on not being whole

I discovered something last week: I was not created to be whole.

Reading Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, spending slowly moving time in prayer for the past week that I was away from school, walking in the cool of the day in the lawn of my house as I made rounds to pull weeds, I have had my perspective of myself changed. I am completely transformed. My understanding of myself now boasts a richer, more savory rumination and honesty than anything I have ever known previously.

How do I explain this? How do I explain what it is to not be whole? To make sense of that which will seem to be so antithetical to the Christian life, but that I have found to be the hermeneutic by which my experience with God makes sense?

For this is not a post about how all of us have a longing for God. I cannot say that such is the lack of wholeness I have experienced. I grant that this longing, this need for God, is true for every creature and find it to be an integral aspect of my theology. But the lack of wholeness that I am speaking of is not given to everyone and is reflective of how someone is created. It is a unique lack of wholeness. It is the same as saying that some were gifted with the spiritual gift of administration and another with healing. Both groups are important, indeed equal if we view things not in egalitarian terms but divine; yet, they have been given different roles for the glory of God. Created differently for His purposes.

So I affirm that we are all created with a lack of wholeness in the sense that we all desire God, crave His presence, and are only satisfied, as St. Augustine said, when we rest in Him. And if we are to believe St. Paul in Romans 8, then the whole of creation beyond humans crave this union as well.

But, there are also some people, and I have come to realize that I am one of them, who are created with a lack of wholeness that shall never be filled. And that, that unwholeness, is in fact a kind of completion.

We’re a funny people when it comes to the word blessing. When things are going well, we readily attach a role of Providence in the process. I have received a check in the mail from the IRS because they have overcharged me, surely this is an act of God. I have found a parking space in the crowded mall parking lot ’round Christmas, praise be!

I do not want to suggest for a moment that these events are not somehow gracious acts of God in the everyday world. Indeed, to make sense of the lack of wholeness that I feel I have been created with, I have to believe that they are. But it’s interesting how quickly these conclusions turn into a theology that operates on this premise: if I am good, God will bless me. Innocent enough, until you consider the antithesis: if I am bad, God will smite me.

So far, for many, these conclusions seem obvious. But they quickly fall apart when they are put to the real test, in which the theology of these two statements are faced with an earthquake in Japan, a mother who has suffered an incurable disease for nearly twelve years, and a man born blind whom Jesus heals. Because these statements assume something else is true, something darker than we should ever be so bold to admit aloud, though frightfully we do it often: if you’re being blessed, God is pleased with you; if you’re being smitten, God is angry with you.

This theology has no place in the Christian faith, because it’s a secular invention. In her hauntingly beautiful play The Year of Magical Thinking, based on her memoir of the same title, Joan Didion describes this kind of pagan understanding of the world, which she realizes she herself has fallen prey to in the wake of losing both her husband and daughter in the space of a year:

“Magical thinking” is a phrase I learned when I was reading anthropology. Primitive cultures operate on magical thinking. “If” thinking. “If we sacrifice the virgin–the rain will come back.” … “If I keep my husband’s shoes–”

Why have I digressed into talking about blessing and our misuse of the word? Because I am beginning to better understand that, Who am I to begrudge a rain drop? Can I know the impact that droplet will have? A single raindrop, a single drop, and yet it can change the course of history by being the last little drop to break forth the dam, or the last little drop to feed the soil to bring forth crops after the famine. All this contained in a single raindrop. All this power, all this possibility. So shall I look to Heaven and curse God that it were to rain this day and not the next? In my ignorance, yes. But what would it be to know Him in a way to where I could at least chasten my tongue long enough to see the blessing that was to ultimately come, even if it only meant in Heaven I would see it.

But that still doesn’t quite explain why I talked about blessing for so long. It is because I have lived my entire life believing that I wasn’t blessed in a very particular way, to understand now that I am blessed enormously in that very way.

You see, my lack of wholeness is my blessing.

Now we come to the place in which I try to describe what this lack of wholeness is. I want to assure you that it is not at all to do with the presence or absence of God. In fact, I have enjoyed a life in which His presence has been known to me consistently. He’s always in the room, if I can reduce it to such simple terms. He has been silent, sometimes for months at a time, but He has never not been present. That was my advantage being raised in the household I grew up in, with God-fearing parents who had a deep appreciation for story.

So if I am not whole and a lack of His presence is not to blame, what then? What is this unwholeness? And how can I dare say that He created me with it?

I grew up believing that everyone around me did not experience the same loneliness I felt. This was not helped by the fact that growing up I didn’t have many friends in school. It was really only late in high school that I seemed to find a sense of self that others were attracted to; and, really, only at university that I moved beyond mere companionship into deep, beautiful friendships.

