Our Whole Person
My Dear People,
"Human beings are not just one thing. We are not just a bag of feelings. We are also reason, and memory, and will. All of these faculties make us human, and each has its own area of activity. I don't use my emotions to solve a math problem. All the parts of us work together. The same one can't lead all the time. So, I may have extravagant revenge fantasies about someone who has hurt someone else, but I can't make my moral decisions on the basis of my fantasies. I have to use more of my self."
-Barbara Cawthorne Crafton, from The Almost Daily eMos: Mostly Reverent Emails
"We are not just a bag of feelings." I first read that line several years ago--and I have not come across it since--nevertheless, it has stayed with me, and so I went looking for it.
Indeed, we are not just a bag of feelings. And yet, this is sometimes less evident; and sometimes more evident.
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My wife and I talk, tongue in cheek, about "leaking" on one another. More to the point, as needed, we apologize for leaking on one another.
The image there, of leaking, comes from the sense that emotions have their healthy, appropriate place, as part of the whole; and yet, how, at moments, emotions can leak out beyond their place, or even overrun their banks in a torrent, thereby interfering with, if not overwhelming, other faculties.
President Obama is faulted by some for being too cool a customer. Whether that appraisal is accurate or not, it does point to a fine line that any sensitive, thoughtful person must walk: We don't want to come across as uncaring or aloof. On the other hand, it does no one any good if we simply hang five on every emotional wave that comes our way. And, in my experience, in general, we human beings are more prone to the latter than we are likely to admit. And perhaps this is more true in our day than most, in what has been called "an age of anxiety."
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When we encounter and engage one another, we want the "other" we meet to be meeting us in our wholeness, not ourselves askew with emotion run amock. We human beings are, yes, emotional; and that is right and good, to borrow a line from the Prayer Book. But, again, "We are not just a bag of feelings." We are much, much more, thank goodness.
We are a whole person, a whole person called to an incarnational love that brings the wholeness of who we are into every encounter, every moment, of our lives.
Next time we meet, may my whole person meet your whole person.
Your brother in Christ,
Wallace+
