A "Mini Trinity"

What I'm trying to explore here is a concept of health for the human being.  We can't really do that, if we don't know what a human being is; and our culture is supremely unhelpful in this.  In fact, it's worse than unhelpful, it's actively misleading with respect to the truth of human existence (or, indeed, the existence of truth at all, but that's a whole 'nother gigantic, over-arching can of worms. . . [and who the heck puts worms in a "can" anyway?--but I digress. . . ]).

So here's the first thing, foundational to any effective exploration of human health.  People, our Creator tells us, are "made in the image of God."  One of the ways this is reflected is that, like God, we exist in "trinity."  Not the complete and mysterious "three whole persons who are also one" that we are confronted with in God, but a "mini trinity," which is a bit easier to grasp, but comes with a mini dose of its own mystery and a concomitant difficulty of applying the concept to right living.  We'll give it a go:

In contrast to our culture, which increasingly is attempting to treat people as if they are nothing but bodies (the "Scientism" cult of the "New" Atheists being the height of this), or the lingering notion of most of our (basically Protestant-derived) culture (still, for now), that wants to see people as essentially a physical body with a mind (which possibly somehow includes a "soul," if there is one???) "riding around" in the body (for a while), the truth is that people have three aspects, which dynamically interact and indeed form one person, although the three aspects are recognizable as different aspects, but really not, in practice, treatable as separate "entities," because (here's the mystery), although we can recognize them as three "different" things, in reality, they are one person.  Very much like the Trinity. 

If I haven't lost you already, here's what I propose to do, and the caveat required in the attempt:

Human beings, for health, need a number of things (some of the more obvious including air, water, food, for example).  My contention is that, if we ignore the fact that we are NOT just physical bodies, and neglect to provide the necessities (food, water, etc.) for ALL that we are, we WILL be sick, period.  In other words, no matter how well you feed your BODY, if you ignore the other two-thirds of what you are, your body will suffer, because you are not feeding ALL of you properly.  Because the whole person is a trinity, caring for only one aspect (or two) is by definition neglect of the whole person.  And because you are only one person, neglecting even one aspect will hurt the whole.  Anything you do to your body, for example, affects your mind (and your spirit); anything you do to your spirit affects your body (and your mind); and so on.

Definition of terms: 

J.W. Waterhouse,
"Psyche Entering
Cupid's Garden"

For purposes of discussion here, I'm going to take the Biblical notion of the whole person, which includes "spirit, soul, and body" (e.g., 1 Thess. 5:23).  However, because our modern parlance tends to use the words "spirit" and "soul" interchangeably, for clarity I'm going to use the actual Greek word--"psyche"--that is the actual word used by St. Paul in this context, but which is usually translated as "soul" here.  This word indicates and includes what Psychologists generally study (and thus gives the discipline its name); things like mental activity, cognitive capacity, emotions, motivation, etc.  So, for purposes of discussion, I'm going to use "spirit" to indicate the aspect that most people think of as the eternal or "super-natural" existence of a person; that "part" of us that can most directly relate to God (and other spirits).  To talk about the mind, conscious thought, and most crucially important here, the will, I'll use St. Paul's own word, psyche, which is more inclusive and thus more precise than simply using the "mind" (as I did above, for ease of discussion before this definition), and which I trust is not too taxing for any reader who has bothered to follow me this far, anyway!  It is a word we hear used occasionally, after all, even in fairly casual modern speech.  For body, I'll just use "body."  That'll probably do just fine, don't you think?  Whew. 

That'll get us started.  Planned explorations include "Things We Need" (such as food, water, air, pressure, movement, sunlight, rest) and how these apply with respect to proper care of your WHOLE person, not just your material body; as well as "Things We Don't Need" (such as toxins and extremes), which we must avoid or resist, otherwise we will sicken and die. 

The caveat:

Treating the human person in these three aspects carries with it, of course, the danger of "splitting" the reality of the person; of further "splintering" our concept of human living.  However, with that risk acknowledged, I think we must proceed in this way, in order to counter our culture's habit of completely denying one or more of these aspects and behaving as if they don't exist at all (or at least don't matter).  We really can't hope to properly care for ourselves and promote our overall health if we are utterly ignoring some important aspect of our health.  If, somehow, you were unaware that you needed protein, and therefore proceeded to make a constant diet of nothing but carbohydrates, say--or, if you were one of those misled folks who went all out on the Atkins diet and decided to make your constant diet of nothing BUT protein and fat for an extended period of time--you would live for a while, but all the time you would steadily be declining in health, eventually (sooner or later, depending on the level of imbalance and what you are choosing to neglect) to a mortal extent (just ask Dr. Jekyll).  So the intent here is to promote greater awareness of the neglected aspects of our human selves, so as to correct our culture's bizarrely imbalanced (and increasingly so) notion of what the human being is, and how to promote its health.

Ready, set--