Community Health

JAN. 6, 1981, 6:02 AM
W. WILLOW, STUDY

You posed this, o son, as a working title during your shower, which shall be a test, of sorts, of what I told you yesterday. For I did say that this time of instruction would have utility as preparation for all of your teaching tasks. So, as you are thinking most about this most secular of courses, why not see what I have to offer in insights relevant.

Community health can be envisioned in at least two ways. In one perspective community health is the theoretical sum… and average… of the holistic health of all persons in the community. In some communities the range would be rather small, the health of most people being rather uniformly good… or not so good. In others, there could be a wide range, from extremely healthy to rather abject ill-health. The balance of the dimensions could be, again, quite similar or quite diverse. So, the health of the community would be assessed, in some ways, as some sort of mean or median of all the individuals who, in fact, are that community.

The other major perspective is that community health is the quality of the environment, social and physical, in which any individual lives. This involves the cleanliness of the air, water, and land, the spirit of helpfulness and of acceptance among the people… and many more factors which make up the holistic environment in which any of My individual souls (or so it appears) lives. Here there is a differentiation between the individual and his or her environment. Seeing that there is a certain individual quality to each person’s environment you can sense a coming together of these perspectives when you would try to “average” the environment for all of those in any community.

Let’s consider My favorite dimension, the spiritual, under each of the perspectives. Under the first you would consider and assess the strength and quality of the spiritual health of persons and how important this is, in “comparison” with the other dimensions. Then you’d have to assess some “central tendency”, which, as I said, could be the relative homogeneity of a Catholic convent or a maximum security prison or the relative heterogeneity of Carbondale… or of Los Angeles. One obvious element in this aspect of community health is commitment to Me and My values for community living. And I still am somewhat amazed at the diversity of souls who are My creations, how some can genuinely love and praise Me, acknowledging Me as the source of their being and having close personal and community contact with Me… and yet favor the development of nuclear weapons which can, and will, destroy other creatures equally dear to Me. They act, finally, as though freedom were somehow apart from Me… and that I must be defended… by nuclear means. A brief diversion. Anyway, one measure of the health of a community, in holistic terms, is the number and quality of worshipping and serving communities and the strength of commitment to Me by individuals.