Wholeness

“ ‘You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done … you are fierce with reality.’ … I now know myself to a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.”
[Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, pg. 70]

In psalm we prayed together, we asked God to “purge us with hyssop that we would be clean” We said, “wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow”. The psalmist longs for wholeness—longs for joy and gladness, for their crushed bones to rejoice. But there is darkness lurking, parts of psalmist that are dirty, that need to be purged. Wholeness in this vision involves removing some of the offensive parts.

The sacred text we read for today seemed to take a diametrically opposed perspective: for Parker Palmer, the way to wholeness was to embrace all of himself, the weakness and strength, liabilities and well as gifts—even darkness along with the light. Only by embracing all of these parts, says Palmer, was he able to leave behind his malaise & depression.

How do we reconcile these two perspectives— The natural tendency to want to reject the unclean parts of us, and the equally natural tendency to want to be accepted for who we are, flaws and all?

It’s kind of hard to imagine a biblical psalm with the sentiment of embracing the broken parts within ourselves. So many pleas for rescue are found there, along with plenty of humility. It seems a very modern idea, perhaps part of the self-esteem movement, that we should embrace our flaws without rejection or judgment.
And it might be modern. Or it might the model of Jesus himself, embracing the sinner, the unclean, the traitor-collaborator. If Jesus, if God does not condemn us for our faults, but loves us all the same, unconditionally; if God doesn’t reject the darkness, liability and weakness in us but loves us, loves us not despite these flaws, then perhaps it is a sacred wholeness to embrace all of oneself.

For myself, I’ve worked to embrace the fact that I can be a little… grumpy, a little self-centered, lacking in ways I wish I weren’t. It’s hard because I’d like to deny that I am that way at all. But when I recognize my weakness and strength, then I can love even these flaws, just as I would in a friend or spouse.

Embracing this wholeness isn’t license to give up the vision of leading a God-filled life. Rather, embracing all of our flaws lets us acknowledge the raw material we have to work with. And when we can embrace these unclean parts, paradoxically, we can then better bring our lives to God, and say “create in my a clean heart”: I am who I am, give me the wisdom to begin anew, forget my past mistakes, says the Psalmist.

The good news is that God loves the whole you, and though you may see yourself like the dirty snow on the side of the road, crusty and gray—God sees you purer than the most pristine snowfall, and want your weary, broken bones to rejoice.
Amen.