In the 1970’s something old re-appeared on the medical scene. It was an idea that a person’s health may be a result of more than their physical condition and symptoms. Holistic health was a concept that dated back to at least 5000 years previous, which believed that all potential factors that contributed to a person’s life, might affect their wellbeing.
This approached a person’s health from an angle that was different to how western medicine had been providing health care. The Age of Enlightenment (when, roughly speaking, science replaced spirituality, reason replaced emotion and logic replaced mysticism) brought about a very scientific and biological way of viewing healthcare. Holistic health recognized that merely treating a person’s physical symptoms might not tackle the underlying cause of someone’s ailments. A person should be seen as a whole when considering their overall health.
For a while I’ve been thinking about how maybe the church has lost this ‘Holistic’ view of humans and how this has particularly affected our worship of God. At the centre of Jewish prayer is the Shema (Yisrael) the second line of which comes from Deuteronomy 6:5 “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” The Psalmist echoes this “My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the LORD; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God” Psalm 84:2 Finally Jesus recites this as the most important commandment “`Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’” Mark 12:29-30.
The Jews were well aware that in Worship and service to God their entire ‘Holistic’ lives were for him. Worship was partly a spiritual act but it was something that required and evoked the heart, mind and body also. With an holistic view point suddenly it makes sense why it’s difficult to feel proud when you are on your knees, why meditating on the glory of God stirs the spirit, and why outstretched hands are the outward expression of us being desperate for a glimpse of our God.
I think this has further implications than just our corporate Worship on a Sunday; can we in our daily lives commit the entirety of ourselves to God? Whether showing love and hospitality, wrestling to unpack and understand scripture, or falling under a rhythm of prayer.
I think perhaps we have lost some of the depth to our Worship in treating ourselves a spiritually simple beings, the truth may be that we are a complex interrelation of mind, body and spirit, and that there comes a strength in aligning all three of these under God’s authority.
