A Healthy Body, part 1

As you may know, over the last couple of months I’ve been studying what are the kinds of practices that keep communities vital: strong, resilient, alive. Much of this has been through reading books. Some of these books have been assigned reading from the College of Congregational Development, some recommended (or handed) to me, others books that I’ve been meaning to read for some time. They range from personal reflections to systematic approaches. But all of them speak to what happens when humans gather together and attempt to follow God.

Which is actually what Jesus was doing. Some of his teachings were specific and directive about communal practices for living. Matthew 18 is an example of this, in that Jesus gives us best practices for how to deal with conflict in a community once it arises. (because whenever two or three are gathered, there will be conflict) And others of Jesus’ teachings, like about prayer or forgiveness, are interpersonal yet have tremendous influence on how a community lives.

As I wrote about in my post about Benedictine practices, Christian communities have been working on the best ways to live together since we began to organize around the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. And these practices that we have developed, are developing, they are practices that can be used in any form of community––families, schools, businesses. As you read through these posts, bring to mind a community that you know well, with these understandings and principles as a lens.

The author and practitioner Peter Steinke has written a number of books over the years, but the one that I decided to spend time with was Healthy Congregations: A Systems Approach. What makes this book particularly interesting is not just that he approached common life in a “systems way”, that is, that all life is of a piece and that, “change in one part produces change in another part, even in the whole.” I’ve done a good bit of study in this way of understanding groups, but what I found especially interesting in this book is Steinke’s use of the human body and health as a metaphor.

This approach, as Steinke notes, is not original. It has been part of how humans have come to understand themselves for millennia. Jesus did this memorably when illuminating what defiles someone––what goes in the mouth or what comes out of it. St. Paul of Tarsus used the body as a metaphor extensively in his writings, especially in his first letter to the Corinthians in chapter 12, when he talks about the necessary relationship that exists in a body, like the members of our own bodies––foot, hand, eye, ear. As is often the case, when we better understand ourselves, the ways that we work, we can better understand others and the ways that we interact with those around us.

It is Steinke’s definition of health, though, that first caught my attention, for it is one that may be different than we are used to using. For Steinke, health is about having the system in balance, that the parts are working together, and that the system as a whole has integrity. It does not mean that we are free from illness. In fact in a following post, I will work with the ten principles of health in more detail and there Steinke, along with others, points to illness as a necessary complement to health. Rather, it means that when a system is in balance, our immune system does the work it needs to and that the system is able to live more closely to wholeness. Using this lens, “perfect health” looks different. Rather than a state of perfection, it is a constant and intentional process. We are always looking to the practices that sustain life in the body.

And, in a nuance that is very interesting to me, Steinke writes that, “Health is a resource for life, not the object for living.” In this understanding, it is our health and the practices that support us, that allow us to live, to really live. That is our purpose. Our health, for ourselves and for the communities that we are a part of, is a means to Life, rather than an end in and of themselves. This runs counter to much of the messaging that we absorb about health in ourselves and in our communities. Often what we are told is that our health is the end-goal. If, in fact, our health is the resource that we draw upon for full life, than this turns our perspective and ways to live. Instead of idolizing our body or someone else’s definition of a body, we are to live in ways that allow our bodies to be most alive.

What, then, might this mean for a group of people, a community founded on the life of Jesus? It seems to me that this points to consistent attention to practices that support each person’s wholeness, as well as the wholeness of the body. It will mean that the process of living, the “how” of what we do, each day and week and year, is as important, in fact likely more important than the substance of what we produce. Because the processes that we undertake fundamentally and necessarily affect all of the substance that we are.

What, then, might these processes be? That is the subject of my next post, what Steinke calls, “Ten Principles of Health and Disease.”

Peace,

Phil+