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sisted that such healing is given so that we might glorify God and serve our
neighbours, rather than continue to live for ourselves.

The fact that human lives are always lived out under the shadow of sick-
ness and culminating in death was seen by the Fathers as a given, to be amelio-
rated where possible, certainly, but not something that could be recti?ed by
the march of human progress, as is our unexamined presupposition today. The
human condition of su?ering culminating with death was seen as transformed
by the work of Christ, not displacing it, but setting it within the greater arc of
the economy of God, fashioning human beings in his image, with a merciful
and loving heart, rather than with a heart of stone. And this arc of the econ-
omy is pedagogically fashioned, providing an opportunity for learning patience,
to not trust in oneself, to know that life does not come from the body but from
God, to learn one’s true dependence on God, to provoke us to prayer, to have
compassion on others, as sharing a common human vulnerability. In a word, the
su?erings of this life lead us to humility, learnt ?nally and fully, in the guts not
just in the head, in the grave, when we become clay in God’s hands.

Now, if all this is so, then we perhaps we can begin to realise how im-
mense are the tectonic changes resulting in our modern approach to life, sick-
ness, and death, that I spoke about earlier. If we don’t know that life comes
through death, then our horizons will become totally immanent, our life will be
for ourselves, for our body, for our pleasure, even if we think we are being “re-
ligious,” growing in our “spiritual life.” If we think that the healing provided by
Christ, the Great Physician, is akin to that provided by modern medicine, with
its own high priest, the doctor, then we will never see beyond our own hori-
zons, we will continue to block death out of our sight, we will continue to treat
the illness but not the patient, and we will forget what it is to be, or rather,
become human.

So, I would suggest that one of the greatest tasks for Christianity today
is not simply to proclaim the faith in an increasing secularised world, but it is
rather a matter of changing the presuppositions that have formed that world.
We must take back death, just as over the past decades we have taken back
birth from being, as a matter of course, a procedure carried out in isolation and
in a medicated state, in the industrialised setting of the hospital, by medical
professionals. The desacralisation of the beginning and end of life result in a
hedonisation of life, in which sickness, su?ering, and death are deprived of any
meaning. We might prefer to deny all of this, but the fact that we are embodied
beings means that we cannot do so forever. As Herve Juvin put it:

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