What is wholeness?

So how do we define wholeness or holness? It is a live question as I go to another meeting of the well-being group. It is related to holiness but is different and can be used with integrity in a completely secular setting.

Its an important issue for many people as they eat their wholefoods and try to take a wholistic (holistic?) view of health care, and look for an integration of body mind and spirit. The Hebrew word shalom is helpful to our understanding as its meaning includes all of the following: completeness, wholeness, health, peace, welfare, soundness, tranquillity, prosperity, perfectness, fullness, rest, and harmony. That is a helpful place to start because we can see these characteristics as being positive aspects of life associated with wholeness and well-being.

The insight of the list of fruits of the spirit from the book of Galatians is also very helpful in this debate. The nine fruits love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,  goodness, faithfulness,  gentleness, and self-control suggest a way of living which is at harmony with those around you.  It is a way of life that is not aggressive or controlling yet in command and assertive. 

If these characteristics are all present in a person who I would recognise them as someone who had "got it all together" and were fully human. When I use the phrase fully human I mean that this is someone you look at and say "life should be lived like that". The supreme example that each of us tries to follow is Jesus Christ who in his life and especially in his interactions with other people shows us many examples of how to react and behave and live as whole fully human beings.

as I wrote in a blog of a few days ago....

The challenge that Jesus gives to us is to act with self emptying generosity. This is not an intellectual or even a moral challenge. It is a challenge of the imagination. It is a challenge that calls on us to think of  "what might be if...."  As a result of thinking like this we create new possibilities that are counter cultural, counter intuitive and certainly not what society expects.

And it is inevitable that we are hesitant to follow the example of Jesus as counter intuitive and counter cultural action needs courage. By pausing before we act we are given time to override our gut reactions, hard wired into our brain as survival mechanisms, alongside fight or flight, appetite and motor movement.

When struggling to follow Jesus we pause and say a little prayer and in that moment we can move from the primitive gut reactions in the core of our hard wired brain to the graced wisdom that allows us to choose to do something that is not dictated by narrow survival thinking.

In the life and teaching of Jesus we can see many examples of counter intuitive and counter cultural action, graced by God. We need to study the life and teaching of Jesus to open our imaginations to the possibilities of living and acting in a completely different way. The gospels are a wonderful resource for the graced, generous imagination and studying the life of Jesus will help us to develop new ways of living.
 (2 March 2012)