Lost and lonely, and what integrity has to do with it

Hi Reader,

A reminder: my vision for the future is “a world no longer divided by religion.” This is the context for everything I’m writing now.

I’ve been sitting here in front of my computer for a while now, lost in thought. And I’m slowly coming to awareness that that’s precisely what I am: lost. I think I’ve been lost for a long time. Long enough to be verrrry comfortable with it.

I wander in circles (as we do when we’re lost) in my mind. And I notice these circles grow ever smaller. I may be comfortable being lost, but it’s not what I want. Not anymore.

Playing the tape forward, I imagine the circles growing ever smaller until I’m just spinning in place. Eventually, I stop. When it feels right. And I start walking.

I don’t know what this newsletter, which I’m calling OneFire, will end up being for me, much less for you. But this is an attempt to describe why I’m doing this. I’m trying to find myself, and in that process, to be of service.

Let’s see where the next few steps take us.

Last time I told you that I’d give you the story of OneFire. Of where the name came from, I mean. I’m going to kick that can a little further down the path, because I first need to tell you about integrity.

I mentioned integrity before, in relation to how I stopped emailing you for a while. I don’t have a lot of integrity, but I have enough to know when I’ve done what I said I would, and when I haven’t.

The idea for OneFire came to me as I was nearing the end of a 14-week seminar on integrity. I learned that when someone is standing in a place of integrity, they can see possibilities for the future. The possibility I saw was that of a world no longer divided by religion.

Today, I’m not so confident I was actually standing in a place of integrity when I saw this possibility. As a follow-on to that seminar, I decided to read a book that’s been wildly popular over the last few years: The Way of Integrity, by Martha Beck.

It’s… well, it’s excellent. I mean that in the sense that it’s well-constructed and well-written (the perspective of one author admiring another’s work). But I also mean it in the sense that it was precisely the right book for me to read at this point in time. It’s a superb deepening of the ideas I grappled with in the seminar, and I will be using it in the coming weeks and months to do some serious work on myself.

Our old traditions often have rituals that seem strange until you look at them from the perspective of how they might be allegories for your own inner life. I experienced this myself around this topic of integrity.

For instance, the Jewish people have a tradition of removing all fermented grains from their homes before the Passover. The Hebrew word for this kind of food is chametz. On the night before the Passover Seder, a member of the family performs a ritual, searching the house by candlelight, using a feather to sweep bits of chametz (hidden for the purpose of the ritual) onto a wooden spoon and saved in a piece of cloth. The spoon and cloth are later burned.

This ritual, which is not a part of my own tradition but which I know of through the tradition I was raised in, came to mind as I was reading The Way of Integrity. The idea behind integrity—at least in the way Martha Beck and the seminar I did talk about it—is to continually search out and eliminate all divisions within oneself. Looked at from this perspective, the chametz ritual may not be about the problem with fermented grains (or at least not merely with fermented grains). It might be about the work I have to do to clean up my inner self.

The seminar I did said that “integrity is the state of being whole and complete.” Beck says integrity is when you “know what you really know, feel what you really feel, say what you really mean, and do what you really want.” Which sounds a lot like what I’ve been fumblingly trying to say over the last few weeks. What I’ve been calling “having a heart at peace.”

I say this not to try to make it seem like I was so smart or right or anything so self-congratulatory, but rather to point to the large amount of inner work I have yet to do. Moving toward a fuller integrity (or heart at peace) will require me to tenaciously hunt down and eliminate all the suffering within myself—as with the feather and wooden spoon. I do this because these places of suffering point to inner divisions, structural weaknesses within me. Once I clean them up (so to speak), I can be more whole and complete, a well-functioning human being, able to see reality clearly and work powerfully to move it.

As I grow in integrity, as I heal the divisions and suffering within myself, I hope that will serve to do the same in the world around me.

At least, that’s the idea. I’m aware of a lot of cynicism and skepticism in me, so I don’t know if I really believe what I’m saying here. But I also don’t think belief is necessary, exactly. This feels like a path that I can’t see the end of, so I’m not certain where it leads, but it seems to be going the same direction I want to. In some ways I think it will be shorter than I imagine, but probably still longer than I wish. I think it’s definitely not wandering in circles, though.

My commitment, which I’m making to myself and to you here, is to try it and see.

In other news, I’ve read five other books over the past eight weeks:

Faith Unravelled, by Rachel Held Evans

Eternal Life, by John Shelby Spong

What’s Our Problem?, by Tim Urban

The Art of Mindful Living, by Thich Nhat Hanh

The Anatomy of Peace, by The Arbinger Institute

…and a few other books, fiction and nonfiction, that either aren’t worth mentioning or haven’t had much of an impact on my thinking around this project.

I’m currently working my way through Faith after Doubt, by Brian McLaren. While reading it, I’m becoming aware of something that surprises me: when it comes to religion, I feel lonely. I’ve never minded being alone, so this feeling of loneliness is a bit perplexing. I don’t think this book is for me, but it’s revealing something about myself to me—something I suspect is one of those divisions I mentioned earlier. So it’s a gift, regardless of whether I was the person McLaren had in mind when he wrote it.

I have thoughts on the other books, but I won’t go into them unless you ask. So shoot me a reply if you’re curious, or set up a time for us to have coffee (we can do it in person or by phone or zoom).