Bodies of Light

The healers do not have to be whole because wholeness, holiness, are not human qualities. Humanity’s greatest gift is love and not reason – St Paul is not usually among her prophets but this, for the first time, seems true – and Mamma, for all her time in church, does not know this. If she is to be a doctor – as she is to be a doctor – she will be a broken doctor, her own hurt as much part of her practice as her healing. A docto

and not run away to hide.

This, it seems to Ally, is the condition of human agency; our very lives cause harm to others and it is wilful blindness to pretend otherwise. We are all of us, every mortal soul, damaging persons. Our best hope, for salvation and for medicine – the thing, she thinks, that Mamma cannot do – is to own the damage we do. And to live with it

Holy, whole, hale, healthy: Aubrey told her once that these are all the same word. None of those states is the human condition. The healers are not whole.

Edith is right that the purpose of a moral imperative is to justify harm. If it is sometimes necessary to suffer, it must also sometimes be necessary to cause suffering