Health, Tech, Community & Love
Chad Anderson, my good friend and pastor, recently shared this short essay with me from Wendell Berry: “Health is Membership”. It’s not a light read by any means, but I just about wore out my green highlighter. If you only have a couple free minutes right now, I’d encourage you to bookmark the essay and mark it as a “must read for later” item. However, if your mind is fresh…and you have the time now, take a seat, get a cup of tea or coffee, and get comfortable.
Still with me? Okay, I’d like to proceed with several quotes I’ve taken from his essay and give my thoughts/questions accordingly.
Here we go:
The word “health,” in 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’ve never actually considered the root meaning of the word “health” before, and not only does this make sense logically but it gives me a new perspective on our bodies as a temple of the Holy Spirit which lives within us, described in 1 Corinthians 6:19.
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 that health is wholeness.
I am moreover a Luddite, in what I take to be the true and appropriate sense. I am not “against technology” so much as I am for community. When the choice is between the health of a community and technological innovation, I choose the health of the community. I would unhesitatingly destroy a machine before I would allow the machine to destroy my community.
I love technology, and anyone who knows me, knows I can be very passionate about technological innovation. I am all about forward progression and creativity, however I really appreciate how Wendell takes a step back and considers the health of the community. Often (or, perhaps always?), we make a trade when embracing innovation and forward progress. For example, if you invent a new way of communicating with others via technology, say using the telegraph, you remove or replace the need to physically travel to deliver the message with sending the message digitally. You replace one method or way of doing something (the “bad”) with another (the “good” or “better”) method. Most of the time, this replacement is positive and beneficial for the community - but not always. Wendell Berry reminds us to proceed with caution - which I find as a helpful reminder. Embrace a practice of Think, Do, Think - not Do, Think, Do.
Next thought:
So often we separate the physical from the spiritual. We label such activities as “spiritual” or “physical” (or perhaps “worldly”). Example would be: going to church is “spiritual” and socializing in a bar is “worldly”. I think it’s dangerous to stamp labels on such activities. I know the logic behind such assumptions - going to church, one hopefully is involved in worship and is therefore participating in activities that are honoring to God. Likewise, socializing at a bar is often interpreted as one participating in “ungodly” activities. That is an extreme example of course, but consider this: exercising is a “physical” activity vs. reading the Bible is a “spiritual” activity. The danger here is associating a particular activity with being “holy” or “wicked” (extreme), or as being “spiritual” or “purposeless” - which invariably results in a separation and eventually places a value scale on each particular activity without considering our overall “health”. Wendell goes on to explain…their is no separation between the two. Take a look at this:
What I’m arguing against here is not complexity or mystery but dualism. I would like to purge my own mind and language of such terms as “spiritual,” “physical,” “metaphysical,” and “transcendental” - all of which imply that the Creation is divided into “levels” that can readily be peeled apart and judged by human beings. I believe that the Creation is one continuous fabric comprehending simultaneously what we mean by “spirit” and what we mean by “matter.”
Our bodies are involved in the world. Their needs and desires and pleasures are physical. Our bodies hunger and thirst, yearn toward other bodies, grow tired and seek rest, rise up rested, eager to exert themselves. All these desires may be satisfied with honor to the body and its maker, but only if much else besides the individual body is brought into consideration. We have long known that individual desires must not be made the standard of their own satisfaction. We must consider the body’s manifold connections to other bodies and to the world. The body, “fearfully and wonderfully made,” is ultimately mysterious both in itself and in its dependences. Our bodies live, the Bible says, by spirit and the breath of God, but it does not say how this is so. We are not going to know about this.
Wow!
Out of the same dualism comes our confusion about the body’s proper involvement in the world. People seriously interested in health will finally have to question our society’s long-standing goals of convenience and effortlessness. What is the point of “labor saving” if by making work effortless we make it poor, and if by doing poor work we weaken our bodies and lose conviviality and health.
I had to look up the word “conviviality” which means “a jovial nature”. In other words, we might invent a slick new way of having a machine fold our laundry, wash our dishes, and steep our tea…but what’s the point if we trade our joy for convenience? I think we need to consider the purpose of “work”. Is work something we all do just so we get a paycheck? Is work only a means to some other end? I don’t think so. I’d like to do more research on this or perhaps get some thoughts from you…but I think work is designed as an integral part of our everyday life as a way of fulfilling our purpose to work the land that God has given us and have dominion over the earth as mentioned in Genesis 1 & Psalm 8. I think work is designed by God as a way for us to feel accomplishment, give us pleasure, and experience joy. Work is a part of who we are - it’s makes us whole…it’s healthy for us. Sound familiar?
