Page 353 - Orthodoxy Zizioulas

T H E C H U R C H , P S YC H O L O G Y, A N D T H E Q U E S T I O N O F H E A L I N G
much by what it has, but by what it is. This is decisive. Healing
is not primarily a matter of techniques, sacraments, or gifted
spiritual fathers taken in isolation. People often seek the “per-
fect” confessor or the ideal method of repentance, forgetting
that the spiritual father himself does not heal. Healing takes
place through incorporation into the event of the Church as
communion. The sacrament of confession is not magic; its
purpose is to integrate the person into the communion of the
Church, where true healing gradually occurs.
For the Church, healing is not primarily psychological or
moral, but ontological. Its goal is not merely to relieve symp-
toms, but to bring rebirth—to transfer the person from the
world of self-love, where passions are born, into the world of
love for others, where healing is found in communion. This
transition is painful because it passes through the Cross. Yet
only through this passage can the fragmented human being
be restored.
The Church possesses no merely technical method for this
task. What it offers is faith in the personal God, faith in the
human person as image of God, Christ’s love without condi-
tions or exclusivity, and the Eucharistic community in which
this love becomes lived existence. The struggle against pas-
sions is not an end in itself. Its aim is to recover the true per-
son, to reunite fragmented nature, and to restore right rela-
tionship with God, with other persons, and with the natural
world.
Health, therefore, is the proper relationship of the human
being to these three: God, others, and nature. Disease is the
disturbance of this threefold relationship. In this lies the meet-
ing point between theology and psychology: both seek healing
of the human person, but theology reminds us that the deep-
est healing is found only when the person is restored to com-
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