Christian Idea of Health

Naaman the Syrian leper came looking for healing, for some kind of Fountain of Youth, to cleanse his corrupted flesh. The prophet Elisha healed him.  And the Lord Jesus healed the ten lepers who begged for His pity. They, too, had sought the “Fountain of Youth,” a way back to the perfect health of the Garden of Eden. [Spanish]

Christ came to heal.  He wills our health. God wills our true health, the health that consists in soundness of soul, as well as soundness of body.

We modern Americans obsess about our health. We, too, seek the Fountain of Youth. We chase it desperately, frantically. We live in abject fear of old age, pain, and death.

But do we really even understand what the word “health” means? Pope St. John Paul II put it like this:  “If we consider life as a mere consumer good, we reach a sort of cult of the body and a hedonistic quest for physical fitness.”

We human beings strive, with all our intelligence and scientific skill, to combat sickness and the suffering that goes with it.  Many people dedicate their lives to healthcare.  I daresay quite a few people reading this have given their lives to the work of healthcare.

But Jesus Christ alone teaches us what health really is. Jesus Christ is Himself the source of life and the Healer of the human race. His Body and Blood are the greatest and most important of all medicines. The Blessed Sacrament of the altar is the medicine of immortality.

Let’s consider Jesus Christ’s “health.” It begins with His interior communion with the will of the Father. Jesus declared that His life comes from the Father.  So: true health begins with this fundamental fact of our existence. We receive ourselves as a gift. From God. Almighty God gives us our life. If I imagine that health = total control of myself, my body, my powers, according to my will—well, then I have actually begun to understand health in a very unhealthy way.

Now, Lord Jesus lived a wholesome life, exercised temperance and self-control, worked steadily, kept His mind elevated, cultivated good friendships, knew how to relax. Like all His Jewish contemporaries, Jesus never “went to the gym.” For good reason. The ancient Greeks invented gyms, so the ancient Jews hated them. But our Lord nonetheless did the strenuous exercise we associate with a ‘fitness regimen.’ We can reasonably estimate that He walked an average of 20-25 miles per week through the course of His pilgrim life.

So: Jesus ‘stayed fit.’ He ate right and had a ‘healthy lifestyle’ for most of His time on earth. But there’s more: the God-man ultimately embraced human pain, suffering, and death. In fact, He became man for that precise reason: to suffer and die.

When we base our concept of health on Jesus Christ, a whole new horizon opens up for us.  We perceive that bodily suffering is not the absolute evil. And bodily suffering is not meaningless or a waste. Again, Pope St. John Paul II:

In celebrating the Eucharist, Christians proclaim and share in the sacrifice of Christ, for ‘by His wounds, we have been healed.’ Christians, uniting themselves with Christ, preserve in their own sufferings a very special particle of the infinite treasure of the world’s redemption, and can share that treasure with others. Imitating Jesus has led saints and simple believers to turn their illnesses and pain into a source of purification and salvation.

Modern medical science has benefited the human race enormously. But science cannot by itself explain the fundamental reason why sickness exists. Medicine can succeed in curing particular illnesses by accurately diagnosing them.  But if the question is: Why do we human beings get sick at all? “Germs” is not the whole answer.

We get sick, and we die, because of the Fall. In the beginning, we fell away from God and lost His grace, which is our true health. We walked away from the Fountain of Youth. Doesn’t mean that any particular individual illness of any particular individual person comes as a punishment for particular sins. No. What it means is: In the beginning, God offered us, the human race, paradise and immortality. But we refused the gift, out of pride.

We disobeyed because Satan tempted us. But God knows better than Satan. The sickness and suffering that we experience because of Original Sin can involve agonizing deprivations. But, on the cross, the Lord turned all those agonizing deprivations into the doorway back to paradise.

“Amen, amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” Lord Jesus said those words to the sinner who begged for Christ’s mercy–even as they both suffered together on their crosses. “You will be with me in paradise.” The suffering Christ speaks these words to the suffering sinner.

