Awakening to Wholeness is a series of prompts, reflections, and teachings about how holding the tension of opposites can help us to heal division and experience wholeness. If you feel moved to share your own reflections, we invite you to email us with the subject line “Wisdom of Opposites” or tag us on social media with #EHoPWisdomOfOpposites.
This is a guest post by EHoP community member Dianne Schlichting, in response to “Fullness, the Flux of the Whole.”
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Last weekend my husband and I attended the wedding of our grandniece. At the wedding was a two-week old baby, an eighty-nine year old great-grandmother, and over hundreds of people with ages between these two growing edges. I recalled how quickly and how daily one does experience the wholeness of life as well as its flux in each of our lifetimes.
While my husband and I will celebrate fifty years of marriage this year, witnessing the exchange of wedding vows by a young couple facing an unknown future together reminded me of myself at that age. I, too, was fully alive, filled with joyful anticipation of the perfect life that would unfold before me and my husband as we set up our home and family together. It did not take long for the flux to find its way into our lives. It might have been something as simple as discovering that two people do not squeeze the toothpaste from the same end of the tube, or that one person prefers to discuss “important matters” at 5:00 am while the other wants serious discussion nearer the 11:00 pm hour! Whatever the situation, we can all remember the first time our “eyes and hearts” realized that life did, indeed, harbor both a sense of wholeness and of flux.
The trick to fifty years of marriage as well as to the first year and all the years in-between, I think, is to see fullness and flux as complimentary to the wholeness we all seek, no matter our individual preferences. While what I have shared seems true in marriage, I suspect it is true in all lives, married or not: We are part of the whole of nature, and as Christine’s reflection noted—“all of creation is whole and in flux”!
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Dianne Schlichting
Dianne is a member of EHoP; she and her husband John value the opportunity to share contemplative prayer and outreach with others who make the House of Prayer their spiritual home. Dianne is a wife, mother, and grandmother who loves spending time in nature, especially canoeing with John.
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