“Cease striving (in some translations – be still)
and know that I am God.” Psalm 46:10
Wholeness. When you’re
whole, there is a sense of “cease striving” that allows you to truly experience acceptance and affirmation that only God can provide.
Without wholeness, you strive for it constantly – some unseen reality, a
standard too high, an undefined nirvana.
Even if you’re the achiever-type and who can visualize exactly what
success will look like, what your 3, 6 and 12-month plans are to get closer to
that, achievement is not always what it’s cracked up to be.
Especially for achiever-types, and I know this because I am
one, achievements only open the door to other things you need to do to get to
the next level of achievement. I started
graduate school in 2000, and just graduated in May with my Ph.D. As if writing a dissertation and getting it
approved wasn’t enough, my advisor is adamant about having publications come
from it, which truly is a wise thing. Then the other mentors on my committee
are also after me to present my findings at conferences. Another wise thing. But these things only lead to more work, which leads inevitably to more work. It’s like I’m always a step away – as if I’m walking
up the wrong-way escalator. Each time I
get up a step to the top, another appears.
My lack of excitement at my graduation has mystified some of the people
I work with. I should be excited about
this achievement. But one achievement’s
children become the next stairs on the escalator that leads only to new stairs.
It’s quite a tail-chasing way to live.
In the middle of all
of this, I’ve been dealing with some very important identity issues related to
how I will choose to live the rest of my life.
I have friends for whom the search for a husband is the most important
part of their lives right now. I have
other friends for whom getting rid of their husbands (or wives) is the most
important thing they have ever done for themselves. Some of my friends spend all of their mental
and emotional energy investing in their children or taking care of their aging
parents. I don’t
have any of those things in my life right now, so sometimes their stories are
just entertaining rather than instructive for me, and sometimes they just make
me feel bad for the storyteller. It
makes me perversely glad that I’m not in those shoes.
I feel most whole when dealing in the land of ideas,
concepts and translation of those ideas into the lives of others. Maybe I don’t need a romantic relationship to
feel whole, don’t need a family of my own, don’t need to invest my life in
those kinds of things. Maybe ideas are
all I need. I have questioned for years
whether the romance/marriage thing was something I really wanted or whether it
was a social norm that I didn't want to conform to. I even considered very seriously becoming Catholic
so I could become a nun. That's a pretty serious statement coming from a Baptist girl.
Maybe I’ve been looking at the wholeness thing all
wrong. What if instead of achieving in
order to be whole, Shalom comes for me through simplicity, through stripping
down what’s not necessary, through becoming poor in spirit. And poor might not mean having nothing, but having only what's most important. It may come particularly for me through
peeling away layers of ideas and experience to get down to what I really need –
to feel accepted even with my own flaws, with my own createdness in all its
uniqueness including being at home in the land of ideas and big high sounding words. And only God truly provides that kind of stillness, that all-inclusive wholeness, that depth of affirmation. I feel myself wanting to jump off
that escalator all of a sudden. Maybe someday I will.
No comments:
Post a Comment