We cannot base our idea of “health” on anything other than our hope for that paradise that Jesus promised us at that moment. The paradise of true and complete communion with God. The paradise of an everlasting Eden. Our idea of health must embrace the cross of the Christ Who suffered. Because His Cross is the only way that truly leads to the Fountain of Youth.

True Health

Naaman the leper washed in the Jordan, and his flesh became like the flesh of a little child. Lord Jesus told the ten lepers who begged for His pity to “go, show yourselves to the priests.” As they were going, they were healed.

Christ came to heal. He wills our health. He wills our true health, the health that consists in soundness of soul, as well as soundness of body.

I think we need to seek a solid foundation for our idea of “health.” Our technocratic culture, which ostensibly offers so many helps to good health, does not really have a clear idea of what health is. Pope St. John Paul II put it like this: “If we consider life as a mere consumer good, we reach a sort of cult of the body and a hedonistic quest for physical fitness.” (World Day of the Sick, 2/11/2000)

We human beings strive, with all our intelligence and scientific skill, to combat sickness and the suffering that goes with it. Many people dedicate their lives to healthcare. I daresay quite a few of you, dear readers, have given your lives to the work of healthcare. The Church’s mission to the world includes caring for the sick. And you don’t have to be a Christian to perceive that sickness is bad and healing is good.

But Jesus Christ offers the human race the true and deep vision of what health really is. He Himself is the source of life. His Body and Blood are the greatest and most important of all medicines; the Blessed Sacrament of the altar is the medicine of immortality.

Let’s study Christ’s health. It begins with His interior communion with the will of the Father. Jesus is the source of all life, yes. But He said that His life comes from the Father. So our health begins with this fundamental fact of our existence: We receive ourselves as a gift from God. Almighty God gives us our life. If we imagine that health = total control of myself, my body, my powers, according to my will, then we have actually begun to understand health in a very unhealthy way.

Now, Lord Jesus lived a wholesome life, exercised temperance and self-control, worked steadily, kept His mind elevated, cultivated good friendships, knew how to relax. He never “went to the gym.” The ancient Greeks invented gyms, so the ancient Jews hated them. But our Lord did the strenuous exercise we associate with a ‘fitness regimen.’ We can reasonably estimate that He walked an average of 20-25 miles per week through the course of His pilgrim life.

So: Jesus ‘stayed fit’—He ate right and had a ‘healthy lifestyle’ for most of His time on earth. But the crucial thing we have to keep in mind is this: the God and source of all life also freely embraced human pain, suffering, and death. In fact, He became man to suffer and die.

When we base our concept of health on Christ, a new horizon opens up for us. We perceive that bodily suffering is not the absolute evil. And bodily suffering is not meaningless, a waste of life. Again, Pope St. John Paul II:

In celebrating the Eucharist, Christians proclaim and share in the sacrifice of Christ, for ‘by His wounds, we have been healed.’ Christians, uniting themselves with Christ, preserve in their own sufferings a very special particle of the infinite treasure of the world’s redemption, and can share that treasure with others. Imitating Jesus has led saints and simple believers to turn their illnesses and pain into a source of purification and salvation.

Modern medical science has benefited the human race enormously. But science cannot by itself give us a true concept of health, because science cannot explain the fundamental reason why sickness exists. Yes, science succeeds in curing illnesses by accurately diagnosing them. But if the question is: Why do we human beings get sick? “Germs” is not the whole answer.

We get sick, and we die, because, in the beginning, we fell away from God. That doesn’t mean that any particular illness of any particular person comes as a punishment for particular sins. What it means is: In the beginning, God offered us, the human race, paradise and immortality. But we disobeyed His simple law.

We disobeyed because Satan tempted us to pride, and we gave in. But God knows better than Satan. The sickness and suffering that we experience because of Original Sin can involve agonizing deprivations. But, on the cross, the Lord turned agonizing deprivation into the doorway back to paradise.

