Part 3 of 4 in the series Spiritual Perspectives on the Covid-19 Pandemic
By Mark Kutolowski
You can listen to the audio version of this blog on our podcast page.
“The glory of God is a human being, fully alive.” St. Irenaeus of Lyons (2nd century)
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“Healing is salvation. Salvation is healing. They’re the same thing.”
Father Kelly let his words hang in the hot desert air for what felt like minutes. As I did twice a week, I had come to visit him in his hermitage, nestled amidst mesquite trees in the heart of a 400,000-acre Southeast Texas ranch with no more than a handful of permanent residents. He had become my spiritual father, and during my year-long stay at Lebh Shomea House of Prayer these meetings were often my only human conversation for the week. I would spend about three hours a day in scripture study, four to five hours in silent prayer, and another four hours on my work assignments—cleaning bathrooms, pitchforking decomposing compost, watering young trees and weeding a cemetery. After several days of reflecting on scripture in solitude, I would come to see Father Kelly, and I’d ask him to expound on the meaning of key words of scripture. This week, I was asking about ‘salvation.’
I’m sure he saw the astounded look on my face. Before I gathered up my wits to ask a question, he continued, “The Greek word, soteria means both salvation and healing. In the English translation of the New Testament, we chose which word to use based on the context. When you see the words ‘save, salvation, savior, and heal, healer, and healing’ written in English, they’re translations of the same word in Greek. To be healed is to be saved – and to be saved is to be healed. We’ve created a dichotomy where there is none in the original Greek.”
We spent the next hour unpacking what this meant. In the Bible, healing is always about the restoration of relationship—of a person with God, and often of a person with other people or their community. Bodily healing was not separate from spiritual healing. The two are depicted as occurring together. To be ‘saved’ in the original sense meant to be restored to healthy relationship with God, the creator and sustainer of all life. Sin meant being cut off from the God of life, and salvation was the healing of the relationship with this same life-giving God. The whole of Jesus’ ministry was that of both healer and savior. In the Gospel narratives, the bodies and souls of many were utterly transformed by His presence.
Father Kelly summed it up—"God is life – and when we are with God we are healed, saved, and made whole. To be apart from God is to be cut off from life.”
As I left Father Kelly’s cell and began my slow walk through the desert sands to my own hermitage, I was filled with wonder. I knew in my heart that what he was saying was deeply true. Yet why had I never heard this before?
The split between body and soul
Christianity’s foundational claim is that God became human. Yet for a religion based on the intimacy between Divinity and a human body, our tradition has had a strangely tortured relationship with health and healing. Yes, the Gospel stories are filled with accounts of Jesus’ miraculous healings. For Catholics and Orthodox, we grow up hearing stories of miraculous healings at the hands of saints throughout the centuries. Yet for the overwhelming majority of Christians in the West, we perceive bodily healing as largely a matter of science and medicine, as opposed to the ‘spiritual’ work of salvation. The two exist in separate categories. We may pray for someone’s physical healing – but the actual work of health care takes place squarely in the realm of secular medicine. Similarly, we’ve come to believe that the state of our bodies has little to do with the state of our souls – and that prayer exists in a spiritual realm beyond the realm of our embodied selves. How did we get here?
As Father Kelly emphasized, this split between body and spirit, or between healing and salvation, does not exist in the Bible. In both the Old and New Testaments, the unity of spiritual and physical health is assumed. This connection played out beyond the earthly life of Jesus and was continued in the many miraculous healings by Jesus’ disciples in the Acts of the Apostles. Throughout the Bible, physical healing and spiritual salvation are interconnected aspects of the same movement of restoration. Physical healing continued to be central to the ministry of the early church. In his book The Healing Reawakening (2006), Francis MacNutt traces this early history, claiming that physical healing (and exorcism) was the primary way Christianity spread in the first three centuries.
