Integrity Deficit Disorder
By Charles Rush
September 29, 2013
Matthew 5: 6
[ Audio
(mp3, 6.3Mb) ]
In the Sermon on the Mount,
Jesus said this: “You are blessed when you get your inside world- your
mind and your heart- put right. Then you can see God in the outside world. You
are blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or
fight. That's when you discover who you really are, and your place in God's
family.” (The Message)
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is morning I want to say something about integrity. Admittedly, this is not a popular subject for this generation. As a group, I think pretty much follow the advice from the famous movie producer Samuel Goldwyn. He once said that the most difficult part of acting was being authentically honest before the audience. And how true that is. He went on to add, "once you can fake that, you're in."
I've wondered
for a few years if some smart graduate student at Stanford isn't going to write
a dissertation on our generation titled ‘The Porno Era' drawing together a
number of disparate threads, the indirect and subtle ways that mainstreaming
porno has altered the cultural background against which we live our lives now.
I first started
wondering about it when these jihadists started videotaping their gruesome
beheadings, which somehow seemed like they should be illegal to distribute. But
they are not.
Then the Taliban
got in on that game and it has been a regular medium for over a decade now, the
latest these live shots of atrocities in Syria that are supposed to stoke our
compassion but somehow they just seem to me to be oddly voyeuristic and
unhealthy for the soul, almost like we are in love with death.
I thought the
same thing of the photos and videos from Abu Grahib
prison. The soldiers had taken photos and videos of themselves, pretty much
like they were going to post pictures of a party that got out of hand to
Facebook. What is it about our era that feels like we can and should film our
body of work- and then post it somewhere?
Also from the
file of ‘what were they thinking?' we have the phenomenon of a pretty
widespread practice of our bankers, like the traders at JP Morgan, that were
selling Mortgage backed securities to people that were toxic. Even as they are
doing it, they are shooting email to each other making jokes about the
institutions stupid enough to buy these things like a bunch of fraternity boys
at the bar after work. Unfortunately for them, they had to have their catty
comments read back to them in the presence of the SEC, violating the cardinal
rule of the internet era of “Do not hit send if your Mother can't read this
too.” It is all recorded and can be completely re-created.
What is striking
to me is the response of the generation. Almost to a person in my extended
family when I ask my children or their cousins about these things, they
respond, 'What is the big deal? everybody's doing it.'
It is a response that brings to mind Voltaire who once said, "No snowflake
in an avalanche ever feels responsible." It is true that these are broad
cultural trends which probably cannot be bucked but that does not mean they
should not be addressed. I'm sure you've seen the plaque on the front of the
Holocaust Museum in Washington that reads, "Thou shalt not be a victim.
Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a
bystander." Don't just go along with the flow either.
It is true that
many of us work in professions that discourage thinking about integrity beyond
the most minimal discourse. And it is also true that we genuinely don't give it
the due it deserves until we are of a certain age.
Spiritually,
however, integrity is important. It is just hard to get it when you are young.
The great psychoanalyst Erik Erikson described our psychosocial life cycle in 8
phases, the last phase- the ultimate phase- being "Integrity vs.
Despair". It is the question of whether your personal life is starting to
cohere in meaning and wisdom or whether you are actually fracturing in futility
and your life is starting to seem inane. [1]
This ultimate phase is implicitly draw us all along, we just become more aware
of it the closer we get to last phase of our life.
The importance
of integrity was captured well in the movie 'Saving Private Ryan'. In the
movie, Ryan is saved in the battles that followed the D-Day invasion at a
considerable cost. He is rescued but literally dozens of other soldiers around
him perish in the mission. In the after shock of battle, one of the officers
comes up to him, just before he is about to be shipped back home. The officer
says to him, 'you got a chance for a life kid… don't
waste it. Earn this' he says just before he dies.
Years go by, we
know nothing of his Private Ryan's civilian life, except that one day as an
aging man, he travels back to the beaches at Normandy with his family and he
finds the graves of the soldiers he served with, the soldiers that gave their
lives that he might live. He is overcome with emotion, so his children leave
him to his thoughts, wondering what he went through because he never told them,
so like that generation.