“Amen, amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” Lord Jesus said those words to the sinner who acknowledged the justice of his punishment, but who begged for Christ’s mercy anyway–even as they both suffered together on their crosses. “You will be with me in paradise.” These are the words the suffering Christ speaks to the suffering sinner.

We cannot base our idea of health on anything other than our hope for that paradise that Jesus promised us at that moment. The paradise of true and complete communion with our Creator, the Lord and Giver of Life. The paradise of an everlasting Eden. Our idea of health must be wide and deep enough to embrace the cross of the Christ Who suffered. Because His Cross is the only way that leads to paradise.

More HHS Mandate Considerations

Just when you thought that maybe we could forget all about it!

…Cathleen Kaveny of Commonweal has written an illuminating essay, which I commend to your reading.

Points she has made well:

1. She distinguishes: On the one hand, the Church’s teaching, as an expert analyst of human morality, that any sexual act is unchaste and wrong if it is intentionally rendered fruitless by human intervention. This applies in every case–Catholic, non-Catholic, Jew, Quaker, Presbyterian. No one will ever be able to stand before God and defend him- or herself for turning sex into an act of mutual masturbation.

On the other hand: the Church Herself does not propose that we should live under ecclesiastical secular rule.

We live in a republican democracy. The Church made Her case that the healthcare law should not include artificial contraception. Our duly elected leaders chose otherwise (having received, as Kaveny points out, the counsel of supposed experts–in other words, the government did, in fact, do its due dilligence). Result: they made a law that includes artificial contraception.

[Now, Kaveny does ignore one big elephant in the room here, namely that hormone contraceptives cause early abortions–or at least appear to do so with some frequency. Which means that, from a moral point-of-view, the issue at hand must be considered to include not just immoral sex acts, but also embryo-icide, which is a far graver moral evil. But let’s let that pass for now…]

2. She–to my mind, decisively–points out that “clarion calls for religious freedom” do not serve any real purpose in this context. The whole business must be analyzed in minute detail in order to arrive at a just conclusion.

In the first part of her essay (the link above is to Part II), she points out–again, quite decisively–that any claim by our Church to the effect that co-operating with the mandate is immoral cannot withstand scrutiny. Because we have already co-operated with such mandates in numerous states. Money in the coffers of Catholic institutions already winds up in other coffers that pay for artificial contraceptives, and it happens because of state and local laws that govern what healthcare coverage must include.

Now, perhaps this means that the moment has arrived for a careful scholar to outline precisely the moral problem with this phenomenon (of money moving in this way). I will be glad to read it. I haven’t yet come across it. And I have looked.

To my mind, the fact of the matter is: money moving in this way does not necessarily implicate anyone morally. It implicates only those who intentionally use artificial contraceptives, and those who wrongly counsel them to do so and facilitate their doing so.

But obeying a law about where I am required to send money to cover my employee’s government-mandated health services does not implicate me in any immoral use of that money later on.

So, in fact, there really is no moral problem for the institutions, businesses, employers, etc. So, in fact, there is no real religious freedom claim to be made.

IMHO.

Chime in, as you wish!

In Butter. But Not Co-operating

1. Gold for Mexico in fút. 2. Gold for Team USA, worthily won in a Sunday-morning thriller, which was perfectly timed to unfold immediately after Mass. 3. Rental house has two porches, free bikes, skylights, ceiling fans. On vacation… Dude, I am swimming in the good sweet butter of life.

But I am like the (beach) dog that cannot let go of the bone. The religious-freedom-is-not-the-issue bone…

The National Catholic Bioethics Center produces precise moral analyses, based on incontrovertible principles and developed via careful distinctions. Few organizations in this world make so much sense so consistently.

