whole

I was talking with a friend today, when she made the comment about a mutual friend not being ready for a relationship until she is "whole."

I have been thinking about that a lot in the mean time, and I am pretty sure she is onto something and yet basically completely wrong. Which is tough to do, when you come right down to it.

What we need is not to be whole but to appreciate our brokenness. The first is to dream an impossible dream. We don't get to go back to Eden; we are stuck here to its East. We may mend, but we can never be as if we weren't broken. It just doesn't get to be that way. (And yet, to argue with myself, isn't this exactly the kind of situation Jesus indicated when he said, unless you can be like one of these children, you will not be a part of the kingdom of heaven?)

But we can learn to appreciate our brokenness. The thing about being broken is that it exposes parts of us to ourselves we never knew we had. We can choose to have a depth about us that enhances intimacy. We can want to know someone to the very depths that we know exist from our own depths. We can speak from the deep places in our lives even when we are not speaking about the deep places, to borrow a phrase from Buechner.

As a practical matter, is there any difference in formulation of "being whole" versus "appreciating our brokenness"? Probably not. But it is a distinction in my mind anyway. I think it is a helpful one.