Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
With body and spirit...
'Work Out' your Salvation
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
December 2002
It was something of a shock to discover that my hypochondria is imaginary. It was, at least, a delusion exposed in 13 months spent on redeveloping physical health.
Like many people interested in psychology or religion, I find it fairly easy to accept what researchers have learned about the mind’s effect on physical health. I am particularly intrigued by what we have learned about the relationship of the brain to the immune system.Bernie Siegel’s studies of "exceptional cancer patients" are perhaps the most exciting illustration of new realizations about the unity of mind and body.
During the last year, however, while continuing to value these insights, I have experienced a complementary truth: physical health influences one's mental state just as much as mind influences body.We disregard at high cost a continuous relationship between those two aspects of the person.
Proper nutrition and exercise affect how we feel about and respond to people and events. Some forms of depression lift with physical exercise. Proper nutrition can enhance one’s romantic life.As the medical community slowly progresses from "sick care" to actual "health care," practitioners increasingly offer patients education in the basic requirements for total health of mind and body.
To ignore either mental or physical health is to influence the state of both.
Which brings us to Christmas.
In a world where the leading thinkers believed the body to be an encumbrance to a separately existing soul, John’s gospel proclaimed the unsettling idea that "the Word became flesh," that the human body can contain what is divine and in fact did so in Jesus.
That Christianity would succumb to those Greek philosophies that denigrated the body would be a mistake for which we are still paying.
It was not always so. Healing and feeding were a major part of Jesus’ ministry, not preliminaries to it.
His first sermon in his home town emphasized the prophet Isaiah’s belief that a chief characteristic of the messianic age was human wholeness. In Isaiah’s vision, when the messianic time comes, the lame walk, the blind see, prisoners are freed, and good news is proclaimed.
Much in our culture conspires against health. Many of us hardly move at work. Our entertainment is passive. We can do our holiday shopping online, shopping even for cars and houses while seated at a computer. Much of what we eat and drink does not support good health.
My job brings me into contact with people who deal with deeply troubling issues in their lives. More than half are in poor physical condition, not fighting back at what can cut years from their lives and joy from their experience.Being products of our culture, they want a spiritual magic bullet, an instant cure involving little exertion of mind or body. None of them are asking whether they might feel better about life, about the universe -- about everything -- if they moved large muscle groups more often and stopped poisoning (or starving) themselves.
Flipping the pages of an art history book reminds us that what the ideal human form looks like is a cultural value that changes. What seems not to change is the interrelation of body, mind and spirit, a truth that has been best preserved by traditional societies.Just as those people, focused solely on the material aspects of life, can often be depressingly shallow, people focused solely on the spiritual can often suffer a constant shallow depression.
Believing that one can choose to disregard either movement or contemplation is a choice against life. The New Testament exhortation to "work out your salvation" may well mean just what it says.
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