When he discusses artificial contraception, President Barack Obama lies, flimflams, and cravenly tries to marginalize us Paul-VI feminists–i.e, kind-hearted, reasonable people (like Mahatma Gandhi) who think women deserve better than poison for the womb.

Can such a day come? Namely, a day on which campaign-stumping President Obama refers to some actual facts—facts which the careful analysts of the NCBC failed adequately to take into account in one of their expert moral studies?

Well, it happened. On Thursday.

The NCBC published a vademecum for business owners to guide their discernment about how to handle the federal contraception-coverage mandate (which has now gone into effect for all “non-religious” employers). While I do not hold myself out as an expert on the “health-care industry,” the NCBC’s essay strikes me as realistic when it comes to laying out the options which a business owner/operator has.

Universal Destination of Goods, Evil Cults, Bad Hands, Etc.

I have to say that I think Chief Justice Roberts has illuminated something important for us. Governments do have some authority over the money our economy produces. So, dear ones, the loyal opposition speaks…

Our assertion: Catholic Church will not pay for contraceptives / abortifacients / sterilizations.

Reasonable response: Fair enough. Granted. But there is no question of Catholic Church, Inc., paying for objectionables. Because the $$$ to be used for these—and all other healthcare items involved in the ACA (Obamacare) regime—the money does not belong to the Catholic Church.

Ergo: No formal co-operation with evil. No material co-operation. No co-operation at all. Ain’t yo’ money, homes.

Mandate and Religious Freedom Compendium

The day has arrived when your humble servant will do my duty. Namely, I will begin a four-part series of homilies aimed at preparing us to pray and fast through the “Fortnight for Freedom” from June 21 to July 4.

First, though, if I may:

Dr. David Schindler has published an essay about human nature, freedom, and rights.

He distinguishes the ideal of a modern ‘liberal’ regime from the regime envisioned in the Church’s articulation of Her doctrine of religious freedom.

Dr. Schindler exposes the paradox at the heart of the liberal ideal of a religion-neutral state. If the law/the courts/the goverment say that freedom means anything other than openness to God and truth, then the content of what freedom is will always be supplied by the strong–at the expense of the weak.

The independent man who determines for himself what life means will inevitably do so at the expense of a weaker person. The only man who never infringes on the genuine “rights” of others is the one who acknowledges that he depends on God for his freedom, and he must use his freedom to seek goodness and truth.

In other words, if man is not for God, then he is for himself–at the expense of someone else, sooner or later.

I bring this up because: Obviously, Dr. Shindler has been reading my posts on the HHS-Mandate controversy and decided to supply the philosophical argumentation for why I make so much daggone sense.

Seriously, though…

We present a collection of the ramblings on this subject from the past few months, years:

Warming up for action: Answering the atheist…

1. What is Life?

2. Who’s the Mysterymonger?

To set the stage: Theology ≠ Esoterica

Kathleen Sibelius, Bishops Dolan and Lori, and me:

1. B.S. Alarms on Both Sides

2. I Will Give You Bacon, but Not a Contraceptive (2b. Let us Reason)

3. Define ‘Health’ for Me [See ‘What is Life?’ above for an answer.]

4. Abstinence More Healthy than Sex

5. Chastity, Conscience, and the Real Problem is that Too Many Doctors Suck

6. Should we have Faith in the First Amendment?

7. The real problem: When Goverment Oversteps Gamaliel’s Limit

8. Aha! The Church is a moral agent!

9. No Slogans (Pope St. Gregory VII)

10. Which is our Best Hand?

11. The Businessman’s Co-operation with Evil

12. Cathleen Kaveny’s Good Distinctions (January 2013)

13. Kaveny Again; Running Like Ray Rice

Four Sermons on “We cannot co-operate with evil, even if the civil law stipulates that we must.”