Finally, his wife comes near him to support
him. He looks at her and he says, "Tell me I am a good man." She is
confused. What he is trying to say is, "Tell me that I was worthy… Tell me
that I didn't waste it… Tell me this was meaningful… because the cost…"
That is our conscience talking to ourselves and it is the right question about
your life.
One of my
colleagues has suggested that culturally we are living through a period of
integrity deficit disorder.[2] I
like that phrase. Integrity deficit disorder comes from outside/in thinking.
Outside/in thinking permeates our media, and it particularly dominates the
ethos of the entertainment we serve abundantly to our children.
We have whole
T.V. channels devoted to nothing else than an outside in approach to life- the
E channel, Style. The magazine rack is simply filled with devotion to glamour,
image, popularity, and the culture of perquisites. It is all about who has
what, who's in and who's not; it is all about power plays,
plot and intrigue. It is all about who is getting who, who is flaunting what.
It's all about the bling bling
and being cool.
We feed our
children a steady diet of reality More whacked out housewives, more nutty
people living together being mean to each other at the Jersey shore or
Hollywood, the wonders of liposuction, Temptation Island, tours of the homes of
the rich and famous- on and on an on- and we wonder why the young people we
hire seem to be more focused on the perq's than the actual mission of the job
itself. We wonder where this sense of growing entitlement comes from? We keep them consistently focused on what is outside
for motivation and we wonder why they have so little interior motivation, so
little interior moral compass.
Yet, we know
that spiritually speaking, it is not the exterior things that make us happy or
bring us abiding contentment. True fulfillment, as Jesus says, comes from
having your inside world put right. There is an ancient proverb from Confucius
that says, "To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation
in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to
put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life. In short,
we must first set our hearts right."
The Dalai Lama
once remarked that we cannot, we should not wait for the leaders of the world
to bring us world peace. "It lies within each of us individually. Peace,
for example, starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at
peace with those around us." True contentment comes from living from the
inside out.
Our children, so
we are told, cheat with a regularity unknown to
previous generations. Part of it is that they can. They lived in that short
window of internet access just before internet responsibility. But when I talk
to them, the way they justify it is that it is all simply a means to an end.
The end is just to get into a good school so I can put myself on the A job
track so I can live the A lifestyle. That is the way that kids think.
But there comes
a time in your life, actually many times in your life, when you pause for a
reflective moment. Sometimes, it is near the end of a chapter of your life,
when you graduate, sometimes it is after a crisis that you have endured,
sometimes it is after you have accomplished all your goals. And sometimes it is
after you have violated a basic principle and embarrassed yourself or someone
close to you. You say to yourself, "Why am I here? What am I supposed to
accomplish? What am I supposed to be doing?" At these moments, you come
face to face with none other than… yourself.
The spiritual
question before all of us, is what are we to become?
Not other people, not people in general… What are you supposed to become? What
is your potential to realize? What are your gifts and powers? What is inside of
you?
It is a very
personal question. Rabbi Zusya got it right. He said
that in the after life, God is not going to ask him why he wasn't Moses, why he
wasn't Abraham or Gandhi, why he wasn't some bigger than life person. No, he
said, God will ask me, 'why were you not Zusya?' Why
didn't you become the unique person that God wants you to be.
That is the toughest challenge of all is it not? Oliver Wendell Holmes once
said that "What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters
compared to what lies within us." We are our own biggest project, for
better and for worse. I love St. Augustine's reflection on his own moral and
spiritual complexity at mid-life. He said, "I have become a problem unto
myself."
The point of
integrity from the Christian point of view is not that we become moral perfectionists, the point is that we are on the road toward
improvement. It is not that we don't make mistakes but that we work towards
reconciliation of those things in us that are a problem to ourselves. We are
not a collection of righteous saints but a community of forgiven sinners
(Dietrich Bonhoffer was right).
And a mighty
struggle these personal issues really are for all of us. I love Teddy Roosevelt's
fighting description of the challenge of the self that he gave in a lecture at,
of all places, the Sorbonne in Paris. "It is not the critic who
counts" he said, "not the man who points out how the strong man
stumbled, or where the doer of the deeds could have done better. The credit
belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust
and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and
again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself
in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst knows
that if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall
never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."
