From Your Minister
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Years ago I was working with an acupuncturist. She put needles all over my body to stimulate various meridians, so that my life energy, or qi, could flow freely and without impediment. As I was lying on the table, she asked how my body felt. Now, the needles don’t hurt, but my body was uncomfortable in a variety of ways. I told her about various sensations that were unpleasant, thinking she needed to adjust her needles. Instead, she said, “That’s fascinating. Right now your energy is perfectly in balance.”
It was fascinating, indeed. My balanced energy felt uncomfortable and wrong in a variety of ways. What felt right to me, instead, was when I could relax into the comfort of familiarity.
What does this have to do with integrity? To have integrity, we’re told, we must look inside to that deepest wisdom, that still small voice. We’ll know it when we feel aligned, when we identify our authentic self and align our actions and words with it. But what if that still small voice, and everything else we’ve been taught to look to as wisdom, is biased in ways that are limiting and limited, and it turns out what we’ve been trained to see as truth is actually steeped in lies? How do we know what integrity means then?
As I’ve come to understand more and more the depth to which oppressive worldviews fill my head—worldviews based in all kinds of biases which I rationally reject—I realize that integrity is a difficult commodity for most of us, particularly in areas where we hold privilege. Well, all I really know is that it’s difficult for me. I simply can’t trust my own integrity by looking within—I need side-mirrors and other reference points. The acupuncturist’s viewpoint provides a corrective to my own.
Quite honestly, it took me many, many years to come to this realization. Years when I thought, “Yeah, I get it, of course, but why do we have to talk about it all the time?” about racism and white supremacy culture and classism and ableism and sexism. Because I had encountered the ideas before, I thought I was grounded in an anti-oppressive, trustable, place. Because I rationally rejected oppressive ideas, I presumed that I had moved beyond them—that my own sense of myself as a person of integrity was trustworthy and accurate.
Integrity, after all, means wholeness. But how can I be whole in a world where we are all torn apart, labeled by identities that only hold pieces of our complexity, pitted against one another for our very survival? How can I be whole when governments and law courts have made up racial categories to describe one another which are foundationally lies, and then based whole legal and cultural systems on those lies? How can I be whole when people categorized as I have been—white—have had access to privilege at the expense of people who have been categorized in other ways?
For me, continuing to work towards integrity has been a study in humility.
I am constantly believing Now I understand! only to learn yet another thing that tells me I don’t understand at all. Work towards integrity has meant interrogating myself about where I locate my sources of “truth,” and questioning whether those locations are actually trustworthy. My work towards being a person with integrity has meant learning more every day about the ways I am blocked from engagement with the actual lived experiences of all kinds of people: neuro-divergent people, people with disabilities, black and brown people, people of all genders, people who are poor, people who hold all kinds of national and ethnic identities, people with different religious reference points. Learning from all these people leads me down a path toward greater wholeness.
Unitarian Universalism is a challenging religion because we are multi-metaphorical. We draw from many world religions and philosophies, and we don’t pretend that we all coalesce around a particular belief or metaphor system. But in a way, I think this challenge is the fundamental challenge to becoming a whole person. Rather than believing that if we look towards ultimate truth we will experience the same God (or no-God), we trust that there are larger patterns to be found if our own integrity is part of an interdependent web of perspectives.
Of course, that interdependent web needs to be grounded in some kind of standard of truth to have integrity. In order to live out the principles to which we are committed, we can’t ignore pieces of history and current events simply because they are too painful. We have to believe the experiences of people who have radically different embodied life experiences than we do, paying particular attention to the voices from the margins. Liberation theology calls this the “epistemic advantage of the oppressed,” meaning that oppressed people know both the dominant narratives and the narrative that comes from living underneath that narrative.
This is a wonderful community in which to learn, in which to become more whole. The diverse lives and experiences of the people here can help us all in the lifelong struggle to live our own lives with integrity.
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