A New Year's Integrity

A New Year's Integrity

Rev. Laura Bogle

Reflection, January 2016

Opening Words:   “I now know myself to be 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

Story:  Jonah and the Whale

Readings

From Rev. Sean Dennison’s sermon The Integrity of the In-Between:  “It is an act of courage and an act of liberation to remember all of ourselves. Re-membering means being conscious of all the parts of ourselves that are too complex, too messy, too solid to be held by imaginary boxes. Reclaiming these parts of ourselves is the work of integrity, and integrity is one of the things we as individuals, and as a society, need most.”

Parker Palmer:  “Here is the insight most central to spiritual experience: we are known in detail and depth by the love that created and sustains us … known as members of a community that depends on us, and on which we depend.”

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The Book of Jonah is a short, somewhat confounding story in the Hebrew Bible.  It is included with the prophets, though Jonah is never actually called a prophet in the story.  

In Jewish tradition this scripture is traditionally read in its entirety at Yom Kippur services – the holy time in the year that falls in Autumn, just before the New Year of the Jewish calendar.  Yom Kippur opens the days of Awe, several days of self-examination, taking stock, and asking for forgiveness from those you have wronged in the year.  It is a time to ask questions of oneself, like the ones that the sailors asked of Jonah—  What is your occupation? Where do you come from?  What is your country?  And of what people are you?” (Jonah 1:8)  Essentially they are asking, “Who are you?  Who or what do you worship? Why are you here?”

It is a strange little story, and does not give very much clear instruction, perhaps a bit frustrating for those hoping for some clarity in a New Year.

Think about Jonah.  Is Jonah a loser, or not? 

It is hard to tell.  He is forced to spend some time in the belly of the whale considering whether to follow the call of God, or not. 

Just because he repents and makes a different decision doesn’t mean he is a wholly different person.  He has both impulses inside of him:  that which wants to run away and serve himself and his interests.  And that which willingly jumps into the turbulent ocean to save the ship.  He has that part of himself that bravely strides into a foreign land to warn its inhabitants, and he has the part that sulks under a bush because God made him feel like a fool. 

Think about God in this story.  Is God a violent vindictive judge, or a loving merciful protector?  Hard to tell.

God changes God’s mind too – in the end, instead of destroying the people of Nineveh God says, “And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons…, and also many animals?”

Think about the Ninevites—are they wicked or humble and pious?  Hard to know. Apparently they did something to provoke God, but they sure did get themselves in order quickly.  Jonah simply had to utter five words and they were all fasting.

So many unresolved questions in this story!  We don’t even know if the Big Fish is male or female, as both the masculine and feminine versions of the Hebrew word for fish are used.  (http://www.reformjudaism.org/sometimes-we-are-jonah )

It is impossible to fit any of the characters into a box, to say they are this but not that.

The story itself almost seems unfinished, as at the end we aren’t quite sure of Jonah’s fate, just perhaps that he will continue to struggle with all that is in himself—the impulse to run from a call, then seemingly selflessly offering to be thrown overboard to save the ship, how he by turns praises his God, and then is deeply annoyed with his God.

If you are looking for a pure hero, a simply inspiring prophet, Jonah ain’t it!

But I’m drawn to him precisely because he isn’t.  There is a real humanness, a wholeness to Jonah. 

Who among us hasn’t run away from a call?  Who hasn’t slept through a storm, numb, when everyone around us is bailing out the ship?  Who hasn’t been swallowed whole by our monsters of grief, of depression, of a crisis of faith, of addiction, of anxiety? Who hasn’t spent time struggling in the belly of the beast, only to be spit back out—the same person, yet also a little different.

There is no final conclusion about Jonah, the Ninevites, any of us, or even God. 

We are made of messier stuff.

It’s a perfect story for the New Year.

Many of us make our own secular marking of New Year’s as a time to reflect and take stock.  A time to brush off the last year and make plans for the new.  It is a liminal time, an in-between time.  We haven’t quite left the old and we haven’t quite embraced the new.

We are tempted to make grand resolutions and pronouncements about how our life will be different this year from last year.  How we will be different.  Some of us think we might leave behind parts of ourselves that haven’t been serving us well.  Or experiences we’d prefer to forget. 

It is a good thing to dream about how our lives might be better, more perfect, more righteous, more healthy, more…

And then, if you are like me, long about the second week of January, you are confronted with the fact that you are still you.  A complex person full of beauty and ugliness, full of dreams and also full of inertia.  Full of kindness and also full of pettiness.  Full of praise and also full of judgement.

As Quaker teacher Parker Palmer reminds us, we are people “of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. …to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.”

To have inner integrity we must grapple with those parts of ourselves we’d prefer to hide, ignore, or cut-off.  To look at them honestly and forthrightly.  Not in some sort of pity and not in some sort of false humility, and certainly not to tear ourselves down.  But to simply hold it all honestly, to recognize that the places in us which are in-between, imperfect, and unfinished can also be a part of our salvation.

Theologian Rev. Rita Nakashima Brock has talked about what she calls interstitial integrity.  She says:

“Interstitial refers to the places in-between, which are real places, like the strong connective tissue between organs in the body that link the parts. This interstitiality is a form of integrity.… Integrity has to do with entireness or of having no part taken away or wanting.”

It is the in-between places, places where our goodness and our short-fallings rub up against each other that change can take place, that the connective tissues of our lives are built.  Those places where we have struggled and re-considered, where we might even have changed our minds.  Those places make us human and keep up whole. 

This year, I invite us all to watch out for times when we label ourselves or someone else as fully good or fully bad.  I invite you to think about how to share yourself more fully with this community, warts and all.

This year may we do the hard work together of living into our own integrity, remembering, as Parker Palmer tell us that we are already “known in depth and detail by the Love that created and sustains us.”  May this community be a manifestation of that Love that holds all, not in judgement but in mercy and kindness.