In search of wholeness

As hard as it may be to believe, there are people in our world who are still convinced that the earth is flat. No amount of evidence can persuade them otherwise.  

Now, some people are suggesting that the earth is becoming flat in a very different sense. One of those people is Caroline Jones. In her book An Authentic Life, she includes a chapter on Care for the Soul. She remembers a book her father gave her when she was 8. Written by Dorothy Ann Lovell and published in the 1940’s it was called “In the Land of the Thinsies”. It is the story of a young schoolgirl, Jill, who slips through a crack at the bottom of an escalator. She emerges into a world where everyone is flattened into a cardboard cutout-type figure, including herself. The people there long for fullness, for wholeness, but cannot find any way to achieve it.

I am not familiar with Lovell’s book, but I was very taken with the way that Jones uses this image as a starting point to reflect on our situation today. We live in a world where she says people “are thirsting for spirituality but are offered shopping”. Something crucial to a life of meaning and purpose is missing, and she identifies that as “heart and soul”.

Jones talks about how our world is becoming more one-dimensional with “the fullness ironed out of it by a materialistic postmodern secular system of thought”. I see an example of a one-dimensional viewpoint in interviews with supporters of Mr Trump. They seem to have adopted a single narrative, and everything that happens is then made to fit within it. In this narrative, Trump is the saviour of people who existing institutions have not well served. He is also a victim, as they are, of the same institutions. He has done nothing wrong but is being framed and persecuted by the authorities who are conspiring against him. In this kind of narrative all the good and none of the bad are on one side and all the bad and nothing good on the other. This phenomenon is referred to in psychology as splitting – a form of flattening the world into just them and us.

Many people are worried about the future of democracy in the USA. Concern is growing in many parts of our world where authoritarian rulers are gradually eliminating all opposition and outlawing all dissenting viewpoints or perspectives. The trend is "very serious", said Tony Banbury, president of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems. "We see in country after country someone gaining power through the ballot box, through a democratic process, and then once in power, they start to dismantle the democratic institutions of their country." They go after electoral commissions, the judiciary, and the free press. (From an ABC news story on elections in 2024 by Lucia Stein)

The integral and holistic view of reality as well as the spirit of cooperation that we need if we are to deal effectively with all the challenges we now face becomes more and more difficult to achieve as the flattening effects of these systems grow. There is no middle ground on which to meet.

Just as nature depends on diversity for its flourishing, human wholeness requires that we keep and cherish the different experiences and perspectives that exist in our world. While our modern world is not comfortable with ideas like soul, faith, grace, sin, angels and devils, Jones suggests that when we lose touch with the reality that these things point to and help us to connect with, we suffer. Evidence of the kind of suffering that a soulless landscape can inflict is all around us. Like Jill, we are looking for a way out of the land of Thinsies so that we might again find wholeness.

Fr Patrick O’Shea – Aotearoa/New Zealand