Yet in these same centuries, the body-soul duality present in Greek philosophy crept into the church. Conventional Christian thought drifted from the New Testament unity of body, soul, and spirit to the Greek idea of the immortal, superior soul contained in the mortal, inferior body. As Christianity went from a persecuted minority religion to the state religion of the Roman empire, this essentially Greco-Roman understanding of the human person became the prevalent view of the Christian faithful.
In later centuries, the split became even more extreme. From the high middle ages through the Renaissance and early modern period, the Christian church and evolving scientific thought struck a sort of uneasy truce – the church would focus on the spiritual world and have authority over the human soul, and science would focus on the physical world, and scientific medicine would have authority over the human body. For example, the Sacrament of Anointing, which in earlier centuries was administered for both spiritual and physical healing, evolved into an exclusive focus on spiritually healing the soul of a dying person in preparation for eternal life. Over time, the two systems – Christianity for the soul, and scientific medicine for the body, evolved as sort of parallel systems.
It’s only when I began studying the traditional healing systems of China, India, and the Indigenous world that it occurred to me that this split is profoundly strange. I’m not aware of any traditional, non-Western healing system that has this kind of split. It means that the medicine of our recent centuries has evolved on a purely material realm. The scientific method works entirely through observation of trends in material reality. With science operating in relative isolation from religion, over the centuries this has led to the development of materialism – the idea that because only the material world can be observed directly with the senses and the scientific method, the material world is all that exists. Regardless of the religious beliefs of any individual scientist or doctor, medicine in the western world is practiced in this profane context. ‘Profane’ literally means ‘outside the temple’ and our medicine has long been conceived and practiced outside of a spiritual worldview.
Christianity is given a few minor roles in the contemporary medical landscape: monitoring ethics and providing medical services. Churches and other Christian institutions will speak out about the ethics of certain medical practices as they are developed by the secular medical system – especially technologies to assist reproduction or end of life issues. Churches and Christian institutions also devote tremendous resources to providing medical care – as evidenced by the many Catholic hospitals, as well as innumerable scrappy neighborhood clinics set up to serve the poor both in the USA and in medical missions abroad. Both of these realms (ethics and access) accept as a given the supreme authority of the secular medical system to deliver the ‘goods’ of care of the body. Christianity is limited to a supporting role.
Since my desert meeting with Father Kelly, I’ve spent the past twenty years exploring the intersection between Christian spirituality and the body. I’m convinced of the tremendous potential of integrating the body in Christian spiritual practice. I’ve observed that both our physical and spiritual health suffer when we keep these realms disconnected, and they benefit when we integrate body, soul, and spirit. We are whole people, and the healing and flourishing of our bodies and our souls are intimately linked. Over two decades of my own practice, and fifteen years as both a spiritual director and a health coach, I’ve found that we live happier, healthier, holier lives when we engage with our spiritual and physical health as a unified whole.
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A Christian Vision of Health
What does a Christian vision of health look like? In this next section I explore how I have come to understand health from a perspective that takes the ancient Christian understanding of the unity of body, soul, and spirit seriously. I see two essential components—an understanding of our inherent wholeness and an understanding of health as unity.
The vision I’m describing here is more descriptive than prescriptive. I don’t mean for this to be a new list of tasks to accomplish or to imply that health requires ‘getting it right’ in all the realms I describe. Instead, it is an observation that on every level, health increases when there is relationship and connection, and dis-ease increases when there is rupture of relationship. It’s a natural law of health. The law remains at work and influences our being whether we believe in it or not.
Our inherent wholeness: We are whole, as we are made in the image and likeness of God. We are created as a union of matter and spirit. Our bodies are a part of the harmony and dignity of the natural world, intricately ordered to flourish in nature. Each of our bodies, with all its uniqueness, quirks, and diversity, radiate an aspect of God’s nature into the world simply by our existence. Our spirits are rooted in God and connect us to the very source of life. Our original nature is oneness, health, and vitality. Our bodies and souls both bear an imprint of divinity. Health, in this view, is not something we acquire or accomplish by doing all the right things. It is our natural state, and aspects of our original vitality always remain as long as we are alive. When we become dis-eased, we do not need to attain health from outside ourselves. Instead, we are called to turn back, and re-engage with our original wholeness. If our original nature is wholeness, then healing is always an act of restoration, rather than the acquisition of something that is outside of us.
