The Good Stuff And The Bad
Henry here. How do you stay out of trouble? “Don’t drink, smoke or chew or associate with those who do,” was one light-hearted recipe from my younger years. In my travels through life, I have found this advice to be both poorly thought out and deeply unhelpful. But, then again, I came from a very small community. If nothing else, my time as the chaplain in a mental hospital convinced me that it really does take all kinds to move the world.
This humorous advice meant to define the good life for a teen came back to me in church recently. The young people leading the singing encouraged us to sing a hymn which appears meaningless to me. The first line reads; “My deepest desire is to be holy.”
What is this dressed-up encouragement of the phrase from my youth? I cannot imagine what it means to be holy. Does this mean respecting the Ten Commandments or something else?
Perhaps we just take the community standard, but there are so many community standards. That doesn’t seem like a good plan. The standards from the tiny community I grew up in didn’t help much when I moved to New York City in the 80’s. I suspect that it means that we repress all our natural desires and try to “be good.” So I would be a rigid, buttoned down, repressed, quite miserable person. This is also not a terrific plan. But although repression may make me look good, it won’t make me be good, or holy. So repression doesn’t work very well either.
Or is this hymn aimed, as I think it is, at establishing a slick, polished, outwardly respectable mask or persona. We all need some kind of public mask and if we appear to be morally good then we seem to get on better in life, unless there is no authentic person behind the mask.
Rather than attempt to be artificially holy, we need to deal with what Dr. Carl Jung called our shadow. That is the side of us that we have been trained from childhood to regard as bad or even evil. Some of our best qualities are hidden away from public and even from our own view.
Our entire person, everything that we are, the “good” stuff and the “bad” stuff, cannot be captured in a one-liner piece of advice or a dinky hymn. By refusing to see all of ourselves, but burying the stuff we think the community doesn’t want to see, we’re loosing part of ourselves, maybe quite a good part. We are usually better that we think we are and need to act on that potential.