Lately I've been reading a lot of Madeleine L'Engle, author of the Newbery Award winning novel A Wrinkle in Time, and many other wonderful books. She wrote about love, family, work, war, relationships, faith, God, and the self. In one of her works of non-fiction, "A Circle of Quiet," she presents one summer of her life in journalistic form. One of the passages I read this morning reads as such:
'The most "whole" people I know are those in whom the gap between the "ontological" [true] self and the daily self is the smallest. The Latin integer means untouched; intact. In mathematics, an integer is a whole number. The people I know who are intact don't have to worry about their integrity; they are incapable of doing anything which would break it.
It's a sad commentary on our world that "integrity" is slowly coming to mean self-centeredness. Most people who worry about their integrity are thinking about it in terms of themselves. It's a great excuse for not doing something you really don't want to do, or are afraid to do: "I can't do that and keep my integrity." Integrity, like humility, is a quality which vanishes the moment we are conscious of it in ourselves. We see it only in others.'
I sat, ashamed at my own illiteracy, looked up at the ceiling and said, "You're going to have to help me with this. I can't figure this one out by myself." We speak a lot of integrity where I come from. We talk of realness and goodness and "geniune-ness." To be truly real, good, and genuine is an admirable goal. So what are we fighting over? Why can't we easily define this admirable goal? And why have we become so obsessed with defining it?
When I sat down to mentally digest this passage, I started out by asking "Well alright, who doesn't have integrity? Is it me? My friends?" I quickly realized that this was not the question I should be asking. If integrity vanishes once we are conscious of it in ourselves, then who in my life does have integrity? I thought about my aunt who fought to stay alive until she could meet her first grandson. Her fight for her life depended not on her belief in her own worth but on her belief in everyone else's. I thought about one of my professors who, knowing full well that I was inept at both the subject matter of the course and at waking up early, still found the time to make sure I passed her class. She didn't let me get away with anything, she just let me be myself while still teaching me the material. Her respect for her students is "ontological."
I am in no place to decide who doesn't have integrity. "The gap between our 'real' and 'actual' selves is, to some degree, in all of us; no one is completely whole... When we refuse to face this gap in ourselves, we widen it." I am constantly widening my gap. I judge too harshly and love too slowly. I worry about about my actions to the point where I'm more worried about myself than everyone else around me. I constantly question my integrity. This is not to say that I believe we should forgo checking ourselves and keeping each other accountable. Freedom is only truly found within a form. The difference, however, is in what we do first: we can define each other's worth (and our own) based on perceived integrity, or we can love. I guess I choose love.
