health and wholeness
I’m joined this week in Estes Park, Colorado with a group of pastors here for the annual retreat that I convene each year, with essential help from my wife, Claudia. The retreat is a combination of adventure in the wildness of the Rocky Mountains and prayer, theological reflection, prayer, music and conviviality. We hike every day, in the mountains, by the streams and in the valley looking for birds, elk, moose, bear and whatever appears. Then we gather for a couple hours of reflection in the afternoon before enjoying a communal meal. The days ends with a gathering round the fire for stories and music, and evening prayer. This is the 12th year of our gathering. The texts we are exploring for year 2025 are decidedly old school, with lasting wisdom. Daniel Berrigan’s Uncommon Prayer, a commentary of Psalms, William Stringfellow’s collected theological writings and an essay by Wendell Berry. It’s a retreat to renew our spirit, strengthen our pastoral vocation and provide collegial support for the work of ministry. Today I offer a brief comment on Wendell Berry’s work.
In a speech entitled "Health is Membership,” the essayist, poet and farmer explores what health means, particularly how it includes the land and communities. The speech was delivered at a Louisville Seminary conference on “Spirituality and Healing.” In his usual manner, Berry goes to great lengths to show how a proper understanding of healing and health must include attention to the way health is construed in relationship to the land and economy.
He asserts, “From our constant and increasing concerns about health, you can tell how seriously diseased we are. Health, as we may remember from at least some of the days of our youth, is at once wholeness and a kind of unconsciousness. Disease (dis-ease), on the contrary, makes us conscious not only of the state of our health but of the division of our bodies and our world into parts.” He continues,
"The word “health,” is fact, comes from the same Indo-European root as “heal,” “whole,” and “holy.” To be healthy is literally to be whole; to heal is to make whole. I don’t think moral healers should be credited with power to make [things] holy. But I have no doubt that such healers are properly obliged to acknowledge and respect the holiness embodied in all creatures, or that our healing involves the preservation in us of the spirit and the breath of God.”
I appreciate Berry’s insistence that any definition of health must include a sense of wholeness, which means an understanding of one’s life within a larger community and the earth. One cannot be healthy, in any normal sense of the word, as an isolated human individual. Which, of course, means that individual-ism is a threat to health as wholeness, in relationship with others. “So far,” writes Berry, “I have been implying my beliefs at every turn. Now I had better state them openly."
”I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love which subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God. I believe health is wholeness.”
He goes on to say much more about the roots of our current dis-ease, and the only manner in which it will be healed, which includes all of us and in particular those whose vocation is to speak of the ways of God in the world, shattered by sin.
I hope that you have a community of critical reflection, worship, and collegial support and that you have opportunities to explore the wondrous love of God in this world.