I will address this by holding their concerns up to recent studies implying that some types of spirituality are indeed helpful in nurturing mental health, and then I will extrapolate from these studies the characteristics that make spirituality important to improving mental health and healing the broken lives of people.
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