On eloquentia perfecta and whole health

August 9, 2021

I have a small balcony, mostly covered with plants, but it does allow me to step outside and observe the world from my small street in Paris.  I have spent many hours watching the neighborhood from my balcony and thinking about the pandemic.

*   *   *

The first thing I can observe from my balcony is the café across the street, which is generally quiet in the morning and increasingly busy as the day goes on.  The discussion, laughter and music usually culminates around 6 p.m., which is of course what we know as “happy hour.”  Because being social makes us happy.  

There is never a queue to get into the café across the street. The servers are friendly and the food and drinks are not as expensive as the bigger cafés on the main boulevard.  It’s kind of like the bar in the 1980s sitcom Cheers.  As the song goes, “You wanna go where people know, people are all the same, you wanna go where everybody knows your name.”

The next thing I observe from my balcony is a building that has the words maison des secours engraved in it, probably over 100 years ago.  Today it functions as part of the CASVP of the Ville de Paris, whose mission is to support the most vulnerable – families, the handicapped and those otherwise in difficulty or precarious situations.

There is always a queue in front of the CASVP.  Having spent many years dealing with various administrative authorities in France, this is likely due to the fact that people need to provide lots of documents in order to get assistance – identity papers, attestations, bank statements and rent statements.  So although the work of the CASVP is critical and important, the level of service does not meet the demand.

The last thing I observe from my balcony is the dome of the Sacré-Coeur Basilica. Although I don’t go to mass there every week, there are few places that feel more holy to me.  It was on August 15, 1534 that Saint Ignatius Loyola and companions took their vows that led to the founding of the Society of Jesus (sacred to me as an alum of the Jesuit university of New York City, Fordham). 

One of the values of Jesuit rhetoric revolves around cultivating a person as a whole. An idea that emerged from the European Renaissance known as “eloquentia perfecta,” this is understood as the joining of knowledge and wisdom with virtue and morality.  There is rarely a queue to go to mass at Sacré-Coeur. 

*   *   *

Speaking of queuing in my neighborhood, I have spent a lot of time in the last few months queuing in front of my neighborhood lab for PCR tests. There is a pharmacy across the street from my neighborhood lab, lit up by a green cross, as all French pharmacies are.  As I stare at the cross while queuing for PCRs, I am increasingly convinced that our collective view of health today is far too one-dimensional.

We are being told that the solution to the pandemic must be medicalized.  I would argue that it’s because health has become a huge driver of our economy.  Because the treatments that are promoted and sold tend to be driven by what is profitable, there is little time and attention given to how our lifestyles and environments can improve our ability to resist chronic diseases.

But a purely medicalized approach will likely fall short.  The resources of states today cannot meet the demand, and this will inevitably lead us to something that looks like the CASVP – waking up very early, queuing for an hour and having a number of unpleasant exchanges… all to have ourselves injected with a needle or have a small stick inserted into the far reaches of our noses!  Inequalities will be reinforced as privatization leads to a multi-tiered level of service based on resources.  All in the name of health.

*   *   *

In my view, today we are looking at health and healing mostly at a “micro” level – focusing on the virus and immunity to it is obviously a prime example of that.  Equally, while psychology can help us understand what happens in our brains, trauma is something that is experienced and stored in the body.  In my view, true healing can only take place at a macro level. 

So what can we learn from eloquentia perfecta, or whole cultivation, in the health field? 

I have been reading a lot lately about lifestyle medicine, whose pillars include fitness, nutrition (mostly plant-based but not entirely), restorative sleep, stress management and positive social connection. I think the potential for macro-thinking in health is tremendous and we will need people from lots of different disciplines to sketch out how that can look.

On the one hand, we have the café and the church that have no queue, while the CASVP is completely overwhelmed.  But the café and the church play a very important role in health – a healthy lifestyle that includes human connection, gratitude and acts of service.

If, as lifestyle medicine tells us, true health includes nutrition, social connection and stress management, then we must find a way to better leverage the resources of our community, including our cafés and our churches, to ensure a macro-level healing from this pandemic… and the many unhealthy practices that led us here.

A café is itself a place of health.  Even the word “restaurant” comes from restauration… the idea of making someone or something whole again.  There’s a reason we call it happy hour, and there’s a reason we want to go where everybody knows our name.  It’s all part of our “whole health.”   

And the same for churches.  Not necessarily a place to receive the seriously ill, but places to more meaningfully help the vulnerable through peace, prayer, counselling and connection.

How could that look?  I have a lot of questions but I don’t have the answers.  And there is certainly more than one answer. 

What is clear is that we can all be bearers of good health.  In the same way we greet someone in French with the word salut (health), we can all be caretakers. 

This doesn’t necessarily require additional expense but more efficient exchange of resources and skills.  And a lot of creativity and innovation to get us there.

CPM