Health as unity: Many key Biblical concepts express an understanding of health as the unity of disparate parts. The Hebrew word ‘shalom’ is often translated ‘peace,’ but it more fully means the peace that comes from the drawing together in harmony of all that was once separate. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus instructs his disciples in Matthew 5:48 to ‘be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.’ The word ‘perfect’ would be better translated as ‘without division’ or ‘unified.’ Satan is described as ‘the adversary’ and ‘the accuser,’ or one who divides. Jesus prays that his disciples become one in him,[1] like a vine with many branches,[2] and says they will be known as his disciples precisely by their loving unity with one another.[3] St. Paul depicts the ideal Christian community with the metaphor of a healthy body – each part offering its gifts as part of the whole.[4]
I believe this notion of health as unity provides a powerful template for understanding a holistic Christian vision of health. Unity is the source of health on many levels—at each level of our being unity brings health and wholeness, and disconnection brings suffering and dis-ease.
1. Unity between a person and God: The most essential union for human flourishing is the union between a person and God. When we are intimate with God, the deepest need of the human person (herself made in God’s image and likeness) is fulfilled. We enter into the limitless peace of the Kingdom of God, and find spiritual freedom, peace, and love. This is Jesus Christ’s most essential mission—to restore the ruptured unity between human beings and God. Without this union, our inner landscape is marred by division as we try to fill a ‘God-sized hole’ with finite things that can never fully satisfy. We remain, as St. Augustine said, ‘forever restless until we rest in God.’ The most basic and essential level of health from a Christian perspective is intimacy with God. The regular practice of prayer grounds our lives in spiritual health.
2. Unity between people: The next level of human health is to have harmonious, close relationships with other people. When we live in friendship and love with others, we feel connected, secure, and fully alive. Countless studies show profound mental and physical benefits from enjoying close friendships and strong marriages. Along with intimacy with God, intimacy with others is essential to our psychological well-being. We are social beings and thrive in close connection with others. Both isolation and discord in our close relationships bring stress, isolation, and deterioration in our well-being. Spiritual disciplines like forgiveness and non-judgement provide tools to help us remain in loving relationship with others.
3. Unity between a person and nature: Just as we flourish in close relationship with God and other people, we also thrive when we are connected to the natural world. We are of earth, and our bodies and souls are strengthened by daily contact with the forces of nature—both elemental (earth, air, fire, and water) and biological (plants, animals, fungi and microbes). When we engage with nature, our immune systems are strengthened, our nervous systems relax, and all aspects of human functioning benefit. There are many studies showing profound physical and mental benefits to spending time in nature—but most of us know it just plain feels good! By maintaining a discipline of regular contact with nature, we can ensure this aspect of human health and flourishing. It might be a practice of hiking for one person, river and lake swimming for another, gardening for another, keeping chickens for another. Whenever we make contact with nature a regular part of our life, we grow in health and vitality.
4. Unity of all parts of the self: The New Testament describes the human person as a unity of body (soma), soul (psyche) and spirit (pneuma). Unity of body, soul and spirit means that we are integrated in all three aspects of our being. For example, we root our prayer (spirit realm) in our bodies and souls, and we feel our emotions and thoughts (soul realm) in our bodies. When each aspect of our being is in lively connection with each other aspect we become balanced, whole people. When any one part is disconnected from any other part, our health suffers.
5. Unity of all parts of the soul: We each have many complex emotions within our psyche—affection, joy, anger, sadness, grief, frustration. A major aspect of psychological health is the ability to hold or ‘be with’ each emotion as it rises in consciousness. In health, we allow all emotions to be without over-identifying with some emotions while repressing others. Similarly, in a healthy psyche we allow all of our ‘selves’ or ‘sub-personalities’ (often described with archetypical names such as ‘the protector’, ‘the critic’, and ‘the inner child’) to be present and in relationship with each other, without demonizing or driving any of them into the unconscious.
