If anyone, then, knows
the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.
--James 4:17 NIV
Yesterday, I
shared about our need for wholeness and the struggles we face in our attempts to
avoid leading divided lives. By divided
lives, I’m referring to our actions and the outward presentation of ourselves which
are in conflict with our true or inner selves and convictions. More than mere hypocrisy, a divided life is a
violation of who God created us to be or a desecration of the “image of God” in
each of us—what has sometimes been described as the true self, the divine spark
or the inner light. I am depending
heavily on the writings of Parker Palmer, especially his book A HiddenWholeness: The Journey Toward and Undivided Life.
One of the books that has
had the greatest impact upon my own spiritual journey and sense of identity is
a different book by Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. Until I read this book, I
did not trust anything that came from inside of myself. Growing up Southern Baptist, I had been
taught that I was a product of a “fallen world” and was utterly corrupt in my
sinfulness. As a rather nerdy and non-athletic child with a low self-esteem, this negative description of my
spiritual identity fit like a hand in a glove.
Well, of course I was a sinful mess, because I felt awful about myself
anyway! So, I probably bought into this
understanding of the wretched state of my soul at a much deeper level than my
well-meaning Sunday School teachers ever intended. I learned not to trust any kind of inner
voice and depended only on sources of truth outside myself for guidance and
direction.
Thanks to Palmer’s Let
Your Life Speak, I began to understand there was something inside of me,
something I had been created to be, that I could trust. He writes:
Vocation does
not come from a voice “out there” calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice “in here” calling me to
be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at
birth by God.
In his writings, Palmer differentiates
between the “true self” and what we might call “ego,” “arrogance,” or “vanity.” These latter things are not “true” but merely
false understandings of who we are and why we matter. Palmer quotes the great spiritual writer
Douglas Steere, who “was fond of saying that the ancient human question “Who
am I?” leads inevitably to the equally important question “Whose am I?”—for there
is no selfhood outside of relationship.”
A healthy understanding of our true selves can only be found with a
balance between inner individual work and outer accountability in community.
In A Hidden Wholeness,
Palmer moves from discerning one’s true self to creating communities
(congregations, workplaces, institutions, etc.) where people’s true selves can
flourish. The costs of living a divided life are not paid by individuals alone
but by everyone in relationship with a divided person. Parker writes that we grow into adulthood and
become alienated from who we were made to be.
He says
Dividedness.
. . comes highly recommended by popular culture. “Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve,” and “Hold
your cards close to your vest” are just two examples of how we are told from an
early age that “masked and armored” is the safe and sane way to live. But our culture has it backward. The truth is that the more dividedness we perceive
in each other, the less safe we feel. . . The perceived incongruity of inner
and outer—the inauthenticity that we sense in others or they in us—constantly undermines
our morale, our relationships, and our capacity for good work. So “masked and armored,” it turns out, is not
the safe and sane way to life. If our
roles were more deeply informed by the truth that is in our souls, the general
level of sanity and safety would rise dramatically.
The alienation we feel from our true selves becomes
manifest in our relationships with others.
Our personal alienation becomes an interpersonal alienation. People who feel alienated from themselves are
alienated from others who in turn feel alienated from themselves. Unhealthy individuals create unhealthy
communities which help create unhealthy individuals. It is a vicious cycle: no wonder we need God
to save us!
Parker illustrates what our true selves look like by
reminding us of our childhoods. A
starting point for getting back in touch with our true selves is asking what
delighted us as children? The messages
of our culture that demand we stop being “childish” and “grow up “can cause us
to lose track of delight, awe and joy.
Yet, discovering our true selves is no easy task. Palmer writes,
Occasionally, I hear people say, “The
world is such a confusing place that I can find clarity only by going within.” Well I, for one, find it at least as
confusing “in here” as it is “out there”—usually more so!—and I think most
people do.
He describes his love for C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series of
children’s books and uses the children of the novels’ trip through the wardrobe
as a positive image of our own experiences of childhood delight. Yet the world they find through the wardrobe
is not all paradise; there are trustworthy voices (e.g. Aslan the lion) but
also voices of “temptation, deception, darkness, and evil” (e.g. the White
Witch). How does one discern between the
two? Only relationships of trust provide
space for people to allow their true selves to flourish. This is the goal of all healthy relationships.
It is a strange paradox (another subject Palmer haswritten a book on) that for communities (workplaces, congregations,
institutions, etc.) to be healthy they require individuals who act out of their
true selves, the image of God inside of them; yet at the same time individuals
seeking to act out of their true selves require communities that operate in a
spirit of trust and support. One cannot
exist without the other. For a church to
be healthy, it requires spiritually healthy individuals; and for individuals to
be spiritually healthy they require spiritually healthy communities of faith. Both are necessary.
When Jesus said, “Let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’be ‘no’” he was inviting us to step out of our divided lives. Making the same point, the writer of the
Letter of James says, “If anyone,
then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.” The way out of our divided lives—ways of
living that Jesus and the early church condemn--requires individual spiritual
work and the work of spiritual communities.
I have no idea what the
future of churches in America will look like, but I unreservedly believe that
communities of faith that create what Palmer calls “circles of trust”--spaces where
individuals can be in touch once more with their true selves rather than the
facades they have taken on--will always remain necessary. Churches who make this kind of work their
priority will flourish and those who focus on other things will die. They will die, because they are more
concerned with external and superfluous things that contribute to rather than lead
us away from divided lives. Just as
divided individuals lead lives that cannot be described as really alive, so
also divided churches are likewise not really alive. One needs only to look at the astounding
number of dying congregations and the number of church buildings now on the
market for sale to see what happens to churches who live acting contrary to their
true purpose for being in the first place.
Grace and Peace,
Chase
Chase
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