1. We, the Catholic Church of Christ

2. Co-operating and co-operating

3. Divine Law of Unconditional Love

4. Where Civil Laws Come From

Fortnight for Freedom Homilies

1. Hamlet and the Martyrs of Mexico

2. Fasting

3. Elijah’s God

4. St. Thomas More’s First Choice

5. Inconvenient and Uneasy in the Canticle of Zechariah

6. King Josiah and Prophetess Huldah (II Kings 22)

7. The Apostolic See

8. Believing Like the Martyrs

9. Backyard-barbecue, Catholic American

Theme Song: A Catholic Boy Can Survive

Fortnight for Freedom Homilies, 2013

Basic Marriage

The Looming Flashpoints

The Marriage-Law Titanic

Welcome Here

Hard Penance

2014:

Which of the two will land me in jail?

Cant’ be Happy about Hobby Lobby

Status Quaestionis: The Contraception Mandate

PG 13

Maybe you, too, find it difficult to keep the central elements of this controversy in focus. With all due respect for ecclesiastical authority–and for all authorities on medicine, public health, and health-care finance—I would like to undertake an analysis.

More on Health

The Son of God labored on earth as a physician. He applied His deft hands to the work of healing the infirm. In the beginning He made us out of moistened earth with the power of His Word. In the fullness of time, He healed blindness and deafness with the same clay and moisture and divine speech.

Why? Why has He opened the ears of the deaf and the eyes of the blind? So that we could believe in Him and live.

Perhaps you have heard something about the controversy between the Dept. of Health and Human Services and the Catholic health-care system. Many people see the business as a matter of religious freedom.

Don’t we also have to see it as a controversy over what health care is? What health is?

Doesn’t ‘health’ = thriving in the truth of who we are made to be? Isn’t health care a matter of imitating and co-operating with the Great Physician Who made us in the first place?

Is it healthy for a woman to poison her body with pills that maker her infertile and inhospitable to new life? What kind of health care is that?

The proponents of universal access to contraception try to characterize it as a “woman’s issue.” But if “pro-woman” health care involves poisoning the womb with chemicals, then I would hate to see what misogynistic health care would involve.

The divine Physician came to help us have a better life. Much better than a dead-end routine of work, eat, sleep, and work again, with occasional recreational sex. Artificial contraception fits into an Orwellian nightmare of dehumanized modernity, not into the beautiful truth of who we are in Christ. The children of God have inherited a better life than what the Department of Health and Human Services wants to envision.

The divine Physician came to us so that we could enjoy eternal health in the Kingdom of purity and light. May He help us all to open our eyes, ears, and lips to behold, hear, and sing His liberating truth.

Valentine’s Day Miracle

Orange "flush"

The miracle is that the Hoyas scored as many points as Syracuse after forty minutes of play.

It is only right that the Orange won in overtime, because they dominated the Hoyas. They named Onuaku the game MVP, but in my opinion it was Dievendorf’s five threes that killed us. I am still at a loss as to how the Hoyas managed to put the game into overtime.

Apparently, there are many provisions in the “economic stimulus package” which regulate health care. I have heard that one of these will require a cost-benefit analysis for expensive procedures. The years a patient could be expected to live would be assigned a monetary value. Then this amount would be measured against the cost of the procedure.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about "Georgetown vs. Syracuse – Recap – Feb…", posted with vodpod

I do not know if this provision has in fact been enacted into law. Perhaps a knowledgeable P. & B. D. reader could chime in on that question.

The idea of measuring the years of a person’s life in dollars reminded me of something Bl. Columba Marmion wrote about the priesthood:

The goal for a priest is for an unbeliever to consider his life utterly worthless.

The priesthood only makes sense by the light of faith. Without faith, a priest’s life appears to be a complete and total waste.

So my goal is: When it comes time for health-care dollars to be allocated according to a cost-benefit analysis of productivity and quality of life, I hope the experts will value my life at no more than $5.00 per year.

My health-care allowance will cover two tubes of toothpaste annually (or one tube, plus dental floss). If it’s more than that, then I have not been following my vocation properly.