Kalos Kagathos: Part 1

I remember the exact place I was standing.

I was five weeks into a cycling pilgrimage that I called “From Rome to Rumi.” I took my first pedal strokes in front of the Vatican in Rome with an intention to reach my destination of Konya, Turkey where the famous poet, Jahelladin Rumi, is buried. (Watch for a book by the same title in 2024.)

While my first pedaling pilgrimage in 2011 had a mapped-out route, this pilgrimage only had a launching point and a destination. It was fun to make my way across Italy, then Greece, and finally into Turkey more by instinct than by a pre-arranged plan.

The pilgrim intention (I’ll post about pilgrim intentions in a future blog) was to work my way from the Vatican that represented the institutional orthodoxy of religion to Rumi’s Tomb that represented the mystical arm of religion. I fully expected that my “aha” moment was going to come as I either neared Konya or arrived in Konya.

I was surprised how early my “aha” moment arrived. On this day where I can nearly remember the shape of the tiles I was standing on, I was in Thessaloniki, Greece visiting a museum of ancient Greek culture. There were hundreds of pottery shards, broken pieces of marble columns, and statuettes, some fully intact and most broken.

And then I came across a broken statue with a description of the ancient gymnasium culture positioned next to it. This is what the placard said:

The concept of the “kalos kagathos” (beautiful and virtuous) citizen was a main objective of ancient Greek society and was achieved through the parallel exercise of the body and the mind.

My body literally froze as if some voice from the past had suddenly called out my name. For the first time in nearly three decades, I felt seen and heard by a formal philosophy and practice. Someone out there got me!

There is a story behind this. During college I had an equal love for both physical education and religion. I spent the first couple of years trying to decide which one should be a major and which one a minor. In the end, I could not choose between these two loves and ended up with a double major.

Right after college I once again lived this “double life.” I was working for the local YMCA in Marin County, CA while also attending seminary. While I eventually became a pastor that was not the original goal. Three of the seven YMCA directors and executives I knew had seminary backgrounds. It made complete sense to me. “How perfect—an education that would lend itself to shaping people’s minds, bodies AND spirits.” I would get my seminary education and then become a YMCA director, was the plan.

But life and forces greater than myself got in the way.

Much of our culture compartmentalizes those various developmental areas. We go to church to nurture our spirit, to school to feed our minds and to the gym to shape our bodies. Three developmental areas, three different institutions. Eventually, my ideal of marrying body and spirit into one life and one professional career was too much. I knew my own wiring, but it didn’t seem to fit the way society and employment was set up.

But the separation was always uncomfortable for me. I often laced my early sermons with experiences I had on the bike and used sports analogies to make points. The separation nagged at me in the same way a dancer might bristle at the suggestion that the beauty of the dance and the grace of the body can be separated. Or suggesting that emotional connection and physical connection are two separate realities when making love. I just don’t think we are wired in such clean and tidy compartments.

Kalos Kagathos. Beauty and virtue or beauty and goodness. That is the philosophy underlying the gymnasium in ancient Greece. Those are the words that finally made my double major in college make sense. I never wanted a double major. I just wanted an education where mind, body and spirit were integrated into one approach to life.

I am going to dedicate another blog to this, but I want to leave you with the mission statement from the Kalos Agathos Foundation in Laguna Beach, CA, a foundation dedicated to the development of youth through the philosophy of Kalos Kagathos.

The Kalos Agathos Foundation promotes mind-body health in young people through the support of arts, athletics and environmental awareness. The Foundation’s core philosophy is that a healthy mind and body are integral to developing self-respect, respect for others, and for the natural world around us. To that end, we encourage young people to regard their own bodies as sacred creations, and to love and respect other persons and resources, including our land, sea, and air.

More to come…

Brian Heron

Religious Innovator and Spiritual Pilgrim