I first became familiar with the word integrity when I turned twelve and entered the Young Women’s program at church. However, even after a number of years spent reciting the theme each week in opening exercises, I didn’t really understand what integrity meant. The way it was talked about in lessons was simply as a synonym for honesty. To live with integrity meant to tell the truth and to not pretend to be something you were not. Since that time I’ve begun to ponder a more expanded, subtler definition of the word. In psychology, integration is the process by which a person comes to individuate themselves and to fully recognize and accept all parts of their personality. In the field of engineering, structural integrity is the area that covers the safe construction of buildings to ensure that all their parts have been made soundly. When I was in Spain, whole-wheat bread was known as pan integral, and in English integral means something that is vital or necessary.

 During the last few weeks I have been pondering the idea of integrity because a good friend of mine wrote a blog post, together with his wife, about aspects of his life that many people in his situation have chosen to keep private. His post went viral and ended up all over the internet. In writing about the experience, he has talked about how he felt strongly prompted to integrate the parts of his life into one whole. It had become impossible to talk about many issues without fully acknowledging everything that he is. Our current level of technology has, in some ways, made this kind of integrity much easier. I can share some of my deepest secrets to mass numbers of people on Facebook, this blog, or my personal blog. And after I’ve shared them, my friends can all share them with their friends until the entire world knows. There are some drawbacks to this new technology; these days you’re much more likely to hear people complain about oversharing and “TMI” than about not having enough information about a situation. And yet, for me I’ve mostly found only good comes from sharing my true self more fully with those around me.

Four years ago, my former husband and I moved to Northern California. Neither of us had any idea that that year’s election would focus so heavily on Proposition 8, which sought to amend the state constitution to restrict marriage to only opposite-sex couples. My first Sunday at church I was asked if I would be interested in doing some phone contacts in support of the proposition. I found some way to politely demur and change the subject; there wasn’t really a good way to bring up the fact that I was married to a gay man who was an inactive Mormon. I never did tell anyone in my ward about that facet of my life; I wonder if I should have and what might have happened (for the record, my ward actually did a good job keeping politics out of Sunday meetings and the topic rarely came up during that fall). On campus, I also never told my literature professor, who wore a “No on H8” shirt most days, that all my knowledge of literary theory came from classes at BYU. I don’t know what his reaction might have been either. Sometimes living with integrity and being true to all the parts of our lives just feels impossible.

However, impossible though it may be, I’ve found that I am happiest when I can recognize, accept, and share all facets of my life. Some ways of doing this are better than others; describing the impact of living in a mixed-orientation marriage with a gay spouse is probably best done in a thoughtful blog post rather than a comment in Relief Society. I find it interesting that we often suppress parts of ourselves in an effort to outwardly appear ‘perfect’, when another way to look at the idea of perfection is completeness or wholeness, not freedom from blemish. How can we become perfected if we don’t first look at and acknowledge our whole selves? When I can offer the good, the bad, the messy, the ugly, and the beautiful to God and to other people, I feel I am truly honoring myself and others. The energy I once put into hiding things I didn’t like about my life can be put into changing or accepting or forgiving those things. Even more importantly, the energy I put into worrying about how I appear to others can be spent on concern for them and their well-being. I don’t believe we can become perfect, or whole, or integrated as a Zion people until we are more perfected, or whole, ourselves.

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