The Divine Physician and a Christian Approach to Mental Health and Wellbeing
January 17, 2026
To be Christian is to celebrate the coming into our midst of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. The mystery of the incarnation, of God’s personal entrance into history, and the good news of Christ’s revelation which we call the Gospel, changed everything. We have simply never been the same, for ever since our Lord’s life, death, and resurrection and the beginning of the Church’s mission, we have lived with an earnest hope for authentic and everlasting happiness.
Even before the advent of Christ, and before our definitive knowledge of God’s goodness and the possibility of heavenly peace, humanity knew that all was not well. We knew that we needed a Savior. Aristotle observed that every human person “pursues the good, or apparent good” in his or her actions. We all strive for goodness, or what we think will bring us happiness, but we also tend to confuse what is truly good with what only appears to be good. The very fact that we have trouble distinguishing objective goods from objective evils was a sign to the ancients of our brokenness. This helps explain why Aristotle also spoke of hamartia, literally meaning “to miss the mark,”1 to describe the basic tendency of the human person to fall short of perfection. In fact, the Gospels, in the original Greek, speak of hamartia,2 the modern word for which will be immediately recognizable: it is what we call sin, the rejection of God, the source of all good. The negative effects of our separation from him so obviously frustrate our natural desires for health, wellbeing, and lasting happiness. We see that even before Christ’s incarnation, humanity recognized it was “sick” and required divine intervention if minds and hearts were ever to be set right.