6. Unity of all parts of the body: Our bodies function best when all parts of the body are highly interconnected. For example, wherever blood flows freely, we have healthy tissue, and wherever blood flow is restricted, tissue function suffers. In a healthy body, all organ systems (circulatory, pulmonary, neuromuscular, skeletal, endocrine, etc.) are connected to one another and function as an integrated whole. When a muscle needs more oxygen, the lungs draw in more air, red blood cells absorb oxygen and the heart and arteries efficiently pump the oxygenated blood to where it’s needed. Each body system functions because it is in dynamic, harmonious relationship with the other systems. Traditional body cultivation systems like Russian Systema, Yoga, and Tai Chi all develop a body that is soft, flexible, relaxed and fluid. They’re all based on a common insight—where there is interconnectedness and flow, there is health. Where there is constriction, there is dis-ease.
7. Unity with our real creaturely needs: We are embodied creatures, and our bodies have basic needs for optimal function. Unity on this level means listening to the real limits and needs of our body and providing for them. This may sound obvious, but it can be challenging in an industrial landscape that is built to deny the needs and limits of the body—through nutrient deficient, highly flavorful food, through electronic stimulation into the night, and sedentary work. When we take seriously the natural needs of our body, and seek to provide for them through natural food, regular sleep and movement, our bodies flourish. When we ignore the limits and boundaries of our bodies, we inevitably fail to thrive.
8. Restoring unity through relationship with healing plant medicines: One common insight of indigenous people across the globe is that every ecosystem contains the plant medicines necessary for the healing of the people in that region.[5] The Creator has given human beings the gift of medicine plants that can help us to heal when we become ill and fall out of balance. These are not a substitute for a whole life lived in balance with God, others, nature, and our selves. When we fall out of balance and need help to return, God has placed the medicinal plants in every ecosystem that are needed for the people of that region to heal themselves. With gratitude and reverence, we can use these medicinal allies to support our return to unity when we have fallen into dis-ease.
Each of these levels of health flows from the overarching Christian understanding of health as unity. In this approach, health is an active, dynamic state that emerges naturally from a state of unity and interconnectedness.
In this Christian vision of health, there is no need for judgement or condemnation of ourselves or others when illness occurs. In addition to our inherent wholeness and invitation to unity, we also all share in a universal experience of separation—what past centuries have called ‘original sin’ and modern contemplatives call ‘the human condition.’ We all experience a level of dis-unity, of disconnection from God, from others, from nature and from ourselves. This is a universal human experience and is not the result of the personal failing of any one of us. To be human is to live into the paradox of both our original wholeness and unity, and of our universal experience of division and separateness. From this perspective, we all experience varying levels of health (unity) and dis-ease (separation). The movement of health is a movement of return—we return to our original wholeness, seeking to understand and support the natural self-healing capacities of our body and psyche. We turn towards God, other people, and nature, acknowledging our need for others and that our health is intricately connected to our relationship with them.
A passage in John’s gospel speaks to this:
As Jesus passed by he saw a man (who was) blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered ‘Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him.’ (John 9:1-3)
This passage illuminates a Christic approach to disease. It is not about blaming ourselves, or anyone else. Instead, we can humbly accept the reality of illness, suffering and disease in our life, as well as in the life of the world. Then, we can take the presence of the disease as an opportunity to ‘reveal the works of God’ by taking up the journey of restoration and unity. This restoration might mean the cure of a physical disease. It might also mean the acceptance of limits and a new relationship with life. Someone who becomes wheelchair-bound after a car accident might not regain their ability to walk, but they can be re-integrated into a community of love and connection with God, others, and nature, finding a new way of relating to their body and limits that leads to a life of peace and abundance.
