Instead of fumbling around in the dark, pretending to be something you are not, be who you are. Walk in the light where you will always find me. This honest, vulnerable place is where you can have real friendships with one another and with me. When you remember that my Son’s blood has cleansed you thoroughly, you will not need to hide. Come out of the shadows and be seen. When you pretend that you are better than you are or have no sin in your life, you may deceive others, but the one you have deceived the most is yourself. You cannot live long in that disintegrated state before it begins to tear you apart. Half-truths are no truth at all.
1 John 1:7-8
Letters to the Beloved
Tag: integration
A prayer for wholeness
God of wholeness,
Father, Son, Spirit,
never lacking or incomplete,
eternally perfect in oneness,
you promised that in the Son,
all things shall be reconciled.
Remind me of my union with you,
always aware of your holy presence
in and around me.
You, O LORD, are never absent,
but I confess that my senses are dulled
by 10,000 distractions.
I want to love you
as you have loved me,
fully and completely and unreservedly.
Let your lovingkindness toward me
ignite my love.
You, O LORD, have filled this world
with those who bear your image
yet each person is uniquely beautiful.
Remove the scales from my eyes
so that I may see with compassion.
Help me to remember that listening is loving
and curiosity is a sacred gift.
To love another is to get dirt on my hands,
just as you did when you formed people
from the dust of the ground.
Whether in agreement or conflict,
let love define me.
As I look inward,
let me see myself as you see me,
not as damaged goods, nor irredeemable,
but as your beloved child
who is infinitely valuable in your eyes.
Let the knowledge of my belovedness
cast aside every doubt I have
about how you see me,
knowing that you cherish me
just as I am right now.
Help me to remember
that when you formed the heavens and the earth,
you called your creation good.
It was full of beauty
and teeming with life,
yet like your people,
your good creation has suffered
the ravages of disintegration.
You have invited me to be a steward of the earth;
let me take up that call with hope and endurance,
remembering that you are reconciling all things.
Grant me the skill
to make good and beautiful things,
remembering that goodness and beauty
are reflections of you.
Where there is hatred, restore compassion
where darkness, light
where confusion, clarity
where where fragmentation, integration
where agitation, peace
where pride, humility
where brokenness, wholeness
and where self-centeredness, love.
Rehumanizing
I have a hard time seeing anything good in some people. If you were granted a window into my private thoughts and even some of my private conversations, you would learn how judgmental I can be. In my desire to be an advocate for goodness, truth, and beauty, I sometimes fail to distinguish between a person and their behavior, and that gets to be a slippery slope. I’m fairly certain I am not the only one.
Every day, my Facebook and Twitter feeds are filled with anger, name calling, and general dehumanization. It seems there are no segments of society that are excepted from dehumanizing others–politics, media, religion. We too easily choose sides and go to war. Our chosen weapons disintegrate and dehumanize others.
When we read about the kingdom of God that Jesus told us about, it is a rehumanizing kingdom. When Jesus healed, he not only healed physical maladies, he rehumanized people, reminding them who they were. How can you and I carry that same message into the world?
Let me offer a few thoughts:
- Start with prayer. When you find yourself stirred and upset, pray for the one who upset you, asking God to bless them. Confess your self-righteousness, asking God to forgive as you also forgive (Matthew 6:12).
- If you choose to engage, take a page from Francis Schaeffer’s book and seek to deal with ideas rather than people, or even groups of people. For example, it can be good to discuss ideas such as injustice, deception, or media bias, but seek to do so without allowing yourself to devolve into name calling. Every person you meet is loved by God. Every politician, every media personality, every celebrity, every person on Twitter and Facebook bears the image of God. Start there.
- Develop sacred curiosity. Be willing to inquire where people have come up with their ideas. Ask them what stirs in their souls. What are their hopes or fears. Recognize that every one of us longs for truth, goodness, and beauty even if we get lost along the way. Seek truth not as enemies but as companions on the journey.
- Actively look for the humanity in others. Keep looking until you find it, praying that God would open your eyes to see others as he sees them.
I believe that God is in the process of reintegrating all that has been broken and damaged by evil. He invites us to join him as advocates of a better way, the way of agape love. Each day, we will have hundreds of opportunities to choose the way of reconciliation or disintegration, dehumanizing or rehumanizing.
Which will be choose?
What is Reconciliation?
He [Jesus] was supreme in the beginning and—leading the resurrection parade—he is supreme in the end. From beginning to end he’s there, towering far above everything, everyone. So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe—people and things, animals and atoms—get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross.-Colossians 1:18-20, The Message
It has taken ten days, but I am finally writing about “reconciliation.” I started by writing about integration on March 16 and then followed up writing about wholeness on March 20. As I indicated, these concepts are important and how I think about life, and, they are in many ways connected, though I do think about them in slightly different terms.
Reconciliation, in my thinking, is closely tied to integration and wholeness, but implies a broader understanding. In the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Colossians, there is a magnificent description of the “preeminence of Christ” in verses 15 to 20. In the final verse, we discover that in Christ, all things are being reconciled. What are those things? As Eugene Peterson suggested, “people and things, animals and atoms.” Redemption goes beyond the forgiveness of individual sins or restored relationships with people. In reconciliation, God is making all things new.
Yet God does not exclude us from this process. According to 2 Corinthians 5:18 we, as Christ’s ambassadors in the world, have been given “the ministry of reconciliation.” We have been invited to become agents of integration, wholeness, and reconciliation by pointing people to the love of Christ and the hope of reconciliation, which is so much bigger than the forgiveness of sins.
It is no less than God making all things new.
What is integration?
A few days ago, I promised that I would attempt to explain why phrases like integration, wholeness, and reconciliation have become so important in my thinking. Although these three words describe similar concepts, in my thinking, they are distinct in certain ways.
Let’s start with integration. Although it can mean different things, my understanding of integration has been deeply shaped by interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB), a transdisciplinary field described and developed principally by Dr. Daniel Siegel. IPNB deals with the brain, mind, and relationships.
The brain is our body’s control center and it is deeply connected with the entire body. It processes all modes of sensory input and also facilitates both simple and complex responses with regard to both our internal world and our external world.
Although you may have heard the terms used interchangeably, the mind and brain are different. Siegel defines mind this way:
A process that regulates the flow of energy and information within our bodies and within our relationships, an emergent and self-organizing process that gives rise to our mental activities such as emotion, thinking, and memory.
Siegel, Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology, 1-1
In other words, the concept of mind is broader than what we typically think of in terms of brain.
Relationships are the third component important to understanding IPNB. We cannot be fully human outside of relationships with others. Looking again at Siegel’s definition of mind, there is a flow of energy not only within a person, but between people, so understanding who we are in relationship to others becomes an important developmental task–one that continues throughout our lives.
So what does all of this have to do with how I understand integration? Well, a core task of health and human flourishing is integration, not only within, but between people. Healthy integration is grounded in recognizing one’s individuality (differentiation), but also that we are deeply interconnected, even with people we have never met (linkage). Disintegration is the route to unhealthiness. In fact, Siegel suggests that “When we examine various mental disorders, what is revealed is that virtually all of them can be described as clusters of chaotic and/or rigid symptoms that we would say are examples of impaired integration” (Pocket Guide, 16-3).
It is these concepts from IPNB that inform my thinking and writing about integration. I believe that God created us for intra- and inter-personal integration, but that in a fallen world, each of us operates with various degrees of disintegration. So one of the things I am most interested in is understanding how we become more integrated in our relationships with God, others, ourselves, and creation.
What do you think it takes to become more deeply integrated?
Jason Kanz 