The process of becoming whole is kind of like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. At some point, most of us will have pieces in our hands that we would swear just don't fit. And we'll see empty places in the puzzle whose piece we'd swear has been lost, "I've looked everywhere--it's just not here!"
To become whole is to work with the pieces we see and to not give up on the pieces we don't see. And to trust--against all common sense it would seem--that what we need is here, Somewhere.
What follows is a version of the lectio we're using in our two Neighborhood groups this month.
Lectio for Neighborhood Groups, December, 2012: Wholeness
It would be good for the English-speaking world if we were to dispense
for a while with the use of the word holiness, because it has been smirched
like the word church with sectarian meaning. Holy and whole, holiness, and
wholeness are synonymous; and health is but another way of writing holth or
wholth, holiness or wholeness. Piety and virtue and a lot of other qualities
are component parts of holiness, but in themselves they are no more holiness
than the sun's ray is the sun. Holiness is the normal condition of a whole person…. –Charles Henry Brent
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A woman who had suffered a condition of hemorrhaging for twelve years—a
long succession of physicians had treated her, and treated her badly, taking
all her money and leaving her worse off than before—had heard about Jesus. She
slipped in from behind and touched his robe. She was thinking to herself, “If I
can put a finger on his robe, I can get well.” The moment she did it, the flow
of blood dried up. She could feel the change and knew her plague was over.
At the same moment, Jesus felt energy discharging from him. He turned
around to the crowd and asked, “Who touched my robe?” His disciples said, “What
are you talking about? With this crowd pushing and jostling you, you’re asking,
‘Who touched me?’ Dozens have touched you!”
But he went on asking, looking around to see who had done it. The woman,
knowing what had happened, knowing she was the one, stepped up in fear and
trembling, knelt before him, and gave him the whole story. Jesus said to her,
“Daughter, you took a risk of faith, and now you’re healed and whole. Live
well, live blessed! Be healed of your plague.” –Mark 5.25-33
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We are all more than we know. Wholeness is never lost, it is only
forgotten. Integrity rarely means that we need to add something to ourselves;
it is more an undoing than a doing, a freeing ourselves from beliefs we have
about who we are and ways we have been persuaded to "fix" ourselves
to know who we genuinely are. Even after many years of seeing, thinking, and
living one way, we are able to reach past all that to claim our integrity and live
in a way we may never have expected to live.
–Rachel Remen
