The question is noble: is a more spiritualized being, that is to say, open to meditation, silence, prayer, even asceticism, predisposed to better health, perhaps to healing? possible better affirmed? As old Homer proclaimed, and as many others have done since, the greatest good there is in this world is, indeed, health.
A very ancient axiom that still goes around the world: mens sana in corpore Sano. Let’s translate: “A healthy mind in a healthy body”. In this regard, popular wisdom does not beat around the bush. She proclaims that “sick who prays, sick who heals”. Or again: “Help yourself and heaven will help you”.
This is how spirituality – psychic strength – allows us to introduce additional motivations into us, such as self-sacrifice, compassion, and caring for the body as a temple of the Spirit. This allows the sufferer to accomplish, through his physical suffering, a social role that sometimes borders on heroism. For several millennia, even before the birth of Christianity, Hinduism in its various forms, as well as other spiritual traditions, taught ways by which men, and women, with devout and confident hearts, can acquire a certain liberation that can only be beneficial to health.
FOUR PRINCIPLES AND CONSIDERATIONS
Of course, the “spiritualist” recipe is not magic. Rather than valuing the exceptional, isn’t it better to remind ourselves of a few principles and other considerations? The human sciences constantly remind our dear humanity that it can aspire to greater and further than its immediate concerns.
1. In health or in bad shape, the human being is, first of all, a person made up of a body and a spirit. Our words will be valid insofar as we take into account the two “parties” involved. A global vision of health and spirituality is essential, without subjugating body and mind to one or the other. Similarly, we must respect the roles and skills in each area.
2. Spirituality is not an absolute in itself any more than it is the property of a single religion. Neither does health. Both, from the domain of observation and sometimes of hypothesis, remain in the order of becoming. The body has its laws. The mind too. Learned medicine has requirements. Spirituality has its own. Faced with a chronic illness, for example, she will propose prayer, solidarity with other patients, offering to something greater than oneself, allegiance to the living forces of the soul, the virtues of holy abandonment, or even, deliverance according to certain laws of karma. Once “the little flame of hope” (Péguy) is lit, the person’s spiritual potential is enormous.
The power of the spirit is such that it can assert itself through illness and even deal with major physical infirmities. Just like the power of love that so often acts beyond the expected norms.
3. Health is not due. No more than life. No more than the century that welcomes me. Healing is a gift, but it can be expressed in other ways. Several heroes of holiness such as Paul of Tarsus, Francis of Assisi, or Thérèse of Lisieux found in the discomfort of illness the strength that allowed them to rejoice in their physical condition. However, these mystics knew from their spiritual tradition that “no wealth can compare with the health of the body” ( Sirach 30,16).
4. It is thus that, through their spirit, the man and the woman have the power, rather than dominating the disease, to find additional motivations. Spirituality often acts in the long term and according to its criteria. It creates abilities to manage the discomforts of physical suffering and to assign it liberating roles.
Far from denying the body, spirituality has the positive aspect that it rather promotes harmony of the spirit, peace, and compassion vis-à-vis oneself and vis-à-vis others. She knows how to come to terms with illness and, in many cases, integrate death. Such a person gives his health for the fatherland; the other gives it to peace (Gandhi), to a social cause (Martin Luther King), and to all of humanity (Christ).
“The man, this stranger”
Among so many authorized witnesses of the benefits of spirituality in health, why not recall certain words of the famous Alexis Carrel, French doctor, and Nobel Prize winner at the beginning of the last century: “the calm engendered by prayer is a powerful aid to therapy The spiritual proves to be as indispensable to the success of life as the intellectual and the material.
In short, the ideal remains, in these areas as in many others, respect for people and their generosity. The best is within. Medicine is a sea, the heart would be its shore. Great thoughts bring them together.