Louisville Process Theology Network

Persons Cannot be Whole Alone

“If the body is healthy, then it is whole. But how can it be
whole and yet dependent, as it obviously is, upon bodies and upon the earth,
upon all of Creation, in fact?

It immediately becomes clear that the health or wholeness of
the body is a vast subject and that to preserve it calls for vast enterprise.
Blake said that ‘Man has no Body distinct from his Soul ..’ and this
acknowledges the convergence of health and wholeness. In that, all the
convergence and dependence of Creation are surely implied.

Our bodies are also not distinct from the bodies of other
people on which they depend in a complexity of ways from biological to
spiritual. They are not distinct from the bodies and plants and animals with
which we are involved in cycles of feeding and in the intricate companionships
of ecological systems and of the spirit. They are not distinct from the earth,
the sun and moon, and the heavenly bodies.

It is therefore absurd to approach the subject of health
piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists. A medical doctor
uninterested in nutrition, in agriculture, in the wholesomeness of mind and
spirit is as absurd as the farmer who is uninterested in health. Our
fragmentation of this subject cannot be our cure because it is our disease.

The body cannot be whole alone. Persons cannot be whole
alone. It is wrong to think that bodily health is compatible with spiritual
confusion or cultural disorder or with polluted air and water or impoverished
soil.

Intellectually, we know that these patterns of
interdependence exist. We understand them better now perhaps than we ever have
before.”

From page 103 of “The Unsettling of America” by Wendell Berry