In Sickness and Health

(c) Salvatore Vuono

My daughter has had a nagging cough for a couple weeks. Last night she vomited all over the sheets.

My son is recovering from pink eye and an ear infection.

More than one person I know could use a new kidney.

Then there are all those with the dreaded “C” word.

Depression is real. More people have it than you’d guess.

Another friend just got off crutches.

Which of these persons is healthy? If I paraded them before you, could you tell? Considering we place a premium on health, you’d think we’d be able to quickly identify who the healthy ones are. Of course, it also depends on what you mean by “health”.

In God in Creation, Jürgen Moltmann suggested two modern options.

1.      Health is the capacity for work and enjoyment. This is Freud’s definition. The problem is, it reduces health to a matter of production and consumption. Health is limited to what you can give and what you can take.

2.      “Health is the state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, not merely the absence of sickness and handicaps.” This is the World Health Organization’s definition. It fares better in that it captures the social aspect of health. But, measured against this ideal no society is ever healthy. Nor can it. It is entirely utopic.

This creates a caste system of health. One the one side you have the healthy. On the other is the unhealthy. They are those who need helped. They are those who need fixed. This leads to two interrelated problems:

1.      The “sick” are defined against the “healthy”. It is the healthy that makes the sick, sick. I blogged aboutthis phenomenon before in terms of disabilities. According to John Swinton, it is our attitudes about what constitutes disability that makes the disabled, disabled. If everyone could communicate using sign language, there would be no “disability” of deafness. It would simply be another form of communication.

2.      The “sick” are not fully human. If health defined by an absence of sickness is the ideal, than any impairment to the physical and mental well-being of a person is impairment to the state of being human. The sick fall into a category of lesser humans. The sick can never be fully human. Worse, if health is utopic are any of us ever human?

So perhaps our concept of health needs revised. But is there a way forward? Is there another way? Moltmann believes there is.

A)    “Health can be viewed as an objectively ascertainable state of the human being’s physical, mental and social well-being.” This addresses the functioning of a person’s physical and mental state. It is the awareness that the human body tends to function in a certain manner and sometimes it gets off. It’s an awareness that coughs happen. Cancer is an unfortunate reality. Legs break. Depression occurs.

But health is more than the objective state of a person’s physical and mental workings. It is a state of mind concerning these impairments.

B)    “Health can also be viewed as a subjectively ascertainable attitude on the part of the person concerned to his fluctuating condition.” Health is more than an absence of malfunctioning. It is a state of mind. It is the resolve to live with them. It is vitality for life.

Health then includes healthy attitudes (B) to a person’s health (A).

Health is the strength to be human. It is a recognizing and embracing of our limitations. Being human is the capacity to live in sickness and health. It is the capacity to stand up in living and dying. Sickness is not something to be feared. The sick are not lepers to be shoved to the margins of society. The elderly are not to be placed out of sight. Not if health and wholeness is a matter of vitality for life.

For sure, the body breaks down. The mind breaks down. Social systems break down. These break downs should try to be fixed, but they do not determine health. Health is determined by vitality for life. It’s openness to each other and the world around us. It’s an acceptance of the invitation to love well and receive love.

We might lose hope. We might lose faith. We might fail in love. But this is not a failure in health. On the contrary. It points to health. It points to awareness that something is wrong, something isn’t right. It points to holy dissatisfaction with the world that cries with groaning waiting its redemption. Health is the very thirst for redeemed life. Health is living into this awareness.

For Moltmann, this is human life:

Human life is accepted, affirmed, and loved life.

The strength to be a human person lies in the acceptance, the affirmation and the love of frail and mortal life. …

The human being in his embodiment is not created to end in death; he is made for transformation through and beyond death. Hope for the resurrected body and a life everlasting in redemption corresponds to the bodily creation of the human being by God, and perfects that. The hope of resurrection is belief in creation that gazes forward to what is ahead.