One day Brother Weeps was talking about wholeness and holiness, emphasizing that neither has anything to do with perfection.
“Perfection, or the preoccupation with it,” he said, “which we call perfectionism, is the nemesis of holiness and a misguided caricature of wholeness. Holiness, we often have been taught—knowingly and unknowingly—is synonymous with perfection. But this is false. In fact, when it comes to behavior and human living, the focus on perfection is a dangerous misconception especially when it is tied to God. And when it is tied to God it is done without God’s permission.
What God hopes for us is not perfection, but wholeness—not to be perfect, but to become whole. Wholeness and perfection are not the same. Wholeness is not the unblemished, the untouched, the error-free. It’s not being without sin. St. is the abbreviation for saint not stick-in-the mud. Wholeness is not being flawless or unbroken. It is not the uncut sphere. It is the circular puzzle made so by the attentive and intentional graced work of putting all the pieces together into one round whole, one pieced-together puzzle. In and of themselves, not all pieces are pleasing or lovely or beautiful. Some are rather unattractive, misshapen, godawful, seemingly good for nothing except discarding. But when they are pieced together, when they are integrated into a fragmented whole, it is a work of art, an utterly unique, beautiful creation.
In the story of Jesus feeding the multitudes, he blesses, breaks, and shares the five loaves and two fish brought to him by the disciples. They feed the masses. When the leftovers (leftovers?) are gathered they collect “twelve baskets full.” From the broken pieces shared comes a radically new fullness. The crowd is made a community brought together by the sharing of their broken pieces.
The opposite of wholeness is not brokenness but disintegration. Holiness and wholeness involve integration. They are characterized by integrity. Whether they know it or not, when a person is lacking integrity or disinterested in personal integration, they are disintegrating. They are becoming less whole. They are decomposing, rotting, falling apart, moving further away from who they really are. When we are not consciously becoming whole, we are wasting our life. When we are deliberately working to become more whole, nothing is wasted. As Richard Rohr says, ‘Everything belongs.’
Wholeness is not a done deal, a state of perfection but rather, like holiness, is the ongoing graced action of integration, of bringing the disparate pieces of oneself together into a pieced-together oneness. Holiness is not about eliminating all the displeasing or odd-shaped pieces that don’t seem to fit. Wholeness and holiness are not put off by brokenness. Jesus, as the exemplar of holiness, is not a perfect human being, but a whole human being, a whole person. Jesus is the icon through whom we see that holiness is not about being less human but more human. More human does not mean more perfect, but more whole.
The fullness of our humanity and the holiness of our living are not signified by a fixed condition, an unbroken state of perfection, but instead are marked by the ongoing, intentional enactment of bringing together all the disparate pieces of our life that make us uniquely precious, perfectly imperfect, noble, and beautiful works of art in whom God takes great delight.”
© Dan Miller, 2022. All Rights Reserved.
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