Word of Wisdom: Integrity

“Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.” Erik Erikson

In engineering, structural integrity is the ability of an object to hold together under a load without fracture, deformation, or fatigue. When that integrity is lost, things become deformed quickly, sometimes resulting in a leaning tourist trap in Italy, a domed stadium full of snow—or much deadlier destruction.

I pondered this recently while considering headlines about collapses and other calamities involving solid structures. In those incidents, what was once a seemingly stable whole became a dangerous, divided mess when the stressors became too much.

We humans are similarly vulnerable.

In our context, “to have integrity” is often used to describe someone who has a good, moral character in the view of others. It’s used to describe someone with the character trait of choosing what is “right” over what is “wrong”—one who is not prone to or guilty of certain “moral failings”.

But upon closer inspection, we see that integrity is hinting at something else. Something deeper, something more “structural” than “behavioral” in nature.

Integrity, it turns out, is the state we exist in when we are integrated—when all areas of our life, public and private, internal and external, are whole. When we are undivided, inside and out.

We see this in the root of the word. Our English word comes to us from the Latin integritatem meaning "wholeness or completeness". Its origin is in integer, meaning “whole”, which transferred directly into our language. An integer is a whole number—a number that is not a fraction. In other words, one that is not divided.

Integrity is less a clean record than it is a complete story. To “have integrity” is more about becoming integrated than possessing moral high ground.

And what “dis-integrates” us? At a high level, it is simply the principle of death working in and around us. To be mortal (from Latin, meaning “subject to death”) is to experience continual breakdown, decay, disintegration, and the fretful and fearful striving and grasping for anything that seems to stem the loss, be it acclaim, accomplishment, or an avaricious pursuit of medicating pleasure.

On a daily basis, we are dis-integrated by the things that divide our heart and mind. Things that make us pursue one thing here, the opposite thing there. To be one person-ality in this place, another person-ality over there. To say one thing now, to say and do another thing later. We are dis-integrated and divided by the deeds and desires that are secret (from the Latin secernere, “to divide”).

Death divides and isolates; it disintegrates the mind and heart.

But the Creator of life re-integrates things, persons, into one, as he is one. He makes whole the heart that’s been broken; he integrates the lost into community. And then he is a shield around the integrity that is so fragile.

So that we can be whole and wholly alive as a son of this Redeemer.

In the freedom of this sonship, we begin to experience being one who is whole, undivided; who is open, truthful, unafraid. Such a life accepts the coexistence of healing and health. It rejoices in each day of the journey and is not anxious about the days to come. It is the antithesis of a lukewarm life and an attestation of the presence of the Spirit of Life.

It’s a life built on the rock. You can’t find much greater structural integrity than that.

“He grants a treasure of common sense to the honest.
He is a shield to those who walk with integrity.”
Proverbs 2:7