by Gerald May

The relationship between spirituality and health has always been confusing for me. As a child, I wondered why prayers did not heal people as they were supposed to, and why some people recovered from serious illnesses "by the power of faith," while others, who I sensed had just as much faith, suffered and died.

The confusion worsened as I grew older and became a physician. Pop explanations about the differences between "healing" and "curing" did not help. I understood the cosmic sense of healing that means wholeness and integration, and how different this is from curing a particular disease. But I both saw and experienced cures that I could only call spiritual. And Jesus didn't just help people establish a right relationship with the universe; he actually cured diseases--and told people their faith had done it.

The confusion has not been helped by the recent popularity of books and articles citing scientific evidence of the "health benefits" of faith and spiritual practice. I've long felt uncomfortable with people's response to these studies--as if faith, prayer, and spiritual disciplines somehow acquire greater legitimacy if they can be shown to be good for your health. I was happy, therefore, to see an editorial in the January 27, 1999, issue of The Christian Century criticizing this sort of "utilitarian religion." It cited studies demonstrating that faith and spiritual practices can lower blood pressure, that religious people are more resistant to stress, and (of particular interest to me) that "smokers who go to church live longer than smokers who don't." The criticism reflected my own feelings: "It's not that we don't think spiritual and physical health are somehow aligned ... and it's not that we don't think the interaction of body and soul is a subject worthy of investigation. It's just that we don't like to see the therapists of wellbeing ushering people to the pews."

My concerns, however, go deeper. In spite of demonstrated "health benefits," I believe it is, at best, false advertising to maintain the myth that spirituality is necessarily good for your health. Jesus' faith was not good for his health-nor was that of at least eleven of his apostles. Last fall, some of the Shalem staff went to visit the bones of St. Therese of Lisieux when they came through Washington on their American tour. Spirituality did not seem good for her health either; it led her into obsessive scrupulosity and terrifying inner desolation, and failed to protect her from an agonizing death from tuberculosis at the age of 24.

So is spirituality good for your health? For me, the answer is unequivocally yes and no! Religious belief and faith community can support physical and mental wellbeing. Some spiritual practices can lower blood pressure and help handle stress. The power of prayer is unquestionable for those who have experienced it. And I myself have no doubt that miraculous healings do occur. In all these senses, spirituality can certainly be good for your health.

However, one cannot ignore how faith may not only fail to help physical and mental illnesses but also sometimes even seem to invite people into greater disease, disorder, suffering and death. If you reflect on the physical and mental health of the holy people of history and the ones you've known personally, you may find yourself inclined, as I am, to suggest that every Bible come with a warning from the Surgeon General.

Things would, of course, be simpler if the spiritual life clearly led to better health. Then we could treat the life of the spirit, to quote the Christian Century editorial, "like a nutritional supplement or a leafy green vegetable." But things are obviously more mysterious than that. In my own lived faith, I feel certain that God does not want people to suffer, not now, not ever. So how is it that authentic spirituality can sometimes be bad for your health? My hunch is that it has to do with something that the contemplative strands of all the great religions proclaim: the ultimate meaning of human life is not health; it is love.

As Biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson and others have clearly pointed out, Jesus' mission was not to heal but to teach and preach the Good News, the reign of heaven. This primary "project" of Jesus was interrupted on numerous occasions by people requesting healing, and Jesus responded to them compassionately: from the love that was the core of his being. In its rightful place, I believe healing is not the reason for spirituality but one of many expressions of the Love that is the reason for spirituality.

Jesus pulled no punches about the implications of the spiritual life. He said those who wanted to follow him had to take up their crosses. The life of the spirit does involve suffering. More foundationally, it requires letting go of one's agenda for personal wellbeing in favor of a larger love. Like the Bodhisattva vow of Buddhism, the Christian stance of love finally sets the liberation of all creation ahead of one's own comfort, health, and even life. Faith, then, does not make us suffer, but it does lead us toward a willingness to suffer, a relinquishment of the idolatry of wellbeing.

So the answer, for me, is still yes and no. Spirituality can be very good indeed for my health, and there's nothing wrong with desiring it to be so. The 12th century St. Bernard of Clairvaux called it "loving God for one's own sake," a perfectly normal and legitimate dimension of the love of God. But the life of the spirit inevitably puts love above health. And where the two come into conflict, as they sometimes do, the challenge is to let love win. Jesus' life, beyond all, let love win. So did the lives of Therese and Gandhi, Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the countless other known and unknown saints who have taken up the cross of love throughout the centuries.