Orthodox Health

Fr. Ted Paraskevopoulos, speaking on Episode 81 of the Orthodox Health Podcast, describes the church as a spiritual gym. He argues that the body is catechized along with the mind: what we repeatedly do with the body shapes attention, appetite, endurance, humility, and eventually what we learn to love. This is why Orthodox worship is so physical. Christians do prostrations, fast, attend services, light candles, and kiss icons.

He calls this psychosomatic training through ascetic practices, and says the Christian life forms a person through participation, repetition, restraint, effort, and communion. We are being trained, he says, long before every lesson can be perfectly explained. From this he draws a consequence for how we think about health.

Training the body cannot become a separate self-improvement project running alongside the spiritual life. Spiritual formation also cannot be reduced to having correct thoughts while the body stays irrelevant. The whole person is being formed. That is where askesis becomes bigger than religious discipline: it is training ordered toward becoming the kind of human being capable of offering himself to God.

He adds that when people do not engage in these practices, they tend to neglect other things in their lives, which creates an imbalance. The episode is titled When Life Falls Apart, You Need a Bunker.