Tapping

Introduction

Integrity is wholeness, and it requires integration. This is true of individuals as well as communities. We all live in several different settings—work, home, school, social gatherings, worship, and other situations. Each of these different places makes its own demands of us, and we think, speak, and behave accordingly. That is as it should be. To react to your minister’s sermon the same way you react to your football team’s touchdown, for example, would be absurd. The two events do not have the same purpose, intention, or significance.

The threat to integrity arises when the things expected of us in one of these settings conflicts with the values demanded in another. We break our soul into compartments. We wind up with one set of values here and another there. We are pulled apart, no longer whole, unable to find our true selves.

This disintegration shatters integrity. It leads to the turmoil of uncertainty, guilt, and regret that we human beings so often feel within ourselves. This anxiety is then intensified by the violent conflict we witness raging throughout the world. Who could not feel shaky when so many governments are disintegrating, and so many institutions are crumbling, and the earth itself is threatening catastrophe? We need outside help. We need reminders of who we are.

One of my favorite Robert Frost poems, “Tree at My Window,” suggests the tapping of branches on his windowpane can be either comforting or disturbing depending on how the weather outside interacts with his own internal “weather.” Does our inner turbulence, conversely, contribute to the instability of the world outside our window? How could it not? Whether borne in silence or released in violent outbursts, what goes on inside us affects those around us, including those we encounter only briefly as well as those with whom we share the days of our lives.

Our injured pride, our well-nursed grudges, our arrogant dismissal of those we consider less important than ourselves, our idolatry of power, and a thousand other factors menace our souls. Such inclinations deny us the integrity that would make us whole and extend our inner storm far beyond ourselves. Ripple effects from the turmoil within one personality have been known to destabilize nations.

Notwithstanding the futility we feel at all this, we hope for a better world, and we pray to be better people. May each of these brief essays be a tap on the window or on the shoulder to stir, however obliquely, the deep human prayer for a truly integrated soul and community.

HEM 2023