Living with Integrity
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To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” The poet e. e. cummings wrote these timeless words in 1958. Each of us, young and old, receives messages about who we ought to be. How we assimilate these messages with who we know ourselves to be is the spiritual discipline of living with integrity.
Have you ever felt like you weren’t being true to yourself, perhaps even that you were living a double life?
LGBTQ and other marginalized people know this reality well—it’s called passing. Others of you may know this feeling when you’re at work if you can’t be your full self—there’s a divide between work life and home life. Or maybe you feel a gap between your vision of how best to live and the reality of your life currently. Or perhaps you are a proud UU at church, but “in the closet” with more conservative family members or friends.
If you’ve ever experienced this divide, you know that it’s not a very joyful or fulfilling way to live. The truth we hold within is the core of our humanity, so when we are disconnected from the soul of who we are, we can feel lost.
The Quaker writer and activist Parker Palmer has focused much of his energy and writing on the challenge of living a whole and undivided life, aligning soul and role. Essentially, he is interested in what it means to have integrity. In his book A Hidden Wholeness, he describes this dilemma using the image of a strip of paper that is white on one side, colored on the other.
The white side is your inner life—your ideas, intuitions, feelings, values, faith, mind, heart, spirit, true self, soul. The colored side is your outer life—the image, influence, and impact you project.
As adults, at one time or another, or maybe as a way of life, we put up a wall of separation between our inner life and outer life, protecting the vulnerabilities of our inner life from the world we live in. This might include parts of our identities that are not safe to share with our communities. If the paper stays with the white, inner side invisible long enough, if we live behind the wall long enough, our inner life can disappear even from our own view, and the wall becomes all we know.
But when we recognize that the wall exists, we can take a step toward integrity by trying to reorder and reintegrate our inner and outer lives, values, and beliefs. We join the ends of our strip of paper to form a connected circle. The thing about this is that there’s still an inside and an outside, white on one side, colored on the other.
So what does true integrity look like? It looks like what happens if you put a full twist in the strip of paper before you join the two ends, creating a Mobius strip.
The Mobius strip was discovered by German mathematician August Ferdinand Mobius. In mathematics, the Mobius strip is a surface with only one side and one boundary. If you trace your finger on what seems to be the outside, you find yourself suddenly on what seems to be the inside. But if you continue, you will find yourself back on what seems to be the outside.
If life is a Mobius strip, there really is no inside or outside; there is only one reality. Integrity is the state of being whole and undivided, which is why the Mobius strip is a beautiful representation of this way of living.
As Parker Palmer says, the inside and outside—of the Mobius strip and of ourselves—are “co-creating each other.” “Whatever is inside us continually flows outward to help form, or deform, the world,” he says, “and whatever is outside us continually flows inward to help form, or deform, our lives.” We travel the Mobius strip of life making choices—about what we project and what we absorb—and these choices can be “life-giving for the world, for other people, and for me”…or not.
The poet David Whyte writes: “hold to your own truth at the center of the image you were born with.” This is what it means to live with integrity. And when we hold to this truth it shapes our friendships, our work and our life choices in ways that are life giving, because we know and are being true to who we are.
Our integrity is constructed, in large part, by the choices we make. Even by what may seem like little, everyday choices.
The other day I was at the store buying cushions for my patio furniture. They were big cushions, seat and back attached by plastic ties, piled high in the cart, shoved in there so as to keep them from spilling out all over the floor or knocking over displays in my path. When I went to pay, the checkout person said “two?” as she scanned the tag nearest her. I paused, and said, “no, there are three.”
I could have just said “yeah” and taken advantage of the situation, having to pay for only two cushions instead of three. Some people might have jumped at the opportunity, not even hesitating. But that’s not who I am, it’s not “the center of the image [I was] born with.” I’m not someone who takes advantage of others and lies to save a buck. I’m someone who is, or tries to always be, honest.
But integrity is about more than honesty, or telling the truth. It’s about being true to who you are, what you believe, and what you say. It’s the sum total of all those small, everyday choices to be honest, choices that are life-giving instead of life-diminishing.
I think we generally expect integrity of one another. I can recall multiple times that were like the patio cushion incident. I stood at the checkout, my arms full of pool noodles or bubble wands (birthday party—what can I say?), and the checkout person just asked me how many I had, without verifying or counting. There’s undoubtedly an element of privilege at play here, and I believe there’s also something deep within us that makes us want to believe others have integrity.
We are called to live with integrity by expecting it of one another. When someone expects me to be real and true, they are calling me to hold to that inner truth at the core of who I am. There is a spiritual invitation in this exchange.
Integrity is a spiritual practice—not a characteristic or quality of an individual, but a way of being and living. The first part is to identify and listen to our core. Who am I, what is that image I was born with, my core, my soul?
Then there is the spiritual work of strengthening this core, of amplifying this voice, which we do by making choice after choice. Every time we make a choice about what we project and what we absorb it’s like we’re working our integrity muscle.
JoLillian Zwerdling, quoted in the book Emergent Strategy, writes:
From starfish I have learned that if we keep our core intact, we can regenerate. We can fall apart, lose limbs, and re-grow them as long as we don’t let anyone threaten that central disc’s integrity. We can grow so many different arms, depending on what kind of sea star we are. We have to nourish ourselves with the resources we are surrounded by…and by doing so we help keep ecosystems delicately balanced.
I love this image of us as starfish. By fortifying your core and keeping it intact you can weather whatever comes. Whatever temptations present themselves. Whatever messages you receive from this “world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else.” When you know and listen to your true self, you can be like the starfish, regenerating when needed. And this helps contribute to a balanced ecosystem.
If you’re like me, you may need some help with this spiritual practice. It helps to have a community who will remind you of who you are, and support you in holding to that core. A community that models integrity. This is one of the many reasons to belong to a church.
All institutions, including churches, struggle with integrity just as individuals do. Are we who we say we are? Do we walk our talk? Our actions must be reflective of the core identity we claim, and of the values that run deep in our tradition and our bones. In a time when integrity is not being modeled by those in charge of our government and most powerful institutions, we as individuals and as a church have an important role to play.
Just as the choices we make about what we put out into the world and what we take in co-create our individual integrity, I believe the choices we make as individuals and as a church help co-create a society with integrity. Each time we are honest, true to ourselves, humble about our shortcomings and mistakes, and practice discernment and fortification of our core, we model integrity in life-giving ways, helping transform the culture in which we live.
We are all surrounded by forces that tempt us to be other than who we are. But as the poet David Whyte writes: “There is only one life / you can call your own / and a thousand others / you can call by any name you want.” Let’s live our own, and live it with integrity.
- Living with Integrity - May 1, 2020
