My Relations,” uttered at the conclusion of prayers and sacred songs,
and at completion of stages of ritual, embodies a cosmological, religious,
and ethical recognition and reverence for the interdependence and sa-
credness of all aspects of creation.
Far from being the ‘absence of disease,’ health is life’s natural ten-
dency. Order and well-being are not just prevailing properties of life, they
are warp and woof. Nature’s tendency is toward thriving—adaptation,
equilibrium, and development. In the religious domain, the human being
in its true nature is whole and well, needing only the healing that removes
impediments to its perfect nature. The fact that health is fundamental is
evident in the miraculous fact that, most of the time, we don’t get sick,
despite the fact that we continually come in contact with infective agents
and other threats: physical, biological, and psychological. When we are
sick or injured, healing means restoration of original order and well-
being. When, for instance, a leg is broken, medical treatment restores
that leg, recreates its real nature, reestablishes its identity as myleg, and
my identity as one who walks.
To request healing is to affirm health as fundamental to our nature.
To recognize that we need healing, whether for physical or emotional con-
ditions, or in religious terms, for our human limitations and suffering, pre-
supposes the order and well-being of life. To heal is to recover primordial
unity, the non-fragmented state in which aspects of self are operating in
community, and the person participates in community with other beings
in the biophysical and social environments, and with the forces of the sa-
cred, however conceived. Communitydesignates webs formed of many
kinds of participation and interaction among the constituents of life.
Human life depends on community, grounded in interaction and commu-
nication. The provinces of community encompass the assimilation of oxy-
gen and nourishment, companionship and love between persons, manage-
ment of institutions for social welfare, and in the domain of religiousness,
fulfilling one’s relation with that which is sacred.
Health is fundamental to nearly every human enterprise, and is thus
an important consideration in planning and evaluating situations in con-
texts such as social welfare and education. The determinants of health
suggested in this study, for instance, developmentand freedom from
pain, are offered to contribute concepts and vocabulary for supporting
well-being in a variety of settings. The themes that emerged in analysis of
determinants of health (biological and ecological, medical and psycho-
logical, sociocultural and aesthetic, and metaphysical and religious) are
echoed in the reconstruction of the model of religious therapeutics. Our
172 religious therapeutics