DISLOCATED CHRISTIANITY
One word has been on my mind over the last few weeks. That word is integrity. The dictionary definition of integrity consists of three parts:
1. possession of firm principles: the quality of possessing and steadfastly adhering to high moral principles or professional standards.
2. completeness: the state of being complete or undivided.
3. wholeness: the state of being sound or undamaged.
I have tried to spend time examining the integrity of my own faith... Is there a unity between my belief and my life? Is there a unity between my internal life and my external life? Is there a wholeness in the application of my faith to my life? Is there a unity in my view of Jesus as my saviour as well as Jesus the Lord? Am I a man of integrity and am I pursuing integrity in all my words, thoughts and deeds?
In medicine, a disclocation is the the displacement of a body part, especially of a bone, from its usual fitting in a joint. I wonder whether, due to a lack of integrity, I am causing a dislocation in the body of Christ, not only impairing the function of one limb, but the function of the whole...
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2 comments:
My dear brother, I am sure that you think too much...but they are such fascinating thoughts so alas, it is time for me to check in to the conversation.
I offer some thoughts I read recently from Leighton Ford on integrity:
"How often do we think of integrity in terms of wholeness? Yet that is essentially what integrity signifies. The root word (“integer”) is related to “touch”, so integrity describes a quality that touches all of me – both the “light” and the “dark” - and integrates the whole around my true Center.
For Thomas Aquinas
… beauty also included the notion of integrity, integritas. He understands
that each thing is alive and on a journey to become fully itself. Integrity is achieved
when there is a complete realization of whatever a thing is supposed to be. Integrity is
the adequacy of a thing to itself. There is a sense of achieved proportion between a
thing and what it is called to be. (John O’Donohue in Beauty)
As Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in his lovely poem As Kingfishers Catch Fire
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same
…Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
His words are not about the self-absorption of narcissism, but about the longing to become all that God uniquely created each of us to be, and in our uniqueness to reflect our Lord.
For Christ plays in ten thousand places.
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
We miss integrity not just by shading the truth in our dealings, but by fearing to become fully who we most truly are made to be. Some day, promises John, “we shall be like him,” and fully reflect the beauty of Jesus.
Meanwhile the pursuit of integrity means bringing all I know to be true of me into all I know to be true of Christ."
So as I reflect on what you have said and what Leighton has said, for me integrity is summed up in the pursuit of the image of God displayed in Christ and therefore in this statement..
'You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. But now ... you have taken off your old self with its practices 10and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.' (Col 3:7-10)
"...Meanwhile the pursuit of integrity means bringing all I know to be true of me into all I know to be true of Christ..."
I agree, but it must be acknowledged (as the colossians passage does) that for us this will involve leaving something behind - namely all that sin has done in us and to us (it is not easy sometimes to conceive of who I truly am apart from sin) - whereas nothing can be stripped away from Christ as we grow closer to him or we are in fact becoming less ourselves.
It think this idea of integrity as wholeness is part of what the old word 'shalom' is getting at.
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