may be in good health, just as it is well with your soul’ (3 John 2). So what does ‘good health’ mean?
One famous, or notorious, definition of health was offered by the World Health Organization: ‘Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, not simply the absence of illness and disease.’ This is both too limited and too broad. It is too limited in that it makes no reference to a person’s spiritual progress as part of the meaning of health, and in that it concentrates on a ‘state’ of well-being, whereas human life is a constantly changing journey. But it is also too broad in failing to recognize the inevitability of ageing and death, and offers too utopian a vision of life without pain, and no recognition of the redemptive possibilities that suffering can sometimes bring. More simply, and more satisfactorily, the theologian Jürgen Moltmann suggests that health is ‘the strength to be human’. His conclusion is worth quoting:
If we understand health as the strength to be human, then we make being human more important than the state of being healthy. Health is not the meaning of human life. On the contrary, a person has to prove the meaning he has found in his own life in conditions of health and sickness. Only what can stand up to both health and sickness, and ultimately to living and dying, can count as a valid definition of what it means to be human.[2]
Disease, illness and sickness
Some people understand health mostly in relation to disease: an objective condition concerned with those parts of our bodies that are not functioning properly. I visited Zambia with Christian Aid a few years ago, and met a woman, Theresa, in her late twenties, sitting on the floor of her small mud house. Her body was desperately weak through contracting the HIV virus via a blood transfusion. Her ‘lack of health’ was in large part due to the intrusion of a virus into her bloodstream. If health is the absence of disease, then healing becomes restoring proper functioning to an organ, or to the body as a whole. For Theresa it might have meant anti-retro-viral drugs, until something better was discovered – if she could afford them that is, and if there was nursing care available to help her take the medication.
Others understand health as the absence of illness: this is a more subjective word. When I feel ill, it may be the result of some disease, or it may come from more complicated emotional factors such as relationships being strained, or the environment in which I live being too stressful. Healing, then, comes to mean the restoration of a person’s sense of their own well-being. In Theresa’s case, her suffering was made considerably worse by the fact that her whole family had disowned her when she admitted to having the so-called ‘stigma’ of AIDS. She had been left to the care of some voluntary nurses who worked at a Catholic centre on the compound where her small house was situated. They were able to call on her a few times a week, with a little food, and some oil to rub into her ulcerated skin. The obvious emotional distress of being abandoned by her family simply compounded the disease itself.
Yet others think of health primarily in relation to what we may call ‘sicknesses’. We can understand this as a social definition. A person is sometimes said to be ‘sick’ if they do not fit in with society’s understanding of what is ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’. A few decades ago, behind the Iron Curtain, a person who did not comply with society’s political ideas was defined as ‘sick’, and treated in a psychiatric hospital. Others are defined as ‘sick’ if they do not conform to what society expects of them because of their sexual orientation, or the shape of their nose, or some mental handicap; sometimes it can even be the process of simply growing old. Of course, it may be that ‘society’ itself is ‘sick’ rather than the individual who does not fit in. Either way, someone’s social environment can be significant in relation both to disease and to illness.
For Theresa, her situation was made even harder by anxiety concerning her two young children. They attended a school where 75 per cent of the pupils were affected by the HIV virus within the family, and many were already orphans. When I visited the school of 730 pupils, there was a staff of ten, only two of whom were trained teachers. The sad fact was that there were several thousand unemployed teachers who had been fully trained in Zambia, but they were unemployable through lack of finance. There were insufficient resources for proper care of the children – what would ultimately happen to Theresa’s? The ‘sick economic context’ of Theresa’s society was a major factor in her own health and that of those around her.
To give a different example, down the middle of the street in Matopeni, one of the slums of Nairobi in Kenya, is an open sewer in which human waste and all other rubbish is thrown. There is a little bridge over the sewer, and people walk across this and children play and scavenge nearby. No clean water there, or toilets, or showers. The brute fact is that one in eight people on this planet has no access to clean water. Matopeni is a small settlement. Sixty per cent of the people of Nairobi live in slums. Matopeni means ‘in the mud’. There is little dignity there, and health is poor. HIV and typhoid are widespread. There is lack of education, bad housing, bad food, bad clothing. So morale diminishes, behaviour becomes antisocial; men drink too much; and the young girls go into the sex industry to try to scrape together enough money to feed the children.
One local woman, Catherine Kithuku, caught a vision for change, and became determined to improve living standards. Catherine and her friend Veronica set up a community group, mostly made up of single mothers, concerned for the welfare of their children. With support from a local Christian Aid partner organization, Catherine Kithuku has been working for the Matopeni community to construct a water and sanitation block to improve health and generate a small income. This is her prayer:
I pray for change. I pray to live a clean, comfortable life, with privacy. I pray to see my family move out of slum life. I would ask people to pray for better housing, for children to be educated, for jobs for the young people, and support for single parents and the elderly. But most of all I pray for clean water. Without clean water we get sick. We have a lack of money and cannot afford to buy water. It will help bring a change in attitude. People will clean themselves more; they will clean their houses more; it will lead to a clean environment in more ways than one.[3]
‘Health’, then, is a broad term. It covers viruses and bacteria, and deals with the body as a functioning biological whole. It affects the individual person at many levels, physical, biological, psychological, social, moral and spiritual. Health is related to families, the individual person in a network of relationships with other people. It reaches out into the neighbourhood. The social setting of our lives impinges on our health in many different ways. Another dimension of health is ecological: the wider environment of clean water, traffic noise, air pollution, climate change.
The Christian ministry of healing must concern itself with all these aspects of health. From the management of disease, to nursing care; from learning through suffering to finding new ways of being strong and healthy. Christians will be interested in surgery and medication, concerned with emotional health, counselling and therapy. Christians will care about the social pressures that make for illness, and seek for justice, which is the expression of love in our social environments. Christian concern will extend to the wider environment of the planet, the air we breathe, the quality and sufficiency of food supplies, the need for clean water. Health will embrace the whole of our spiritual environment before God. We are concerned not only with removing what is wrong, but with promoting what is healthy: community care, public health, spiritual well-being.
A whole person
Underneath these Christian concerns is the conviction that a person is not to be split up into different parts, but thought of as one spiritual–psychosomatic whole.
We recall the prayer in 3 John, where the author prays for ‘good health’, and then adds, ‘just as it is well with your soul’ (3 John 2). The impression is given that body and ‘soul’ are separate parts of the person. In fact, they are better understood as different perspectives on the whole person. Even the New Testament phrase ‘spirit and soul and body’ (1 Thess. 5.23), which looks as though it splits us