In the back of my mind, I always believed that if I just found that right amount of time spent with these friends, then I would feel whole. But the emptiness was still there. I cried out to God again and again in frustration. Nothing was adding up: I had a good relationship with Him, I had wonderful friends, a beautiful family. I had everything I had asked for and more. I was blessed. And yet, I felt a sense of emptiness, a loneliness, a longing.

In reading Walking on Water, I came to this passage:

As a small child I was lonely not only because I was an only child in a big city, but because I was slightly lame, extremely introverted, and anything but popular in school. There was no question in my mind that I was anything but whole, that I did not measure up to the standards of my peers or teachers. And so, intuitively, I turned to writing as a way of groping toward wholeness. I wrote vast quantities of short stories and poetry; I painted and played the piano. I lived far too much in an interior world, but I did learn that I didn’t have to be qualified according to the world’s standards in order to write my stories. It was far more likely my total lack of qualifications that turned me to story to search for meaning and truth, to ask those eternal questions: Why? What is it all about? Does my life have any meaning? Does anybody care?

There is no way around seeing myself in that reflection. That is my soul, borne open for the world to see. This is my lack of wholeness, this desire to grope toward it through the arts. I have realized now that my lack of wholeness is what drives me as an artist to create.

I have tried to think of how to explain the lack of wholeness I feel. It is not a sorrow, it is not a despair. It’s a frustration. It’s like I’ve found myself suddenly in the presence of God and I have no idea why I’m there, because I have no right to be. I’m aware of my many failures, so to be before Him seems impossible. There are, surely, better people to behold Him.

And accordingly, the lack of wholeness is the desire to bring those people who are so much better than I am, who are better artists, who are better thinkers, to see God as well; because, their perspective of Him, fueled by their profound genius, would be turned back as such beauty into the world. The influence they would have, the lives they would change.

This is the true nature of the Christian artist.

I don’t need to be on the frontline of anything. I’d be rather happy with a quiet cottage by the sea. Let me create, so that in creating others would go and bring forth His great work into the world. Let them be honored for what has been entrusted to them by Him.

So the lack of wholeness, the reason why I have always felt like I wasn’t living in the right century, why I get so easily frustrated with obstructions of Divine Beauty, and why at my worst I can be loud, obsessively passionate, and ravaged by a kind of madness, is how I was created to be. I was created to be someone who gropes and grasps, who wants better for the sake of others because I believe so fervently in their unique talents to see Him realized in the world.

It is in my nature to understand, though to not always live, the prayer of St. Francis, “Lord, make others holy, so long as I am holy enough.”

Therefore I was made unwhole by God for His purposes. And that is not twenty-one years of me not having what everyone else had, or seemed to have. That is my surrender to Him this past week, realizing that I am not whole, that I am not supposed to be whole, and that lack is my very wholeness in Him, as He is still present, seated beside me even as I write this–and likely reap all kinds of folly on myself for the ruinous errors throughout.

This is how He blessed me.

It would seem then that this is a walk in the park. The artist feels unwhole so he is blessed and is somehow privilege to a better sense of God. What I do not want to dwell on but cannot gloss over is the reality of pain that is also a part of this. When you don’t know what to call it, when you think for you it is a kind of depression or lack that others around you have filled, the pain of this feeling, the feeling that you have had something amputated from you, can be crippling.

It’s only until you discover that the thing you think was amputated was never there, therefore could not be amputated in the first place, that you begin to come to a place of peace. But the journey there, I tell you candidly, is not one that you can easily call blessed.

Two weeks ago, before I started L’Engle, I wrote a short story called “The Foolish and the Weak.” When I wrote it, I was trying to explain my frustration with bad philosophy and discursive thinking that kills narrative and robs Christianity of everything that’s good about it. In it, I have a character who is an amputee, a young girl who has such an awful sense of theology in some places, like myself, and yet such good understanding in others. She can’t reconcile why her brother wants to be a philosopher, the kind who rejects God, until at the end she realizes that it’s because he has encountered questions that make him feel somehow less whole, so he’s off on a path to set himself back to a state of wholeness.

It strikes me as profoundly awesome, a testament to the laughter of God that saturates time, that I would have her respond as I did, a week before any of these thoughts or an inkling of this post had formed in my mind.

“It’s to explain the silence.” She repeated, this time not as a question. “I understand it now. You need to explain it. You can’t just live with it. It’s like a part of you would be missing.” A small smile. “And you only know what it is to be whole. That’s not the blessing you think it is.”

© 2011, Preston. All rights reserved.