Our approaches to and understandings of disease, illness, the aging of the body, the body itself, have almost always acknowledged the connection between health and holiness—the words hale, healthy, healing and holy all share similar roots. Ideas about illness in all its manifestations have, as everything else, changed throughout the ages. Most of the theories connected body, mind and spirit in some way, until our so-called age of enlightenment when we saw the rise of rationalism and “science.”

Western thought then attempted to separate the body from the mind and spirit. Now, in the comforting circular way that seems to happen, it is science itself that is showing us evidence of these links in so many ways. During recent years an ever-growing body of evidence has emerged, from brain scans to people's own stories, of the connection between health and spirituality.

However, if we just start meditating or going to church because we think it will fix our physical problems, we miss an opportunity to really enter into whatever it is that illness offers to us. Whether we view it as a message from the gods, a time to rest and restore, or a time to reexamine our lives, the suggestions of the symptoms can lead us there. There are many accounts of so-called miraculous healings, through love, through prayer, through meditation, but when we call on whatever God means for us, the deepest place in our beings, there are no guarantees what form our healing will take—so the best we can do is to try to find some balance, to follow our hearts, to find what for us is holy.