Fully Integrated Maturity

Most people grow up in their respective cultures and never ever question its role in shaping their lives. They never think about its validity on a larger, global, transcultural scale; they cannot conceive of its impacts on others, either inside and outside their culture. In other words, culture is simultaneously defining and limiting. If you begin to question the validity of your culture's values, mores, norms, and practises you will find that people who have never lived or participated or been members of other cultures will warn you that this is not possible, because in reality for them it is not. Indelibly stamped by seeing the world and participating in it in one way their mantra is often expressed, I know the difference between right and wrong. But the direct experience of God that winds you up in contemplative prayer and contemplative living transcends culture and is thus integrative on a whole different level. Reconnected with others, the earth, and yourself in the simplest of ways, culture no longer plays a role and you are no longer limited by the culture in which you have grown up. Doing so means that you have experienced the qualities of every type of life: ordinary/daily existence, intellectual effort, artistic creation, human love, and religious life. Yet you find that each of these are limiting forms of engagement. Defending or promoting these indicates how little of yourself you really own. In fact you do not have to set up these partial views of life at all. It is enough to be able to name them and to set up a complimentary dialectic among them in order come to a deeper understanding of what each entails and how they interact with one another. You do this in order to be able to transcend them. In the end it would be nice to believe that by you coming to terms with culture in this manner that you might perhaps bring perspective and liberty and spontaneity into the lives of others as well. But generally and usually not. Living is way gives you the resources and insights necessary for you to act as a peacemaker. But such a fully integrated person is rarely able to bring about peace - genuine, lasting, sustaining peace. The key to final integration is simply to be at peace with your own level of maturity.