Most of our life-long character struggles feel pretty much like wrestling with
the monster inside of us.
It is important
that we are on the path, that we give some tangible evidence that we are not
only wrestling with our demons but that we are corralling them, particularly as
we get past mid-life.
One way you can
see this is in marriage. There comes a point in the course of a marriage when
integrity in your spouse becomes a substantial issue. You have to believe in
your spouse. You have to trust them. You have to respect them.
When I was 22
and a pastor in a rural farming community in Kentucky I heard a woman say
something I couldn't really understand for years to come. She was talking of
her husband of 50 some odd years just after he died. She said, "I reckon
he wasn't the purtiest boy I'd ever seen; I reckon he wasn't the smartest neither; but Earl McComb
was a sturdy man." He was a sturdy man. That is not a bad image. The bible
has a wonderful hope that we will grow to become like the Cedars of Lebanon, those
great tall trees that provide shade for the next generation. Those great tall
trees that you can see from a great distance and fix your coordinates on the
moral landscape around you; Those great tall trees
that have lived through flood and drought, something sturdy that you can grab
onto. That is what we hope to become.
I would not have
known how important that is in marriage, in families. But over the years, when
I have listened to people reflecting on why their marriages failed, this motif
has come up more regularly than I imagined. It wasn't the affair as such,
though the breach of trust and the sense of sensual rejection was deep; It
wasn't just the poor communication, though that needed to be fixed; it wasn't
just our independent lives, though we need to change our whole approach… it
wasn't any single thing that you can point to… which is what makes it so hard
to articulate. And it won't be said in public either because it is too
personal… but people make a judgment call going into the future and what they
say to themselves and they usually don't even articulate it clearly is
"I'm not going to be able to respect this person in the future… Sum total,
going forward, we won't manage mutual respect… and that is a very sad day, a
very personal day.
Respect
and integrity grow in importance in marriage. I think of that wonderful poem by
Roy Croft that says "I love you/not only for what your are/but for what I
am when I am around you." What a wonderful expression of respect for your
spouse. How much more meaningful that phrase becomes the deeper that you grow
together.
It becomes an
important key as our relationships mature and become more profound. It rarely
finds articulation in our culture, bound as we are by the images of youth and
sex. In the earliest phase of our life, sex and sensuality is all physical. It
is all about image and physique. It is outside/in in approach.
But as we mature
in our relationships, the physical gradually becomes overshadowed by the
spiritual, and spiritual issues become the key to sustaining more profound
intimacy and sharing. Respect and integrity take on greater meaning.
In our mature
relationships, we can find ways to overcome physical image and physique issues.
That is because the locus of gravitas is shifting toward the spiritual
dimension. Genuine respect, genuine integrity become
more important for intimacy. It is no longer about the physical alone. We
evolve in the direction inside/out.
The pay off
spiritually is that we have substantial relationships, we become substantial
people. We have a sense of meaning in our lives, a sense of worth and purpose.
The bible speaks of a simple but profound hope that one day we will live to see
our children's children grow and develop. The hope is that we can become sturdy
people that can positively shape the spiritual character of the rising
generations. Our sense of meaning and purpose are intrinsically grounded and
lived out in these relationships. Spiritually that is what is really real.
Spiritually, this is where we find an internal contentment and peace that
lasts.
So this week,
when you find yourself in conversation with the cultured spiritual cynics that
sneer that the world is nothing but power and fashion, popularity and perq's, let
it all recede into the boring, droning cant that it really is… like the Blah,
Blah, Blah in the Peanuts cartoon that comes on whenever adults speak… That is
all this is too… a lot of immature, frustrated blah, blah, blah outside/in
approach to life. That is only the most superficial dimension of human
existence. There is a lot more to you still. And the most important part
remains to be plummed. You are a project in the
making, don't forget that. Keep your eye on the prize. Why are you here? What
are you supposed to accomplish? Who are you supposed to become? Amen.