Many factors that affect our personal health are not a result of personal choice. Many poor miners across the globe die early from lung disease as they struggle to feed their families. The ‘rupture in relationship’ here is the way our economy is built on resource extraction (an unhealthy relationship with nature), often on the backs of the poor (an unhealthy relationship between people), rather than any personal fault of the miners. Health as relationship in this case means a collective reevaluation of our culture’s relationship with the natural world and between the wealthy and the poor.
In this wider understanding of health, even death need not be the end of health. As the Catholic funeral liturgy proclaims: ‘We believe that life is changed, not ended (by death)’. If we remain with our consciousness oriented towards love and unity with God and others, the passage of death is not a cause of separation, but a radical transformation of the nature of our intimacy with our divine Source and our loved ones.
This same emphasis on inherent wholeness and health as unity applies to the health of human communities and natural systems as well as individual people. Our communities are healthiest when we are well connected in bonds of love, mutual support, and understanding. Gardens flourish where there is a wide diversity of plant, insect, fungal and microbial life functioning in interdependent relationships. Ecosystems are most resilient when there is greater biodiversity and a more intricate web of relationships between many species.
Like Chinese, Ayurvedic, and Indigenous health systems, the Christian health system I’ve just articulated could be described as an ‘immune-based’ or ‘terrain-based’ approach to health. These systems view the human body as capable of abundant health. When disease occurs, ‘terrain-based’ systems look to the landscape of the patient (the ‘terrain’) to see what is out of balance that allowed a pathogen to gain access and develop into symptomatic disease. The emphasis is on restoring the health of the terrain, rather than on fighting the pathogen. While not rejecting the concept of bacteria or viruses acting to create disease, terrain-based systems observe that the ‘germ’ can only establish itself where there is an opening in the terrain, much as weeds only grow in the bare soil of a garden. Their emphasis is therefore largely focused on restoring the health of the ‘terrain’ of the body, trusting that disease cannot flourish where the terrain is intact. As an example, when our gut microbiome is healthy, harmful bacteria have no place to gain a foothold, and we are largely impervious to gastrointestinal illness. This same approach applies equally to the ‘terrain’ of the whole – of our families, our societies, and the health of our ecosystems. The ‘terrain’ of each individual body is deeply interconnected with the ‘terrain’ of the local community and the local environment – when the ‘terrain’ of community and ecological health is enhanced, the ‘terrain’ of each individual is strengthened.
Whither COVID?
Over the past two years, I’ve become increasingly concerned about the US government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m not interested here in talking about the efficacy of measures like vaccines, lockdowns, masking or social distancing, or about why certain treatments for COVID were centrally promoted while certain treatments were suppressed. What concerns me is the way the government efforts have focused almost exclusively on fighting the virus, with almost no understanding of the need to preserve, protect, and promote the overall health of the population. I honestly don’t know if the extreme mitigation measures were necessary, or if the total health outcome for our population would have been worse if a different approach was taken. But when I look around, I see that the total health of my community, and of many people I know and love, has suffered greatly over the past two years. In an effort to stop COVID at all costs, public health measures created conditions of fear, stress, and isolation that have made many other aspects of our health worse—increasing rates of mental illness, drug use, violence, and childhood depression and anxiety. In a vicious spiral, US COVID public health restrictions have led to an increase in weight gain and obesity, and obesity is strongly linked to increased risk of severe COVID. I personally know two people (one student, one colleague) commit suicide, and I’ve seen many marriages dissolve among friends. The stress of the past two years was almost certainly a factor in each of these tragedies.
Perhaps these are necessary evils, and the risk of the virus was so great that protecting against COVID justifies the harm that has likely come from the mitigation efforts. What is most troubling to me is that these other factors were not even considered. In the official narrative, only COVID statistics matter—cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Other aspects of health—physical, mental, emotional, social, and economic—have rarely been a part of the equation.
