Don't skip out on this post too quickly...it's not really about football, it's about something bigger.
So on Sunday my beloved Packers lost an excruciating and crucial game. They had a 16 point lead. There just didn't seem near enough time for the Seahawks to come back. A series of critical errors would have to unfold for them lose. A trip to the Superbowl was within their reach... and yet they managed to snap defeat from the jaws of victory.
Why do close games that we lose hurt like they do?
On one hand it seems silly to even use words like "hurt" when talking about being a fan of a professional sports team. Isn't it just a game? A game played by strangers, who's only really affiliation and allegiance is one I willingly (and somewhat arbitrarily) give them by choosing to consider it of any importance in my life?
Isn't it just another form of entertainment?
Yes. It is. But...
I wonder if our emotions in response to watching games (just like theater or movies) pulls for something deeper? Doesn't it pull for something in the emotional dramas of our own lives?
Actually, I don't wonder, I'm pretty convinced this must be true because how else can we explain the compelling and consuming force that professional sports are in our culture (and have been throughout history so far as I understand it)?
The dramas, the stories, the intense feelings we (okay, some of us) experience when watching sports, are likely so captivating because they parallel a different set of dramas, stories, and feelings in our own lives.
We love the underdog sports story, because we've all been the underdog at some point and can empathize with how that feels. The victory of an underdog has a kind of therapeutic value for us because we delight in the idea that all of us who have been underdogs can overcome our struggles in life.
But what about the losses? What about the kind of loss that happened to the Packers yesterday, where everything was going so well, only to have a collapse at the very end and seemingly be unable to do anything to stop it?
For me it taps into a deep anxiety I have about the world.
It's the gnawing sense that when things are going your way, tragedy lies just around the corner.
It's about that deep sense of vulnerability that all of us experience, but many of us hide.
When life, or the tragedy of a sports team, puncture our illusions that we can construct for ourselves a world of self-sufficiency and safety, we are left to confront that terrible vulnerability we experience because the universe appears to be an enormous, chaotic, unfriendly place. And we appear to be insignificant suffering creatures who can do little to control anything, least of all our imminent death.
We are vulnerable, and it is terrifying. And it may seem like a giant leap to you that I've taken thirty lines of text to get from yesterday's sports scores to the quintessential dilemmas of existence. Maybe I am blowing things out of proportion. Maybe I go looking for any excuse to find parallels so I can talk about my own existential angst.
But the truth as I see it, is that any reminder of our human vulnerability is painful but also a tremendous gift. To embrace our vulnerability is to at least temporarily confront the illusions we live by. And while those illusions might help us live "normal" lives, we need to be aware of our own vulnerability and neediness, so that we can truly see it and respond to it in others.
No lead is safe in football. No lead is safe in life. We are vulnerable. Control is an illusion. But if are willing to engage our vulnerability rather than cover it up, perhaps we can live with clarity, compassion, and love.
P.S. After the game the Seahawks quarterback, Russell Wilson was reported to have said he was convinced that divine intervention had played a critical role in their victory. The Packers quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, later responded that he didn't think God cared at all what happens in football games, although he thinks God cares very much about the people who play in football games.
Nicely said Aaron.
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Saturday, January 10, 2015
Health isn't the absence of pathology
What exactly do we mean when we use the word "healthy"?
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?
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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