“It’s better to be whole than good.”

“It’s better to be whole than good.”

That’s what Dwight L. Wilson, one of my mentors, recently shared in an interview about the books he has written. I highly recommend the entire interview. It’s filled with wisdom. He said this is a phrase he first heard many years ago from Elizabeth Watson, one of his own mentors.

That sentence really struck me.

We all carry places of woundedness. We have received harm from relationships and systems. And we have also wounded others. We have harmed our relationships and created pain for communities and even the environment through our participation in systems.

We can all heal. Notice that this word is both passive and active. Healing is something we can receive and something we can offer. It is an internal process and a relational one.

If we spend all our time trying to be good, we will keep our wounded histories in the shadows. We will do all we can to avoid them or suppress them. When we live this way, we miss opportunities to heal ourselves and to be reconciled with people, communities, and land. We keep places of pain in our rearview mirror, yet they remain active in ways that are not always conscious.

As Richard Rohr says,

“We either transform our pain or we transmit it.”

As Margaret Foley says,

“We reenact what we have not resolved.”

So yes, as Dwight L. Wilson and Elizabeth Watson remind us,

“It is better to be whole than to be good.”

—Renee Roederer