Wholeness
is the Destination
“Naya
was born in Washington, DC, two years after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln
and lived well into her nineties. Like everybody else, she had her happy times
and her sad times, her weaknesses and her strengths, her good luck, and her bad
luck, but what made her unique in my experience was that no matter what
happened to her, she seemed always remarkably and invincibly herself.”
Frederick
Buechner (The Longing for Home, p.105-106, Harper Collins, 1996)
In the
quote above, Buechner writes about his grandmother. He goes on to say that no
matter what was going on in her life, through the deaths of people she loved
and other kinds of loss and pain, she remained serene and intact “as if she
lived out of some deep center within herself that was beyond the reach of
circumstance.” He goes on to describe what was a typical life for a woman
of her time—not easy, full of losses and sorrows, but also buoyed by family and
the love of community. She is one of the people he considered to be “whole.”
It
seems to me that one who lives into their nineties would have experienced most all of what life has to offer—both joy and sorrow, gain and loss, love and rejection,
involvement, and boredom. My guess is that Buechner’s Naya had no expectation
that life would always be fair, that good would be rewarded and evil punished, or
that she and everyone she loved would be equally valued and cared for. Perhaps
in knowing that none of those things apply in real life, she was at peace with
what was. Magnanimous about the negatives and appreciative of the positives,
but neither devastated nor overjoyed by either. It may take ninety years to
arrive at that point of balance.
Buechner’s assessment of his grandmother was, in all circumstances, she
was true to herself. She lived from a deep inner nature that was sufficient
unto itself. Her trust in that center, and her grounding in reality, were
unshakable. I have known a few such people in my life, too, and they always
make an indelible impression. When you are with them, you feel safe and
accepted, as though they change the dynamics of the space around them to
include, and even embrace, you. Contrast that, if you will, to the way most of
us feel around people who are not “whole.” Folks who are still caught in a web
of blame and anger toward others, and rejection of themselves. For good reason,
we do not feel safe or trusting in their presence.
My
understanding about how to get from here to there, from fractured to whole, is
to do your work—your psychological work. Confront your demons, admit your
flaws, but also allow yourself to be human. Every human I’ve ever known has
made mistakes and done dumb stuff some of the time. We all misjudge and
criticize ourselves and one another. But we also love, and uplift, celebrate
each other. And we all need each other. This is the human condition—conflicted,
imperfect, yet striving to belong. We are all on a journey toward wholeness. We
haven’t arrived yet, but that’s the destination. Let’s hope we have ninety
years to get there.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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