Ever since seminary days, I have known the phrase “clergy wellness.”  While the phrase is concerned about the overall health of ordained religious leadership, in its simplest definition, it means your preacher should go to the gym.  So, most weekday mornings, I am a member of the early risers at the downtown YMCA in Asheville. 

 

One set of exercises I do each morning involves a medicine ball.  You might remember medicine balls from junior high P.E., the oversized basketballs which weighed a ton and were supposed to make us all big and strong.  

 

A little while back, I discovered the large black medicine ball I use each morning was made in India.  The ball traveled halfway around the world to end up in the Asheville Y so I can stay fit and keep well.  Besides a few minutes each morning, my thoughts rarely go to India.  It is simply the place where they grow medicine balls.

 

However, I recently traveled to Northeast India to visit the region and to be with Christians who are a part of a companion diocese relationship between the Diocese of Durgapur in the state of West Bengal and the Episcopal Diocese of Western North Carolina.  For two weeks, I along with four other team members from our diocese visited several communities in the mostly rural region along with two brief visits to Calcutta, the major city in that section of India.

 

I am now back from my time in India and my sleep patterns have returned to normal and I am back at work.  I have even spent lots of time again with the Indian medicine ball.  But I can’t get India out of my head.

 

I did not see the factory where my medicine ball came from.  But I did see many signs of new industrial activity right alongside traditional practices of rice farming.  And the air quality I experienced in India was abysmal.  How many Indians breathe poor air so I can stay fit with my medicine ball?  How many Indians drink dirty water so I can be a model of clergy health?  

 

In North Carolina, we have begun to pay more attention to the quality of our air and water and how our daily practices, both individually and corporately, can contribute either to environmental degradation or restoration.  But my time in India impressed upon me the reality that my concern for clean air and water can not stop at the state line.  

 

In Ezekiel, we hear the cry of God for God’s sheep throughout the land and nations.  As a shepherd, God makes connections across lands and regions where we have, time and time again, made divisions.  For too long, we have defined health with a too limited view as to who my neighbor is and who my

fellow sheep are.  

 

God promises to be a shepherd to us all and to practice a just care of us.  If I understand myself to be a member of a common community then it is easier to see how my actions and my decisions impact other members.  Such intention is the beginning of developing that most mature and underrated spiritual practice—the practice of paying attention.  The term often associated with such thinking now is sustainable.  While the word may be new to us, the practice is an ancient one.

 

The vision we hear in Ezekiel is one where a fractured world is being recreated and gathered again properly.  In a fractured world, we too often ignore those whose faces we do not see or whose lives we do not encounter daily.  If India is only the place where my medicine ball came from, then my vision of sustainability will be shortsighted and incomplete.  Whatever it takes to get me the medicine ball so I can be healthy is one way of living in the world.  But that is not the vision of God who promises to shepherd us all.  

 

“I will shepherd the flock with justice.”  In other words, God promises to be an honest broker to all the relationships that we either are unaware of or choose to ignore.  God’s vision of health, of true health, requires us to seek the mind of the Christ, who like God in Ezekiel’s vision, promises to seek the lost.  Our vision is incomplete.  The vision of the Christ is whole.

 

So how does our incomplete vision grow?  How do we seek the mind of Christ?  How do we pay attention without being overwhelmed and paralyzed with all the injustice in our world?  By redefining what it is we need—fewer things and deeper relationships.  I am truly defined by my membership in God’s flock, not by the things I choose to possess without regard for how these things came to me.  

 

At the end of our time in India, we drove through the streets of Calcutta as we searched for our hotel for our last night in the country.  At a stop sign, I looked out the car window and saw a taxicab driver asleep in his cab.  The man

remained asleep and I do not know his name and he does not know mine.  But the image of him remains with me like a kind of ordinary icon; a passage into a more sustainable vision of the true world God created and desires us to live in.

 

The man in the taxicab was “made in India,” too.  Each morning at the Y, the burden of the ball is intended to make me fit, stronger, more able to take on the world.  But the ball is also becoming a means for prayer, an instrument to remember that God makes us all good.  As we are made good, so we are called to treat each other with care and dignity.  One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism.  One Shepherd, one Flock, one Air to breathe, one source of Water to drink. 

 

BY REV. CANON BRIAN COLE, THE CATHEDRAL

OF ALL SOULS, ASHEVILLE