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For the past few weeks, I have been thinking about and exploring the concept of wholeness. Recently I have become aware just how splintered our lives are: job and family and sacred and secular and rational and emotional and conscious and subconscious and love and passion and obligation and responsibility and pain and pleasure and rest and relaxation. We categorise and compartmentalise and label and organise our entire lives, it seems, in order to fit it all in and make it work, but how many of us feel whole?
When I look back at the basic concepts presented at the beginning of time as we know it, the goal was to be whole, to be one, to be in unity- with God first and then with each other. The first splintering took place when the we as humans decided that wholeness was inferior to personal advancement, and we started descending the slippery slope of comparison and competition instead of ascending towards the lofty goals of unison and harmony. Understandable, because unity requires sacrifice and laying down of your life for others.
Pursing wholeness is not for the faint of heart. It will sometimes feel like death. It will require everything you have inside of you. You must be 100% present in whatever you are doing at this moment in your life, in whatever situation you are in, with whatever people you have chosen to surround yourself with. It will cause you the greatest agony as you choose where to commit yourself and the greatest joy when you give yourself wholly.
I don't quite know how to do this life of wholeness, but today, right now, I am here writing about something important that is worth my time and effort. 100% of it.
This is an orange on my kitchen table.
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shane magee said…
one of the biggest mistakes of the enlightenment was to splinter us into mind and body. sure, the gnostics had done a pretty good job prior to that, but decartes really nailed that coffin shut. since then we have had the idea that jesus came to "save souls"; that the spiritual can somehow be divorced from the material; that concern for people's physical welfare is the 'social gospel' which is somehow different from - and less than - the 'real' gospel.

and we further fracture people into emotional, spiritual, physical, psychological and so on. even the idea that soe things we do are spiritual and some are secular is total nonsense according to the new testament. we are spiritual beings - the whole of us - therefore, if christ has renewed us, he has renewed ALL of us. there is no divide, no stopping point, no barrier beyond which he does not travel. so whether we go to church or to the washroom we go there as spiritual beings, so there is a sense in which both are totally spiritual experiences. i'm being kind of facetious but you get the point.

and when we meet other people, we treat them as WHOLE individuals. and in caring for their needs - whatever way they present themselves - in some way we are carrying out the gospel and bringing them jesus christ.
8:24 AM
shane magee said…
oops. think i just wrote a book chapter instead of a comment!
8:24 AM
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