Readings – Integrity

by brigitte
“Be yourself, everyone else is taken.” Oscar Wilde
“Integrity is telling myself the truth. Honesty is telling the truth to other people.” Spencer Johnson
Wholeness is never lost, it is only forgotten. Integrity rarely means that we need to add something to ourselves: it is more an undoing than a doing, a freeing ourselves from beliefs we have about who we are and ways we have been persuaded to “fix” ourselves to know who we genuinely are. Even after many years of seeing, thinking, and living one way, we are able to reach past all that to claim our integrity and live in a way we may never have expected to live. Being with people at such times is like watching them pat their pockets, trying to remember where they have put their soul… Often in reclaiming the freedom to be who we are, we remember some basic human quality, an unsuspected capacity for love or compassion or some other part of our common birthright as human beings. What we find is almost always a surprise but it is also familiar; like something we have put in the back of a drawer long ago, once we see it we know it as our own. Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom
I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it. Parker Palmer
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all, — that is genius… In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty… Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Ralph Waldo Emerson
On some questions, Cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “Is it polite?” And Vanity comes along and asks the question, “Is it popular?” But Conscience asks the question, “Is it right?” And there comes a time when we must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but we must do it because Conscience tells us it is right. Martin Luther King Jr
Back in the days when Forest Hills hosted the United States Amateur tennis championship instead of the United States Open, the great amateur Ted Schroeder was contesting a difficult match against the sensational Pancho Gonzalez — a match Schroeder would ultimately lose. At a critical point, Gonzalez served what appeared to be an ace: that is, his opponent was unable to return the serve. The line judge, whose job it is to make these calls, said that the serve was out, meaning that the point would go to Schroeder. The crowd could not believe the call. Neither could Gonzalez. Even Schroeder himself protested, signaling that the ball was clearly in bounds. But the line judge refused to change his call, and the umpire refused to overrule him. Play resumed. When Gonzalez made his next serve, Schroeder let the ball go by, making no effort to return it, and Gonzalez won the point he should have had on the previous serve. In the end, Gonzalez also won set and match — by two points. But Schroeder preserved his integrity. Indeed, he followed all three rules for integral living: he decided what was right, did it at cost to himself, and was quite open about what he was doing. Stephen Carter
Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates: At the first gate, ask yourself, “Is it true?” At the second gate ask, “Is it necessary?” At the third gate ask, “Is it kind?” Rumi
To live with integrity in an unjust society we must work for justice. To walk with integrity through a landscape strewn with beer cans, we must stop and pick them up. Starhawk
The Way It Is
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
By William Stafford, from The Way It Is, 1998
We work so hard to get somewhere, to realize a dream, to arrive at some destination, that we often forget that though some satisfaction may be waiting at the end of our endurance and effort, there is great and irreplaceable aliveness in the steps along the way.
We are always approaching integrity, never arriving at it. In working toward a thoroughness of character, we dream of arriving at a state of completeness where who we are and what we do are forever one. We dream of living the rest of our lives this wholly.
But recently I realized — when things weren’t going smoothly, when I was breaking small things around me — that the beauty of life resides in the relationships we’re drawn into as we try to bridge the gap that is always there between who we are and what we do.
While we need to keep bringing who we are and what we do together, while we aspire morally to be in more and more alignment with life, making everything we encounter more whole, it’s living in between that holds the richness of being alive. If blessed, we’ll never arrive at complete integrity or life will be done with us. Rather, it’s the thoroughness of holding nothing back as we try to be integral that brings us alive.
When I can accept that I’m always en route to integrity, my humility is awakened and my compassion deepens. This changes how I listen, how I give, how I receive. I was surprised to discover that the engagement of integrity over the achievement of integrity allows us to inhabit life through our vulnerability, rather than trying to perfect life through our imagined purity. Mark Nepo
How shall integrity face oppression? That is one of the most fundamental challenges of today because we live in an age of mendacity. It’s an age in which lies are ubiquitous. [And so] integrity has to do with what is the quality of your courage and your willingness to bear witness radically against the grain even if you have to sacrifice something… Cornel West
The immanent conception of justice is not based on rules or authority, but upon integrity, integrity of self and integrity of relationships. …People of integrity are those whose selves integrate both the positive and the negative, the dark and the light, the painful emotions as well as the pleasurable ones. They are people who are willing to look at their own shadows instead of flinching from them. They honour the shadow because they know that its very distortions reveal the shape of the ground underneath. Integrity means consistency; we act in accordance with our thoughts, our images, our speeches; we keep our commitments…. To have integrity, we must recognize that our choices bring about consequences, and that we cannot escape responsibility for the consequences…because they are inherent in the choices themselves. Starhawk
It seems to me that the artist’s struggle for his integrity must be considered as a kind of metaphor for the struggle, which is universal and daily, of all human beings on the face of this globe to get to become human beings. It is not your fault, it is not my fault, that I write. And I never would come before you in the position of a complainant for doing something that I must do… The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us… [As an artist,] the crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not. You’re bearing witness helplessly to something which everybody knows and nobody wants to face… James Baldwin
Choosing with integrity means finding ways to speak up that honor your reality, the reality of others, and your willingness to meet in the center of that large field. It’s hard sometimes. Terry Tempest Williams
Longer Texts
This piece comes from the blog of activist and writer Adrienne Marie Brown.
In UU World, a story on Cornel West`s Ware Lecture at the UUA General Assembly in 2015.
An article from Spirituality and Health offering questions to help you think about integrity.
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