Integration and integrity

In trying to explain what it means to be in right relationship, with God, with creation, with others and with ourselves, David Willis writes about integration and integrity. It is an important and faith expanding description of what God is about in our lives.

This being in right relationship includes the integration of various things - ideas, emotions, economic condition, physical health, hunger for righteousness, delights, artistic drives and so on - which make us who we are intended to become.

The word for the condition to which we are being delivered is..."integrity". Integrity is wholeness, unsplinteredness, unfragmentedness. We are invoking this imagery when we say so-and-so or such and such rings true. Wholeness in this sense is held-togetherness: as crystal or a forged bell is a 'resounding' holding together of things in tension. Tension is not incidental to integration, for the tensile strength of something is the way its component partsicles cohere, are congruent. The tensioned parts 'fit'. They belong together to make up a whole, and are most themsleves in that tensioned belonging. Integrity is being integrated! Integrity in this sense is a progressing condition, not a fixed state. (page 54).

The tensions between aspiration and frustration, devotion to Christ and the attractiveness of countless alternative calls, between our earthboundness and our spirituality, between emodiedness and inwardness. Jesus knew about those key moments, those urgent decisions, those tensile choices that we face once we've put our hand to the plough, left our nets, left the money at the tax table. And whether the source of tension and the test of integrity is faithfulness to our Lord, or to our covenanted life partner, committed love to our children or answering thedemands of our vocation, Willis is right. Integrity isn't a fixed state, but a continuing process of refinement. Like the crystal vase and the forged bell, now and again God pings or strikes us, to hear the resounding holding togetherness that is discipleship as a way of life, a following after the One whose integrity integrates a fragmented creation.

Comments

[Jason Goroncy]

Nice post Jim. 'Like the crystal vase and the forged bell, now and again God pings or strikes us, to hear the resounding holding togetherness that is discipleship as a way of life, a following after the One whose integrity integrates a fragmented creation.' - Love it!