In a similar way, once the vaccines became available, they were promoted as all-important, with little to no mention of the many other factors that determine one’s susceptibility to COVID. Instead, the underlying message since the vaccines have become available has been that vaccination is the only thing that will provide safety. Perhaps the strongest example of this ‘only the vaccine matters’ approach was the Krispy Kreme vaccine promotion: show your vaccine card, and you get a free donut a day for the rest of the year! In a refreshing contrast, El Salvador’s recent COVID prevention ad campaign promotes a healthy diet, exercise, attaining your ideal weight, getting fresh air and sunlight, drinking 2 liters of water daily, reducing stress and spending time on yourself, and getting enough sleep each night as a way to care for ourselves—and each other.
The El Salvador video is a rare exception to the myopic approach to addressing COVID that has been almost universal across the globe. It highlights the agency of people to turn, change their lives for the better, and align ourselves with natural law as a means of protection against COVID. A holistic approach like this has the added benefit of simultaneously improving health outcomes against every other disease, both infectious diseases like the flu as well as chronic conditions like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. This approach also has the advantage of being beneficial to both vaccinated and unvaccinated, mask wearing and mask opposing. It does not require one to pick sides in the ‘vaccine wars.’ We can all benefit from restoring our bodies’ baselines of health, regardless of how we might regard the official COVID narrative and counter-narratives.
In addition to the practical suggestions of the El Salvador video, there are simple things we can do that simultaneously provide benefits to our physical health and our spiritual health amidst the ongoing pandemic. One example is fasting. Fasting is an ancient spiritual tool for turning towards God by redirecting our energies from matter to spirit by going without food, especially when accompanied by prayer. Fasting is also popular with natural health and fitness advocates as a powerful way to increase metabolic flexibility—enhancing the body’s ability to switch from burning sugars to burning fat for fuel. Metabolic inflexibility and associated disorders are strongly associated with increased risk of severe COVID. A weekly 24 to 36-hour fast can simultaneously be a way to open to God, build overall metabolic health, and strengthen our body against COVID.
Of course, I’m not saying that everyone needs to fast. The example of fasting highlights the potential to a holistic approach to health, where both body and spirit can benefit from the same simple discipline. There are many other disciplines like this, and ways we can choose to simultaneously honor body, soul, and spirit in a life of wholeness.
Living in Wholeness
Where do we go with all this? I am under no illusion that our society and public health systems will shift to adopt a holistic vision of health. Our modern health system is inexorably wedded to the narrative of control and progress that has been ascendant in the West for several hundred years. Whatever happens with COVID in the coming months, the pathogen-fighting, germ-centric approach will almost certainly remain central to public consciousness. The medical system will limp along, failing to address the weak ‘terrain’ that made COVID potentially dangerous for so many Americans. As it does so, it will do little to build strength in our bodies or souls to face the next pandemic or other health crisis that may come our way.
However, we as individuals can chose to adopt a holistic vision of health. For those of us seeking to align our life with the Way of Christ, we can make a commitment to view our health as a part of our spiritual life. We can rediscover our inherent wholeness in God, and the underlying principle of health as unity of relationship. We can each cultivate our health as whole human persons, radiating strength and resiliency in body, soul, and spirit. In this approach, we do not focus on fighting disease, but on living in wholeness and unity with God, others, nature, and with all aspects of ourselves. It is a way of life built on gratitude for the gift of life, and on the immense healing power of loving relationships.
In taking up a Christian vision of health, and committing to a life of wholeness and unity, we can also begin to heal the disastrous rupture between science and religion that has plagued Western civilization for centuries. We can learn to recognize care of the soul, care of the body, care of our communities and care of the earth as a single, unified way of life. Our world is hungering for a new vision of wholeness, one that includes all aspects of being human. It’s time for us to live lives of wholeness, and to together walk in a new way of unity that brings health, wholeness, and holiness to our lives and to our communities.
[1]Jn 17:20-26
[2]Jn 15:1-8
[3]Jn 13:34-35
[4]I Cor 12:12-27
[5]This insight was first shared with me by my college mentor, biologist, lawyer and indigenous rights activist Dr. Russel Barsh. He had heard this same perspective from tribal elders across North America, Latin America, Polynesia, Africa, and Southeast Asia.