What Wholeness Brings
There is a lovely current in religion right now pulling us toward wholeness. It’s a small current but it burbles up within existing religious traditions and in secular spaces so naturally that we might not see it. Wholeness is a wonderful goal for our lives, livelihoods, and the state of the world. We all want this elusive quality. When I imagine a Natural Religion, I see a way of life that creates wholeness.
Sadly the way we live now is just one darn split from wholeness after another. The world we have made is so full of fractures they actually form categories of different ways we cannot be whole. All wholenesses have something in common, but each break from the whole requires a different kind of medicine to put it back together.
Here are some of the ways we fracture. I might as well list them out before writing about the many ways we can heal.
One of the most human activities is to take things apart. We see a tree in the forest, cut it down and turn it into lumber. The tree is no longer whole. But we have something new and useful. What is wrong with that? Often nothing, it depends on the scale of the harvest and the damage done. We take things apart all the time in mining and manufacturing often without considering the whole.
A common technique in science is to take things apart and study isolated components of a system. This technique has allowed so many advancements in science and medicine. However, some things cannot be taken apart and then put back together. Some things are destroyed, like the tree. Other things, like a forest system, work differently when you take out too many trees.
Our western culture has taken holistic ideas and perceptions -- and split them in some way -- and then celebrated the split. So many books and ideas come from these common schisms and dualities. Here are some you will recognize: good and evil, nature and humanity, humans and animals, the individual and the community, thinking and feeling, women and men, purity and pollution, secular and holy, god and no-god. These dualities and schisms are a common way of thinking.
Are the splits real? Or are the differences part of an unconscious effort to favor one group over another? Take any of the splits I list above and then imagine the two sides coming together again. Just the thought can bring a spark of happiness and insight. Try it! We can think and feel things differently.
Another break from wholeness is something I am going to call brokenness. In the tree example, there was damage done to the tree and the forest. How does one get back to wholeness now that damage is done?
We see brokenness everywhere in our culture. As more people notice the brokenness, we do make attempts at repair. But brokenness persists in problems that we can’t seem to solve such as homelessness, climate change, and racism. In fact, there is push-back when we try to heal. It seems for some people the brokenness you know is better than the wholeness you can imagine.
Persistent Brokenness can settle into our personal lives and live intimately in our personalities. Is it too much of a generalization to say that we all feel broken sometimes? Perhaps our families didn’t love us in the right way when we were growing up and it left a mark. Perhaps we became addicted to alcohol or drugs. We feel lonely or unloved. Perhaps we have been traumatized by the many terrible things that can happen to a person (war, poverty, abuse, assault, racism, and accident). How do we go from brokenness to wholeness in all these ways and at all these levels of brokenness?
One of the more powerful, negative forces driving some of the splits above is othering. Othering is both a driver and an example of a split from wholeness. When we see other people and just know that they are not in our group or tribe then we are ‘othering’. We suspect or outright think that they are not as good as us. At its least harmful, othering means we aren’t going to drink a beer together. At its worst, we go to war, discriminate, or treat these others as less than human. We do othering automatically and have to work to keep from doing it. It’s a survival trait that we inherited from our evolutionary history.
As a young Catholic girl, I grew up with the concept of original sin. For a long time after I left the church, I thought original sin was bunk religion. However, I am willing to nominate ‘othering’ as a natural religion, original sin. Othering is rampant and it can easily get out of hand. Exhibit A is the way the United States right now is wallowing in othering. Republicans and Democrats are having a huge ‘othering’ fest with sprinkles of racism, sexism, and religious nationalism thrown in for good measure. It is so bad that it’s hard to see a way out of it.
The list of ways that wholeness eludes us reminds me of the concept of Dukkha, a Buddhist term that is often translated as ‘suffering’ but also gets translated as ‘uncomfortableness’ and ‘lack of fit’. The Buddha was a good observer and one of his four noble truths is that life contains much Dukkha. Indeed.
But let’s take a cleansing breath and return to the concept of wholeness. When I say the word wholeness I get an instant vision. Wholeness is round and fits into the palms of my cupped hands. I can just barely hold a very young baby that way. Or a seedling peeking out from a handful of soil. I can also see the whole earth sitting there in my cupped hands -- looking bright blue and green and displaying every possibility. That possibility is what I want my natural religion to be.
Let me know your reactions to this column. I am interested in whether my list of splits and schisms is complete, or whether you have anything to add to this list.
Image on top by nine koepfer on unsplash