The Health and Wealth Gospel?? Um, No.
However…
The so-called “Health and Wealth Gospel” is a version of Christianity that espouses that health and prosperity are what God desires for all of us. The shadow side of this is 1) you will only truly prosper in the material world (let alone the spiritual world hereafter) if you are a Christian, and 2) if you are therefore sick or in a financial slump, then you are sinning or doing something terribly WRONG. In other words, guilt, guilt, and more guilt be heaped upon thee for daring to be, you know, human.
In my shift into the world of energy healing, a similar version of this gets bantered around A LOT. In this Guru–version of the Health and Wealth Gospel, if you are not living in alignment with divine or universal principles, it will show up as sickness or poverty or some other kind of something you really don’t want and never in your right mind would have asked for. Donna Eden, a pioneer in the field of energy medicine, states in her book of the same name, that she has seen a number of clients who carry around with them what she calls “new age guilt.” They know the right things, believe the correct beliefs, keep clearing the heavy emotions, eat healthy, set the proper intentions, and yet, here they are in her office, sick, poor or both. And they BLAME themselves for not “getting it right.”
So are we healers, teachers, counselors and coaches setting people up to fail? “Do this and you shall be healed. Do this and you shall prosper.” Shadow side: “If you are still sick or not prospering, you didn’t follow the teachings correctly or with enough energy/purity/whatever.” You are therefore to blame. (And I hear this in my head said with the same accent of the mad doctor in The Princess Bride played by Billy Crystal, when he says, to blathe. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, well, you are to blame. Just kidding.)
So, let’s go to the opposite extreme and see what lies there. The critics of “Health and Wealth” point out that the care of the poor and the sick, and seeing God/the divine/the Self in the least of these is mandated by the highest ideals of all the world’s religions. Yes. This is true. And yet, I question this opposite extreme as well because it begs the question: what do you serve the poor/the sick for? To secure your own spiritual satisfaction now or future reward later for helping them? Maybe, but I think the true aim of most bleeding heart activists is to get people out of sickness (if possible) and out of poverty (if possible) into thriving and well-being. You see, if you can’t say that you want people who are sick and in poverty to get out of it (if possible), and that’s one of the main reasons why we who are relatively healthy and prosperous are to serve them, it’s like saying you believe God prefers people to be sick and poor so spiritually mature/healthy/wealthy among us can help them so we can feel better about ourselves and they can simply be happy about their poor, sick, state of being until they transition to the afterlife, which doesn’t seem too right either. Even the critics who desire social action aimed at reconstructing society so the more don’t keep getting more at the expense of those who keep getting less, must say that what they want is for everyone to have a decent chance of thriving and prospering.
But what does thriving and prospering mean? Can everyone be as filthy rich as many have become telling the rest of us how to get filthy rich? Adapting my publisher’s comment: “if every writer met his/her sales goals, civilization would collapse because nobody would be doing anything other than reading,” it is also true that if everybody were as rich as say, Oprah or Bill Gates, society would also come to a halt because societal economic well-being is dependent not on rich people/corporations who have and hoard and keep millions and billions, but on the majority of people sharing and circulating.
So what is true health and true wealth?
It is interesting that the origins for the words health and wealth are related and inter-changeable. Health is from “hale,” and the word “whole” also derives from “hale.” Wealth is from “weal” or “well” another version of “whole.” So it’s not too surprising that in our modern English, the words health and wealth share 5 of 6 letters and therefore rhyme. In the root meanings they are inter-related and connected. Energetically they are too. When do many people lose what wealth they have? When they get chronically sick. Conversely, if one is continually sick, it is difficult to work enough to make ends meet. But I do want to distinguish between them, too, because though they are inter-related, they are not the same. We can all think of people who though wealthy, would not meet our definitions of holistically healthy, because their souls are languishing forgotten in the dungeons of their consciousness or their hearts are as hard as the gemstones they collect. We can also think of people who are holistically healthy: body, mind and soul, and live very simply, even in poverty, whether chosen consciously or not.
So what do we want for people who are suffering? What do we want for ourselves? Our children? Our planet? How do we achieve true thriving and prosperity for most people keeping it all in balance with the earth and each other?
These are all important questions to keep asking ourselves. However, I do want to turn my stream of consciousness here in a different direction. Though this veer may look similar to “the health and wealth gospel” it really isn’t because of one fundamental difference. I believe this difference may help us all shift into the new paradigm the Spirit is trying to create out of the chaos of the old breaking down.
In this shift we are aware that at the core of each and every person is wholeness. This wholeness is the divine spark, the core star, the piece of the Creator, whatever you want to call it. But this is the Truest Self and is therefore whole (and well, healthy, and wealthy). This is true already of each of us. We are not separate from God’s beingness. We are it. Therefore, we are already whole at our core no matter what our circumstances.
We can this live from this awareness regardless of what state of being our body or our bank account is saying to us. It means we live from the place of total assuredness of what is True. The odd thing is that when we live from this awareness, indeed our circumstances do in fact start to shift. They may not shift into our ego’s idea of “health and wealth”. In fact, you can probably bet they won’t. But it will begin to bring into reality something awesome beyond our wildest dreams. Health and wealth of all truly good and beneficial things begins to emerge in our life. And we take responsibility for what does come without blame for where we are learning and growing.
Blame and responsibility. It sounds like a bad Jane Austen novel. But when we can shift out of blame and thinking that something is inherently wrong with us into the wholeness that ever was with us and in us and working through us, we are offered a treasure beyond measure. We are given the conscious choice to use the infinite Source of all well-being responsibly and even magically to help create a new way of being human, a way where we are sharing and circulating and giving and receiving without greed and hoarding, and without fear and suffering for we know who we are. We know we are whole and well and wealthy and healthy, no matter what. And if you are familiar with the mad doctor in The Princess Bride, you know that when he was saying to blathe, he was really covering for true love. Ah yes, that is what all true health and wealth is sourced with, Love. Be rich in Love today!
