Holistic or hole-istic?

My sixteen-month-old son Lucas and I went for a walk this afternoon. He likes to pick up rocks and leaves and examine dandelions and clover. Acorns are a special favorite. Today, he was carrying around a cherished rock he had just encountered, and he came across a hole in the cement, a little divot; perhaps a rock had been mixed in there with the original cement but had come loose. Lucas poked the hole with his finger, looked at the rock in his hand, and placed it in the hole. The rock barely fit, but there was an undeniable logic to it. Lucas showed himself to be his problem-solving father's son. Later he attempted to fill another hole with a clover flower. That was when he showed himself to be his fanciful mother's son!

I was touched by these little actions, as a sappy mama is entitled to be. At the same time, I'd been thinking all morning about holistic approaches to work and parenting and living. As a theology student and activist and former massage therapy student, I feel I'm entitled to think in big, abstract ways about such things. But I was also thinking about the faith of my church community and what the best approach might be to nurturing it, as the pastor I am in the process of becoming. Even more specifically, I was thinking about how I might lead a parenting class. I was trying to decide whether to use a "practical tips" or a "holistic spirituality" kind of a famework.

Here's the thing. Parenting is one of those life experiences which teaches a person that their whole theoretical framework of life was nothing more than an edifice of air, a castle of cloud, blown away by the first, shrieking exhalation of the newborn child. And yet being a parent without a larger dream, without hanging onto the hope that one day the shrieking babe will become a healthy, sane adult, parenting would only be an excercise in daily chaos, in which we move from petty demand to demand until we collapse.

Irenaeus famously said, "The glory of God is humanity fully alive." I love this quote, but what does it mean to be "fully alive?" I believe God creates each one of us to come to a kind of wholeness of personhood and, indeed, holiness. Jesus Christ most fully exemplifies what that kind of wholeness looks like in a person. Okay, and so what was so great about Jesus? I think he lived (and died and rose again) out the greatest commandment: Love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind (Matt. 22:36-38).

Holistic philosophies seek health (another word related to whole and holy) in the interconnection and integration of heart, mind, spirit, and body. I think the greatest commandment points at this kind of health, the holistic work of all systems. One of my hopes for the church is that we can be a people and a place where such healing can take place, where whole, fully alive human beings can be nutured and can be sent out to nuture others.

But so often, reality seems to work against holistic practice. We divide the church up into committees in the administrative practice of my tradition. The Worship Commitee, the Evangelism Commitee, the Stewardship Commitee. We break it down, and we break it down again into bite size pieces. Sometimes, though, the glorious dream of full aliveness becomes so bitty that all we can do is argue about the color of the carpet in the sanctuary. But still we hope that somehow each bite-sized piece will form back up into a whole loaf, a whole communion, a whole interconnected Body of Christ, moving, breathing and thinking towards God's glory.

But Jesus said, "This is my body, broken for you." The only whole One, the fully alive One, allowed himself to be broken, so that we, in our brokenness, might be healed.

I'm frustrated with the small-scale of actual ministry work sometimes, the day-to-day piecemeal work. I'm frustrated with the gap between my dreams and reality, the long pathway, full of rubble. But God does give me pieces, rocks, dandelions, bottle caps, clover. It is not my job to heal seamlessly. My job is to try my best to fit them, sometimes awkwardly, into the holes in the sidewalk.