Wholeness

Another great entry from Jim Branch's Blue Book...a quote by Parker J. Palmer from A Hidden Wholeness...(I know most of you will look at how long this is and choose not to read it, but I thought that it was well worth sharing...a clear glimpse into our humanity-Katherine)

Every summer, I go to the Boundary Waters, a million acres of pristine wilderness along the Minnesota-Ontario border. My first trip, years ago, was a vacation, pure and simple. But as I returned time and again to that elemental world of water, rock , woods, and sky, my vacation began to feel more like a pilgrimage to me--an annual trek to holy ground driven by spiritual need. Douglas Wood's meditation on the jack pine, a tree native to that part of the world, names what I go up north seeking: images o how life looks when it is lived with integrity.

Thomas Merton claimed that "there is in all things...a hidden wholeness." But back in the human world--where we are less self-revealing than jack pines--Merton's words can, at times, sound like wishful thinking. Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the "integrity that comes from being what you are."

My knowledge of the divided life comes first from personal experience: I yearn to be whole, but dividedness often seems the easier choice. A "still, small voice" speaks the truth about me, my work, or the world. I hear it and yet act as if I did not. I withhold a personal gift that might serve a good end or commit myself to a project that I do not really believe in. I keep silent on an issue I should address or actively break faith with one of my own convictions. I deny my inner darkness, giving it more power over me, or I project it onto other people, creating "enemies" where none exist.

I pay a steep price when I live a divided life--feeling fraudulent, anxious about being found out, and depressed by the fact that I am denying my own selfhood. The people around me pay a price as well, for now they walk on ground made unstable by my dividedness. How can I affirm another's identity when I deny my own? How can I trust another's integrity when I defy my own? A fault line runs down the middle of my life, and whenever it cracks open--divorcing my words and actions from the truth I hold within--things around me get shaky and start to fall apart.

But up north, in the wilderness, I sense the wholeness "hidden in all things." It is in the taste of wild berries, the scent of sun-baked pine, the sight of the Northern Lights, the sound of water lapping the shore, signs of bedrock integrity that is eternal and beyond all doubt. And when I return to a human world that is transient and riddled with disbelief, I have new eyes for the wholeness hidden in me and my kind and a new heart for loving even our imperfections.

In fact, the wilderness constantly reminds me that wholeness is not about perfection. On July 4, 1999, a twenty minute maelstrom of hurricane-force winds took down twenty million trees across the Boundary Waters. A month later, when I made my annual pilgrimage up north, I was heartbroken by the ruin and wondered whether I wanted to return. And yet on each visit since, I have been astonished to see how nature uses devastation to stimulate new growth, slowly but persistently healing her own wounds.

Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness--mine, yours, ours--need not be a Utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life.