The body alone is not, properly speaking, a body. Divided from its sources of air, food, drink, clothing, shelter, and companionship, a body is, properly speaking, a cadaver, whereas a machine by itself, shut down or out of fuel, is still a machine. Merely as an organism (leaving aside issues of mind and spirit) the body lives and moves and has its being, minute by minute, by an inter-involvement with other bodies and other creatures, living and unliving, that is too complex to diagram or describe. It is, moreover, under the influence of thought and feeling. It does not live by “fuel” alone.
So true! I love how Wendell Berry contrasts the differences between our body and a machine. He’s setting the stage for what he’s about to unpack as the true definition of “healing”. We can’t treat our bodies as machines - especially when considering the healing process.
In healing, the body is restored to itself. It begins to live again by its own powers and instincts, to the extent that it can do so. To the extent that it can do so, it goes free of drugs and mechanical helps. Its appetites return. It relishes food and rest. The patient is restored to family and friends, home and community and work.
Hmm, interesting. Would you say this is an accurate depiction of the way our institutionalized hospital system approaches the art of healing today?
Can our present medical industry produce an adequate definition of health? My own guess is that it cannot do so. Like industrial agriculture, industrial medicine has depended increasingly on specialist methodology, mechanical technology, and chemicals thus, its point of reference has become more and more its own technical prowess and less and less the health of creatures and habits.
Unfortunately, having an inaccurate perspective on what healing actually is, is only the beginning. The inevitable methods that follow suite are just as broken and misguided.
We are now pretty clearly involved in a crisis of health, one of the wonders of which is its immense profitability both to those who cause it and to those who propose to cure it. That the illness may prove incurable, except by catastrophe, is suggested by our economic dependence on it. Think, for example, of how readily our solutions become problems and our cures pollutants. To cure one disease, we need another. The causes, of course, are numerous and complicated, but all of them, I think, can be traced back to the old idea that our bodies are not very important except when they give us pleasure (usually, now, to somebody’s profit) or when they hurt (now, almost invariably, to somebody’s profit).
Invariably, all hope is lost and we’re doomed. Unless of course we consider love. Our body is designed by love and for love. Healing can’t happen apart from love.
A body, love insists, is neither a spirit nor a machine; it is not a picture, a diagram, a chart, a graph, an anatomy; it is not an explanation; it is not a law. It is precisely and uniquely what it is. It belongs to the world of love, which is a world of living creatures, natural orders and cycles, many small, fragile lights in the dark.
Machines can be helpful, but have major limitations. For one, they don’t share emotion or feeling with us and they can’t make judgments based on unfamiliar data. But most of all they can’t express love.
A machine makes breaths as a machine makes buttons, all the same, but every breath of a creature is itself a creature, like no other, inestimably precious.
In other words we have life - we’re a living and breathing creation made in the image of God. Machines are merely objects, without life, and without soul.
Machines are all about being efficient, and the world of love has nothing in common with the world of efficiency.
Logically, in plenitude some things ought to be expendable. Industrial economics has always believed this: abundance justifies waste. This is one of the dominant superstitions of American history-and of the history of colonialism everywhere. Expendability is also an assumption of the world of efficiency, which is why that world deals so compulsively in percentages of efficacy and safety.
But this sort of logic is absolutely alien to the world of love. To the claim that a certain drug or procedure would save 99 percent of all cancer patients or that a certain pollutant would be safe for 99 percent of a population, love, unembarrassed, would respond, “What about the one percent?”
I love this! Love cannot be explained logically or rationally. Love is mysterious.
My mind is swirling with all sorts of questions, thoughts, and anger. This world needs healing, it needs love. We do have hope, we have a Savior (Jesus Christ)…will we allow him to save us and make us whole again? Or will we rely on our efficiency and craftiness?
Where is your hope? Who or what is your heart attached to? Everything that you have, every breath that you take is a gift. Are you wasting that energy and love on something or someone that can’t satisfy? Don’t be a fool. Live, be healthy, and embrace love with open arms. Walk by faith and not by sight. Forget efficiency, choose Love!
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