Thought for the Week: Becoming whole
David Saunders reflects on finding our way to wholeness
It is a natural tendency, as we get on in years, to take stock of our lives. This process inevitably involves both acknowledging what we have done and coming to terms with what we haven’t. The gaps in our achievements will vary: we may not have climbed Everest; won an Olympic gold medal; seen Niagara Falls; played a concerto; written a bestseller; been blessed with grandchildren; baked bread and so on. This could become very negative, emphasising the gaps, but I increasingly see it as an integral part of becoming whole. The Swiss cheese is beautifully smooth and complete on the outside – but has holes inside!
To recognise, accept and love what we are not is just as important as acknowledging and affirming what we are. As the years pass we consciously and unconsciously sift from our life experience that which we can and that which we cannot. We have, hopefully, discovered our gifts, used our strengths, released our enthusiasms, but also recognised our limitations, weaknesses and fears. That balancing of positive and negative allows wholeness to happen. This is a healthy process; it takes us beyond the ego that governed our early development to something bigger, to our God-selves, to God-ness. The ambitions, expectations and targets of our early developing years, as individual people, gave us energy, passion and strength. In later life we move beyond those drives to something more integrated and more unifying. We grow whole and complete. We may, as Hannah Whitall Smith so delightfully writes in Quaker faith & practice 21.48, ‘be done with things’, but that allows space for something deeper to emerge. ‘Then I will know fully,’ writes Paul in Corinthians 13:12.
‘Go up into the gaps,’ writes Annie Dillard, for ‘the gaps are the Spirit’s one home’. In exploring the gaps we may then find what Thomas Merton called ‘the hidden wholeness… in all visible things’. Perhaps it is one of life’s great paradoxes that in accepting what we are not, what we cannot, we affirm what we are, what we can. T S Eliot saw the purpose of continuing to explore as returning to the starting point, but knowing it for the first time, recognising that the fire and the rose are one.
So, let us be realistic in our life assessments but not allow the omissions to detract from our wholeness; they are part of it. Our gaps, our failures, our ‘not dones’ mean we have learnt to focus our energies, to use our gifts, to receive as well as give. Finding our way to wholeness is finding our way to God.
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