Much has been said and written about "wellness" among the clergy. National and diocesan level workshops and projects have been springing up. It is meet and right that clergy should model a wholesome and holy way of life. Alban Institute asserts that clergy who work more than 50 hours a week are sacrificing their health and/or their primary relationships.

I am a prime example of someone who has naturally been inclined toward wellness. Like the man who could say to Jesus that he had kept all the commandments from his youth, I can say the same regarding the commandments of wellness. Daily prayer, annual retreats and continuing education, spiritual direction, peer supervision, a recent sabbatical leave, regular exercise, a reasonably healthy diet, and decent balance between work and home, I have kept. But what must I do to inherit eternal life?

St. Ignatius offers a response to that question in the First Principle and Foundation of his Spiritual Exercises. "We are created to praise, reverence, and serve the Lord our God, and by this means to save our soul. The other things on the face of the earth are created for us to help us in attaining the end for which we are created. Hence, we are to make use of them in as far as they help us in the attainment of this end, and we must rid ourselves of them in as far as they prove a hindrance to us.

"Therefore, we must make ourselves indifferent to all created things, as far as we are allowed free choice and are not under any prohibition. Consequently, as far as we are concerned, we should not prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonor, a long life to a short life. The same holds for all other things.

"Our one desire and choice should be what is more conducive to the end for which we are created."

Taken at face value, this statement may strike contemporary readers as a terribly narrow view of the life of faith. That our sole end in life is the saving of our own soul seems terribly individualistic. Ignatius also seems to deny God's proclamation in Genesis that the created order is good and to be enjoyed. It certainly appears to go against the current thinking about wellness. In the scope of this brief article, I can only invite the reader to trust that this is not actually so. To cite one example, in saying that we should not prefer riches to poverty, Ignatius recognized that a person who desired to follow Christ in poverty, serving the poorest of the poor, might actually be led to use her talents to create great wealth to provide for God's work, and would spend her life primarily among the rich and famous!

Jesus was no masochist, but he was indifferent to his own wellness when faithfulness carried him to the cross. Constance and her companions, in the summer of 1878, chose to stay in typhus-infested Memphis, caring for the sick and orphaned in the wake of 5,000 deaths, and died themselves, indifferent to the obvious risk.

What Ignatius seeks by speaking of "indifference toward all created things" is to invite us to greater freedom before our God. Our end is praising, loving and serving God (and Ignatius knew quite well that God was found especially in the least of our brothers and sisters among the poor). Our end is not wellness, but ever deeper conversion to Christ our Lord and God's hope for the human family.

The aim of the Spiritual Exercises, a private and individual experience to be sure, is a heart aflame with the love of God for every human being, a heart alive with God's desire to transform the whole human family into the image of the Holy Trinity - a community of mutual, self-giving and sacrificial love.

Wellness? Yes. May the Holy Spirit show us those things that are good. Surely God wants us to pray and sleep and eat and live healthy and wholesome lives so far as we can. But the end is faithfulness, and when the two are in conflict, wellness becomes an indifferent matter. God's call will eventually take us beyond our own wellness in the desire to seek what is good for our brothers and sisters whom we meet in neighbor, friend, stranger, enemy, the rich, and the poor. o

The Rev. David S. Robinson is rector of St. Matthew's Church, Maple Glen, Pa.