Spiritual and material

My thoughts have been moving lately in the direction of holism.   When we look at the wide variety of cultures across time and around the world, we see two tendencies.  A culture will either tend toward materialism or toward the spiritual.  I think reality is a spectrum with these two extremes on opposite ends.  A whole, healthy person will be perfectly balanced in the middle.  He will balance his energies between taking care of his body and his spirit without neglecting or injuring one in favor of the other.
The biggest problem for us today, here in America, is our terrible emphasis on the material, to the best total neglect of the spiritual.  Most Protestant churches are no better.  They preach on morality, on healthy living and on going to heaven someday (or avoiding hell, depending on the church).  But there is almost nothing said about healing the soul, restoring our spirit, or cleansing our heart.  It is so bad that to even to try to speak on the topic will bring either looks of confusion or derision, with accusations of being "New Age".
The far east, on the opposite end, tends toward the other extreme, at least religiously.  Meditation and reincarnation form a worldview that downplays the place of the body.
We need to remember, God made man body and soul.  He formed him from clay and breathed life into him.  We should not fall into the error of Platonism, which sees the spirit in the prison house of the body.  But we shouldn't neglect our spirit either, putting all our emphasis on exercise and the pursuit of youthful beauty.
It will be a very difficult path to find and travel, as we have been way off for so long.  But we must find a balance.  A whole new world will open up for us, in which we will know others more deeply, we will interact with all of creation more fully, we will come to know the spiritual side in ways we cannot even begin to comprehend, and we will know God in the way we were created to know him.
Our reality must be built upon a framework of loving God and loving neighbor.  We can only do this when we are whole, spiritually and physically healthy and balanced.  The tools that we need to move in the right direction are provided for us in the church, the holy, apostolic, historic Orthodox Christian church.  Let's learn to use them holistically.  Life is complex, this will take us a long time to figure out.