As relações de cuidado transpessoal no acompanhamento pastoral do soro-positivo: um estudo de caso

Abstract

We love the life and we have many plans for it. We do not want even to think about the brevity of our days or that we are just passing through. However hard our life seems to us, our hearts are always full of hopes and wonderful ideas for our marriage, our children, our work, our relatives and friends, our investments, our patrimony, our interests, our aspirations, our pastimes and pleasures. However, we are all vulnerable to the sudden attack of a serious disease. Illnesses which put our lives at risk do not know any frontiers; they do not just attack the human BODY, they also desolate the human BEING. Disease does not just jeopardize the biological integrity; it also endangers the personal one. HIV, for instance, with its wasting evilness, devastates the immunological system and provokes mental moral emotional social domestic religious and cultural desolations. AIDS is based on the assertion of excluding and branding elements like sex, guilt and death. In this research we understand that the transpersonal care offered in pastoral attendance of HIV serum positive is an indispensable element in an integrated humanitarian and successful therapeutic process. Pastoral care is comforting and powerful; it communicates safety and authority; it manages conflicts; it monitors emotions and it revitalizes the superior instances of the sick person. It communicates a life force that is not just biological, but also aware, emotional and personal. It offers emotional mental moral spiritual and personal protection more than any other attendance form. In care relationships with people who have incurable diseases, we think that it is necessary to integrate a life and death understanding in the context of earth-bound existence. It is true; the one who feels prepared to die, who can naturally face the death like an event that integrates our experience of living lives better and freer. When the scenery changes and we have to face the death in this process, the pastoral attendance becomes an indispensable and significant force for those who face the end of the journey.