Wait…don’t run away.  I know, some people have trouble with this strong word like pathology.  But it really isn’t my language — and it took language this strong to get my attention so that I could understand.  Maybe it will help you, too.

The image really belongs to the great teacher and writer, Parker J. Palmer.  He uses it in his book, Let Your Life Speak, although he never really offers us a definition for it.  Instead, the idea comes up in his discussion of his own search for his proper vocation:

Vocation, the way I was seeking it, becomes an act of will, a grim determination that one’s life will go this way or that whether it wants to or not. …if the self seeks not pathology but wholeness, as I believe it does, then the willful pursuit of vocation is an act of violence toward ourselves-violence in the name of a vision that, however lofty, is forced on the self from without rather than grown from within. True self, when violated, will always resist us, sometimes at great cost, holding our lives in check until we honor its truth. (Kindle Edition, LOC 72-78).

For all his talk of vocation, it was these words about pathology that changed the course of my journey.  We so often assume that the opposite of wholeness is brokenness.  But here, Parker offers us an alternate definition.

Please do not misunderstand, I have experienced that sense of brokenness in my life, too, but the idea of being broken brings with it a sense of passivity, at least for me.  And I have long held that I am a responsible player in my life’s journey.  No, not everything is under my control because I am not all mystery and omnipotent, however, I am always a participant in my living.  Always.  Even when something is happening to me that I would never choose.  I am still there, participating, even if just in my reaction.

So the idea of pathology as the shadow side of wholeness, with its implicit air of my participation and at the very least, my full presence, was a revelation and has become my mantra for living.  You see, as I read Palmer’s story of vocational wandering, I was uncomfortable.  I had to read it three, four times, because the story of his willfulness in his life seems a little too close to my own.

The details of my own pathology, my own opposite shadow of the wholeness that is my true nature, are not really important here.  What is important is the ways that I have learned to recognize it and to use it in my ongoing discernment of what comes next in my life.  Somehow, it is easier for me to love the me that expresses this way when I label it as a pathology than in it was to work with more Jungian-specific language like shadow-self, as made brought to popular culture in books like Romancing the Shadow, by Connie Zweig and Steven Wolf.  The idea of a pathology holds within it the hope of successful, prolonged maintenance, if not outright cure.

And so, when I suggest to you that embracing your pathology is one of our key subversive acts that lead to transformation, I am inviting you to reflect on your little self and all of the ways it acts up in your life.  Look for the message that life is sending you, and, maybe you too will find a pathology that drives you in the opposite direction of your soul’s call.  Find it, hug it, love on it some, and make it your friend.  But never, ever, let it have the keys to the car, ever again.