Welcome!

Welcome to Called to Be wHoly!

Here you will find resources for healthy wholistic living. Health has many dimensions: physical, spiritual, emotional, social, and financial.

Each page has some links to resources to engage you in increasing your health.  Use the main menu bar under the header to view various topics. You can also use the search function for previous posts about specific topics.

Are we taking care of ourselves?

    "As we talked, I discovered that Joe smoked a pack of cigarettes a day and spent sixty to seventy hours a week in the church. Further probing revealed a pretty shaky marriage.  I wondered if a little scare tactic might reach him. “Are you aware that you are killing yourself with your lifestyle?” I asked.  He responded, “If God want to take me, I’m ready. Who needs this vale of tears anyway?”  His anger and depression were apparent….  Joe is not unlike many of the clergy I meet.” [1]

   Roy Oswald wrote those words over 25 years ago.  How true they ring still today!  Generally, we may talk about health more as a society than in the past, but has our attitude changed that much? Oswald named  a “sort of eschatological fatalism” that clergy use to justify our lack of self-care.  He says, that clergy “feel that if they expend themselves completely in the Lord’s work, God will look after them—body, mind and spirit…. Because the final goal is to be with the Lord, it is all right to mortgage one’s body against this final eventuality.”[2]

            What is your theology of self-care? Have you even thought about what the theology is behind how you care for yourself?

            Those of us who are in full-time parish ministry often talk theologically, but do we think about the unspoken theology that is expressed in the way that we take care of ourselves?

            If you are interested in improving your self-care while looking at this care through a  theological lens, then I invite you to watch this page and also to like the wHolyLife Facebook page. These are geared for clergy who want to engage in mindful self-care that increases their health in body, mind and spirit. 

---

[1] Oswald, Roy, Clergy Self-Care: Finding a Balance for Effective Ministry (New York: Roman & Littlefield, 1991), p. 13.

[2] Ibid., 13.