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.     

Your Vocation or Calling

Upon graduation from high school young people are typically told to ‘discover yourself,’ ‘follow your passion,’ ‘define what you want from life,’ ‘establish a career trajectory that will bring you a life filled with fulfillment,’ etc., etc.  The rhetoric suggests that by achieving material ‘success’ you will in fact be successful and ‘live happily ever after.’ 

President John F. Kennedy famously suggested a different focus:  “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Another focus, somewhat akin to President Kennedy’s suggestion, I would suggest is not asking, “What do I want from life?”, but instead asking “What does life want from me?”  My hero Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “People wish to be settled.  It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.”

We have all been thrown into a specific place, and time, and circumstance, among certain people, and needs and challenges and we need to figure out how we should proceed with the physical, moral, and intellectual tasks put before us.

Writer Frederick Buechner put it this way: “At what points do my talents . . . meet the world’s deep needs?”

I submit that this life is a test and an opportunity to see what we will do with our talents and for whose service they will be used. 

 

Consider the perspective of World War II prisoner Dr. Viktor Frankl from his book Man’s Search for Meaning:  Life, he said, has not stopped expecting things (a proper response) from any of us—no matter how wretched our circumstances might be.  He told his fellow prisoners that someone was watching them—a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or God—who did not want to be disappointed. 

Our vocation or life calling probably will not bring great material ‘success’ to ourselves; it may be something as common but as important as being a good mother, or a conservationist, or teacher or social reformer, or nurse or truly dedicated Church member; or something as uncommon as a great statesman or explorer or pioneering scientist.  In fact, we may not even choose it (our job or occupation or career) as our most significant life work but it will present itself to us; it will choose us.  As David Brooks has said, such people who respond to their ‘calling’ “submit to their vocations for reasons deeper and higher than utility. / Such a person becomes an instrument for the performance of the job that has been put before her.”

It is the response of our greatest efforts to the call of felt necessity.  Regardless of what it is, it will bring something of great value to other of God’s children and have intrinsic worth. Ralph Waldo Emerson was, as always, on point: “If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods [like his friend Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond], the world will make a beaten path to his door.”

Not only Frankl’s ‘watchers,’ but we ourselves should have a good sense if we are meeting the measure of our creation—and that is discovering our true vocation. 

2 Chronicles 7:14

In large crowds of sporting spectators one may often see someone displaying a sign that says, ‘John 3:16.’  It is a good scripture that tells a powerful truth, but like most scriptures or ‘instruction books’ of any kind a single sentence does not tell the whole story.  Yes, God loves His children but He shows that love by blessing them when they do right.  Notwithstanding the many who think that love is unconditional, with no expectations on the recipients, they clearly do not know the character of God or have not read their scriptures (all of them) carefully.

 

The same God who gave us His gospel and his Law and His Son gave us the scripture found in 2 Chronicles 7:14:

            “If my people who are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” 

I think you’ll find a few conditions there and you will also find a promised outcome that we could surely use, right now, in our troubled land. 

To me it is interesting that the mother of the 34^th president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower had her son open the Bible to this scripture when he placed his hand upon it to take his presidential oath of office. 
 

Although Dwight Eisenhower was not religious in his adult life, he internalized most of the principles learned from his cheerful and devout Christian mother and conversely more dour and less, for him, influential father.  But both parents inculcated in Dwight an understanding for the need of self-discipline and the habit of steadiness of character over time.  “I simply gave myself an order,” he once said, to always “reflect the cheerful certainty of victory.” To that end Eisenhower  knew that duty, obedience, and humility were key virtues and linked not only to temporal success but also to eternal values. He was, in David Brook’s words, “fueled by passion and policed by self-control.

   

In consideration of 2 Chronicles 7:14,  I think that few Americans, and very few of our younger Generation know of or believe in this verse of scripture or of many others like it that can be found in Holy writ.  Neither do they know that the foundation of this nation and the character of many its finest leaders were based on a covenant with God that blessings of national prosperity would be conditioned upon our faithfulness. 

 

A retrenchment and rapprochement may still be possible, but most of the sand has drained from the top-half of our national hour-glass.  Pray that God will turn the glass on its side as we try to regain His favor.