I think most of us at least implicitly believe that health is the absence of symptoms or pathology.
What if this isn't quite true? Is health more complicated than just not being sick?
My own profession tends to define health and pathology in terms of the amount of distress and/or the interference with life that are caused by a particular symptom. It's part of a reasonable effort on the part of psychiatry and psychology to distance themselves from theoretical/philosophical explanations of psychopathology (because there's just no agreement on these) and instead shift the emphasis to personal suffering and functioning as a measure of relative health or disease.
One of the problems with this approach is that we start to view suffering or the presence of symptoms as the problem, the enemy, the thing to be eradicated.
But what if suffering and symptoms are not always the problem? What if suffering is an inherent part of human existence? In earlier blog posts I've written about the avoidance of suffering being a huge problem that creates all kinds of suffering. I can't state it any better than Thomas Merton who says,
"Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture."
~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 91
So I've been trying to understand how I might inform my own thinking about health using what I think I know about the Bible. If there's a health that exists independently from pathology/suffering definitions, what might the biblical narrative suggest about it?
Thankfully, Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has been an enormous help in this area. In his view, Williams thinks that health is a matter of the world being inhabited by God. In the Genesis stories, God creates the world by filling the void. God inhabits the world, and when sin enters, it is the alienation from God that causes the physical world, the world of the flesh to be no longer fully inhabited by God. Williams continues this thread with the idea that Jesus is the "supreme instance of health", having been God who fully inhabits humanity. And, in by inhabiting a physical body, Jesus not only transforms the body, but becomes a force that transforms all others.
Hopefully that made as much sense to you as it does to me.
I think what I take away from it, is that my definition of health is not about the end of suffering or the absence of symptoms. It's about God inhabiting my life, inhabiting my suffering, and transforming me and those around me through it. Health is about reconnecting to the presence of God in the world, when I'm so often detached from it.
Perhaps it's the reason why we give care to those with terminal illnesses and disabilities. There is no aim to remove symptoms. But we implicitly recognize that health can come even to those with intractable medical pathology, when their suffering is inhabited by the presence of those who care. We know that acts of kindness, love, service, and compassion become transformative for both the giver and the receiver. It's not health in the traditional medical sense, but it is health in the bigger sense of our story as humans. We are faced with all sorts of terrible circumstances, and health is not finding balance, or finding a perfect life that somehow appears to dodge those awful things that come in spite of our best efforts to avoid them. In a sense we are all terminally ill from the time of our birth. All of us racing towards the grave. And a definition of health that assumes the absence of physical pathology, psychopathology, or suffering, is heavily in denial of the fact that we are all on a steady course towards death.
Suffering is not the problem, alienation is. At least, that's how I'm reading Genesis these days.
Fundamentally, alienation from God, from each other, and from ourselves is the problem.
Alienation breaks us away from God inhabiting our lives and our world. Suffering becomes meaningless. The self becomes a false self created to maximize our own advantage, rather than a self defined primarily in terms of relationship to the creator.
So what is health then?
In this view health is a reconciliation from the alienation that results in us being less than human, uninhabited; merely biological organisms detached from the life of God.
So you can be sick (biologically) but healthy in the grander sense of the term if you can be reconciled and allow God to inhabit your life.
As always I'm open to feedback on this idea. These ideas are percolating, and have had little time for refinement.
Reactions?
Health
is something to do with the bridging of a gulf between flesh and
spirit. And often as we look at the Gospel stories of healing, as we
look at them hard and carefully, we will see how healing there emerges
in a situation, whereas we look more closely at it, there is some sort
of concealed alienation, some sort of bruised relationship. Much to
simple to say, 'Jesus comes and heals sick people and that's wonderful
and everyone is very glad.' That is very much the bottom line of the
Gospel stories. But look harder and you can see how the act of healing
in these contexts is, again and again, subtly connected with different
kinds of isolation, different kinds of alienation. - See more at:
http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2111/the-theology-of-health-and-healing-hildegard-lecture-thirsk#sthash.ihf1pn46.dpuf
Health
is something to do with the bridging of a gulf between flesh and
spirit. And often as we look at the Gospel stories of healing, as we
look at them hard and carefully, we will see how healing there emerges
in a situation, whereas we look more closely at it, there is some sort
of concealed alienation, some sort of bruised relationship. Much to
simple to say, 'Jesus comes and heals sick people and that's wonderful
and everyone is very glad.' That is very much the bottom line of the
Gospel stories. But look harder and you can see how the act of healing
in these contexts is, again and again, subtly connected with different
kinds of isolation, different kinds of alienation. - See more at:
http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2111/the-theology-of-health-and-healing-hildegard-lecture-thirsk#sthash.ihf1pn46.dpuf
Health
is something to do with the bridging of a gulf between flesh and
spirit. And often as we look at the Gospel stories of healing, as we
look at them hard and carefully, we will see how healing there emerges
in a situation, whereas we look more closely at it, there is some sort
of concealed alienation, some sort of bruised relationship. Much to
simple to say, 'Jesus comes and heals sick people and that's wonderful
and everyone is very glad.' That is very much the bottom line of the
Gospel stories. But look harder and you can see how the act of healing
in these contexts is, again and again, subtly connected with different
kinds of isolation, different kinds of alienation. - See more at:
http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2111/the-theology-of-health-and-healing-hildegard-lecture-thirsk#sthash.ihf1pn46.dpuf
Health
is something to do with the bridging of a gulf between flesh and
spirit. And often as we look at the Gospel stories of healing, as we
look at them hard and carefully, we will see how healing there emerges
in a situation, whereas we look more closely at it, there is some sort
of concealed alienation, some sort of bruised relationship. Much to
simple to say, 'Jesus comes and heals sick people and that's wonderful
and everyone is very glad.' That is very much the bottom line of the
Gospel stories. But look harder and you can see how the act of healing
in these contexts is, again and again, subtly connected with different
kinds of isolation, different kinds of alienation. - See more at:
http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2111/the-theology-of-health-and-healing-hildegard-lecture-thirsk#sthash.ihf1pn46.dpuf
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