蜜芽传媒

Good morning. It was good to hear the important interviews on this programme yesterday, not only with Simon Stevens about the future of the NHS but with two people taking such an active, positive role in relation to their own serious health problems, one of obesity, the other of dementia.

One thing I know we can all agree on is that health matters. When we are well we mostly take it for granted, but goodness when we are feeling ill doesn鈥檛 this this tend to dominate and spoil everything else-and of course as we get older this is more often the case. An aging musician friend of mine told me drolly that when he meets a fellow aging musician friend of his now they tend to begin with an organ recital.

The world鈥檚 religions have always had a concern for health. Traditional Chinese medicine for example is rooted in Chinese religion and philosophy. And it鈥檚 amazing how much of the Christian Gospels are taken up with stories of Jesus healing people; stories which have been read Sunday by Sunday in the churches of this country for well over 1000 years. This has surely had a huge influence on the fact that in Western society we believe we should do all we can to help people get better. It is because of this that so many Christians have become nurses and doctors, and so many of our great hospitals have the names of Saints. My favourite example is the great hospital founded in Jerusalem by the Knights Hospitaller which set the pattern for similar hospitals later in Rhodes and Malta-the emphasis was on a good diet, very lavish by the standards of the time, and keeping people warm, clean and cared for in a prayerful environment. At night a monk would even go through the wards with a staff in his left hand and wine in his right calling out 鈥淟ords, wine on behalf of God鈥�. The emphasis was holistic, and indeed very much in line with the 1974 World Health Organisation鈥檚 definition of health as 鈥渘ot merely the absence of disease, but a state of complete physical, mental, spiritual and social well being.鈥� That emphasis on the social dimension is important, for as we know there are parts of some of big cities where life expectancy is ten or more years shorter than more affluent parts. The emphasis on the spiritual too is now much becoming more widely recognised. I love the scene in William Golding鈥檚 great novel Darkness Visible when one of the characters suddenly notices his wrinkled palm, looks down and is amazed; struck by the sheer miracle of it. It seemed to him 鈥渋nscribed with a sureness and delicacy beyond art and grounded somewhere else in absolute health.鈥�

Christians believe that true health includes our relation to that dimension of absolute health in God, but increasingly today people of all faiths and none recognise that it involves not only the body and mind, but the spirit as well.

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