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February 9 - February 13, 2018
Integrity requires that I discern what is integral to my selfhood, what fits and what does not—and that I choose life-giving ways of relating to the forces that converge within me: Do I welcome them or fear them, embrace them or reject them, move with them or against them? By choosing integrity, I become more whole, but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means becoming more real by acknowledging the whole of who I am.
Identity lies in the intersection of the diverse forces that make up my life, and integrity lies in relating to those forces in ways that bring me wholeness and life rather than fragmentation and death.
Gandhi called his life “experiments with truth,” and experimenting in the complex field of forces that bear on our lives is how we learn more about our integrity.2 We learn experimentally that we thrive on some connections and wither with others, that we enhance our integrity by choosing relationships that give us life and violate it by assenting to those that do not.
Re-membering involves putting ourselves back together, recovering identity and integrity, reclaiming the wholeness of our lives.
“You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done ... you are fierce with reality.”10
When we listen primarily for what we “ought” to be doing with our lives, we may find ourselves hounded by external expectations that can distort our identity and integrity.
A vocation that is not mine, no matter how externally valued, does violence to the self—in the precise sense that it violates my identity and integrity on behalf of some abstract norm. When I violate myself, I invariably end up violating the people I work with.
Frederick Buechner offers a more generous and humane image of vocation as “the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.”11
When I devote myself to something that does not flow from my identity, that is not integral to my nature, I am most likely deepening the world's hunger rather than helping to alleviate it.
The teacher within is not the voice of conscience but of identity and integrity. It speaks not of what ought to be but of what is real for us, of what is true. It says things like, “This is what fits you and this is what doesn't”; “This is who you are and this is who you are not”; “This is what gives you life and this is what kills your spirit—or makes you wish you were dead.”
Similarly, if we do not respond to the voice of the inward teacher, it will either stop speaking or become violent: I am convinced that some forms of depression, of which I have personal experience, are induced by a long-ignored inner teacher trying desperately to get us to listen by threatening to destroy us.
We attend to the inner teacher not to get fixed but to befriend the deeper self, to cultivate a sense of identity and integrity that allows us to feel at home wherever we are.
Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts.
“There are great gaps between us. But no matter how wide and perilous they may be, I am committed to bridging them—not only because you need me to help you on your way but also because I need your insight and energy to help renew my own life.”
Good teaching is an act of hospitality toward the young, and hospitality is always an act that benefits the host even more than the guest.
This mode, called objectivism, portrays truth as something we can achieve only by disconnecting ourselves, physically and emotionally, from the thing we want to know.
objectivism claims that we can know the things of the world truly and well only from afar.
It aimed at killing the germ of “self” to secure objective truth—just as dictators kill dissenters to secure the “public order,” and warriors kill the enemy to secure the “peace.”
if we ever managed to build the objectivist wall between the knower and the known, we could know nothing except the wall itself.
“the highest form of love, love that allows for intimacy without the annihilation of difference.”
The poles of a paradox are like the poles of a battery: hold them together, and they generate the energy of life; pull them apart, and the current stops flowing.
To become a better teacher, I must nurture a sense of self that both does and does not depend on the responses of others—and that is a true paradox.
Space without boundaries is not space, it is a chaotic void,
to teach is to create a space in which the community of truth is practiced.
reality is a web of communal relationships, and we can know reality only by being in community with it.
community is the essential form of reality, the matrix of all being.
a subject is available for relationship; an object is not.
When we make the subject the center of our attention, we give it the respect and authority that we normally give only to human beings. We give it ontological significance, the significance that Barbara McClintock gave to an ear of corn, acknowledging its unique identity and integrity.12 In the community of truth, the connective core of all our relationships is the significant subject itself—not intimacy, not civility, not accountability, not the experts, but the power of the living subject.
truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline.
I know of no religious pathology, from fear to bigotry to rigid orthodoxy, that is not also found in secular form,
The root of all banality—including, as Hannah Arendt named it, “the banality of evil”—is our failure to find the other worthy of respect.24
A subject-centered classroom is not one in which students are ignored. Such a classroom honors one of the most vital needs our students have: to be introduced to a world larger than their own experiences and egos, a world that expands their personal boundaries and enlarges their sense of community.
the human soul does not want to be fixed, it wants simply to be seen and heard.
