On Monday I went in to see a photo exhibition in Farsley Church and happened to look up – and there in the rafters was one of those foil helium-filled balloons, looking very out of place and lost, and of course impossible to get at. Have you seen them in odd places?

Many years ago now Hilary & I went to see a film starring a couple of promising young actors called Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis. It was regarded as a rather risqué film; but we thought it was a very moving account of how a couple of rootless people in the Czechoslovakia of 1968 found a meaning and purpose to their lives through the catastrophe of the Russian invasion after the Prague Spring. The film was based on a book by the Czech author Milan Kundera called The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

It's a title that has implicit in it the idea of floating away, like that helium balloon: that our life on its own is insignificant and weightless. As Kundera explores in his book, individual freedom doesn't in the end bring happiness or significance to your life. Rather it means that you either drift through a pointless existence where no one really cares about you, or you end up submitting to the will of those more powerful than you because you don't know what you are or what you believe in. As the sheep pictured in the Little Book of Woolly Wisdom in my downstairs loo put it:

The idea of being a free individual has a strong pedigree in our culture: but in the end, if you truly believe it, you have to face the unbearable lightness of your own being – a balloon that floats away into the sky alone and lost to the world.

Paradoxically, it's having ties and strings that turns you from being a lightweight balloon into a true person. The ancient Hebrews had a word for it: Shalom, the Hebrew word for peace.
But shalom doesn't mean peace in the sense of the absence of noise or conflict. It has a deeper meaning: it refers to the presence of well-being through being in right relationships: related positively to God, to your family and your neighbours, to the human and natural worlds, to your body, to your life, and to your death.

What does it mean to be healthy, to be well, to be in right relationship with things? The Old English word hale was the root of the two words whole and healthy – we still say of someone that they're 'hale and hearty'. Being well means being in a state of wholeness; if parts of your body, or some of your relationships with others, or your spiritual life, aren't doing well, then you're not whole and healthy – you're not in a state that promotes well-being.

To take another example: on a computer (and I know some of you won't relate to this at all!) there's a magnetic hard disk that stores all the information on the computer. Over time the information gets dotted about on the disk as it's moved from place to place, until the computer runs slower and slower and eventually nearly grinds to a halt; at which point you have to poke around in the inner workings and find the button that says Defragment, which takes a few hours to move everything back so that it's in a logical order and the computer runs faster. If we don't give time to our relationship with God, and others, and the world, we too become fragmented and run less and less well, until we grind to a halt.

It's all in today's scripture readings, of course. In Mark ch.6 the apostles return excited but exhausted from their mission of teaching and healing, and Jesus takes them away to rest and eat: first things first, you note: in order to be whole, get your body sorted and refreshed before you do anything else. Only the crowd just won't give them space to be alone: and Jesus has compassion and teaches them, before going on to feed them ( and this bit's not in the reading) with the five loaves and two fishes. Practical hospitality goes with teaching too: understanding for the mind and soul as well as sustenance for the body. And after Jesus prays and crosses the sea, it's time to heal people too: to pursue wholeness of body as well as mind and spirit. Jesus is working to make people well: to be in right relationship with their bodies and their God and with one another too.

St Paul in the letter to Ephesians ch.2 picks this up. He's speaking to the Gentiles, to the Greeks who were regarded by the Jews as ungodly and living without God. You outsiders, he says, have been brought together with the Jewish people into one new humanity in Christ: Christ is our peace, Christ reconciles us together, Christ brings us into right relationship with God and with one another. No longer strangers and aliens, but citizens of heaven, members of God's household, stones built into the temple where God dwells.

If I'd thought to get a helium balloon today and brought it into this church and let it go, what would happen to it? It would float up to the roof: it would be looking down on the church for a long time. But it would never be built-in; in its freedom to blow where the draughts take it, without ties or strings, it has no part in the community or its future, and can only deflate and disappear.

What makes for well-being? We can't be whole without God and one another. We can't be healthy, can't be well, without being in right relationship to a community. That's why the ministry of hospital-ity (being a hospital for the soul) is so vital for the Cathedral: it's a means of bringing us together with God and one another, in caring for our bodies and our spirits. When we come to take communion soon, we find renewal and life, defragmentation for body and soul; we are built together into one community where Christ dwells; we find a place with one another.  Let go of the unbearable lightness of being; come, become whole by being grounded in the light and love of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.