Read "Health is Membership" by Wendell Berry online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
FROM OUR CONSTANT and increasing concerns about health, you can tell how seriously diseased we are. Health, as we may remember from at least some of the days of our youth, is at once wholeness and a kind of unconsciousness. Disease (dis-ease), on the contrary, makes us conscious not only of the state of our health but of the division of our bodies and our world into parts.
The word "health," in fact, comes from the same Indo-European root as "heal," "whole," and "holy. " To be healthy is literally to be whole; to heal is to make whole. I don't think mortal healers should be credited with the power to make holy. But I have no doubt that such healers are properly obliged to acknowledge and respect the holiness embodied in all creatures, or that our healing involves the preservation in us of the spirit and the breath of God.