From Vulnerability to Wholeness

I once heard it said that in order to achieve an acceptable life before God and man we need to know who we are and whose we are.  If we think we are just an accident of nature and the current end product of a very long evolutionary chain then our moral ecology will adhere to one set of values.  If we believe we are children of God with a spark of divinity and have a much higher potential than we currently demonstrate we will have another moral code and hopefully strive to live up to it.  

In either case (or somewhere in between) we will live by a set of internalized norms, assumptions, beliefs, and habits of behavior embedded in an institutionalized set of moral demands. 

 

On the one hand, we will live a competitive existence looking out for ‘number one’ and will try in any way that is expedient for us to try to get to the ‘top of the food chain.’ Worldly success is our ambition. But we are vulnerable to many uncertainties because many others will be vying, with us, for a ‘top gun’ status.  Eventually there will be someone younger, or smarter, or prettier, or stronger or who has better ‘connections’ who will supplant us. And then the question that Jesus posed: “What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Matt. 16:26)

     

On the other hand, we will live life essentially as a moral drama—a struggle to be integrated and congruent with our vision of a moral ideal. 

In either case, we find we are vulnerable and have weaknesses that make it difficult to achieve our goals whatever they might be. 

Speaking from the life-as-a-moral-drama point of view, I would submit the following as a structure for moving from vulnerability to wholeness:

1       Recognize that I am a child of God—really still an infant.  However, I am  ‘wired’ or pre-programmed with a conscience, a body made in God’s image, a spiritual set of instructions (scriptures), can be affiliated with God’s authorized Church (a social structure and script), and, if I was fortunate, with a mother and father who, if they were following their scripts, provided well for my early needs.  They protected me, nurtured me, and taught me and thus laid a groundwork for my ‘higher education’ which was then largely up to me to accomplish.  But even with this favorable beginning I still live in a fallen world—one that has much evil in it—and to survive I must put on the full armor of God every day because I will still be vulnerable without it.

 

2       One who subscribes to this moral framework is anchored by permanent attachments to important things—things that last and that are bigger than self—not just to the transitory “lusts of the flesh.”

 Contrary to pop psychology, we look inward only long enough to “cleanse the inner vessel,” and then look outward to see what life asks of us and needs from us.  Finding it, we organize our lives around this moral framework—and then we commit to it and deliver ourselves to it.  It becomes our ‘calling’ or ‘vocation.’   We are no longer “tossed to and fro” by every wind and by “the sins that so easily beset us.”  We become anchored. Then, accepting the help offered along the way (because we are not an island unto ourselves—we are not the ‘captains of our own destiny’) we become whole by helping whatever it is that is within the sphere of our influence also become more whole. Service to a noble cause becomes our driving force.