“A life of wholeness does not depend on what we experience. Wholeness depends on how we experience our lives.” (Desmond Tutu).
The insights gleaned from the discussion on the flavours and factors of wholeness provides us an opportunity to summarise them as ‘Qualities of a holistic person’. Wholeness can neither be experienced in a vacuum nor in the clouds. It is experienced in and through our day-to-day life experiences. We would do well to remember that wholeness is a sum total of all that we are and all that we experience. It is possible to detect in holistic persons a harmonious integration of all that we discussed in the past four months.
Holistic people would continually stretch their ability to embrace the whole world and all it contains. In every experience they encounter, they would be looking for the broader picture, the underlying feelings, different perspectives present in that situation and the nature of the persons involved in that experience. Say for example, there is a misunderstanding between two people in a community, it may look obvious that one person is right and the other is wrong. If the leaders of communities are not holistic in their mindset, they would take the easy way out and take sides with the one who seems to be in the right. The holistic leaders, on the other hand, sense the bigger story, the underlying feelings between the two persons and any other agenda that might be involved in their misunderstanding. With this insightful observation, they would be able to offer a well-measured solution. In order to arrive at this balanced and equanimous mindset, holistic persons need to have a set of qualities and characteristics that will define their wholeness.
Fr Dr Joseph Jeyaraj SDB
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