Listen to your life.
See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.
In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness:
touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it
because in the last analysis all moments are key moments
and life itself is grace.
~ Frederick Buechner ~
This month we are prayerfully considering the paragraph above from Frederick Buechner’s book, Now and Then (p. 87). One of the reasons we listen to our life is to grow in self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-love. As opposed to an unhealthy narcissism that encourages navel-gazing, listening to our life is intended to generate wholeness and well-being. In Hebrew the word is shalem and reminds us of its look-alike cousin shalom. But just as we have a rather pollyannaish understanding of shalom when we use its English transliteration “peace,” so too we have a rather confused understanding of wholeness.
Often you have heard me describe human wholeness with the image of the leftover pizza, explaining that wholeness is not like the perfect, uncut, cheese pizza but more like the leftover, whole pizza constructed from all the leftover slices in all the other boxes at a birthday party—two slices of pepperoni, three sausage and onion, six cheese, two vegetarian delight, and three pineapple and Canadian bacon. Becoming whole (which is the way we should talk about wholeness when it comes to humans) has to do with the conscious effort to bring together into an integrated whole all the disparate pieces of our personality.
Choosing a more natural and sophisticated image than my pizza pie, Quaker educator and author Parker Palmer says something similar in his book A Hidden Wholeness.
The wilderness constantly reminds me that wholeness is not about perfection. . . . 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.
REFLECTION:
Can you identify an experience in your life when brokenness or devastation led to greater personal wholeness?