Beyond Filipino Resilience: A Conceptual Analysis of Spiritual Survival, Religious Meaning-Making, and Post-Disaster...

Disaster recovery in the Philippines is narrated through resilience, yet praise for endurance may obscure grief, health needs, unequal support, and institutional responsibility. This conceptual article develops the Critical Filipino Spiritual Resilience Framework through integrative conceptual analysis, comparison with adjacent constructs, and synthesis of the Meaning-Making Model and Social-Ecological Resilience Theory. Spiritual survival is proposed as the relationally situated process through which disaster-affected persons and communities preserve, contest, or reconstruct sacred or spiritually significant meaning, relational connection, moral agency, and reasons for continuing amid loss. It may include prayer, hope, lamentation, doubt, anger, religious struggle, silence, and protest without requiring uninterrupted faith, rapid adaptation, optimism, or post-traumatic growth. The framework organizes recovery through four interacting analytical domains: personal meaning reconstruction, family and community support, religious-symbolic resources, and structural and institutional conditions. Critical spiritual recovery alignment describes the multidimensional and changing configuration through which these domains reinforce, compensate for, or conflict with one another. Supportive alignment may facilitate physical, psychological, relational, functional, and spiritual recovery. Temporary compensation may preserve immediate survival while services are restored, but its significance depends on duration, adequacy, sustainability, inclusiveness, burden distribution, coordination, and institutional response. Critical misalignment becomes more evident when communal or religious resources repeatedly substitute for public provision, exclude marginalized survivors, or conceal institutional neglect. Dignified recovery is proposed as a normative outcome domain involving safety, health, material security, relational care, agency, equitable participation, and accountable institutions. The framework offers a justice-sensitive and empirically testable broader account of post-disaster health without romanticizing Filipino resilience.