Today's reflection is by Cameron Partridge
Episcopal Chaplain at Boston University
One Sunday afternoon in October of my freshman year of
college, my roommate picked up a message from my mom. Call back immediately: there was a fire. An inferno was raging in the Oakland hills,
racing down toward my mom’s neighborhood.
Scores of homes were burning to the ground, and smoke was trapping
people in the hairpin canyon roads. My
mom was preparing to evacuate, her dissertation and the family cat stuffed into
the back of the car. Was there anything
I wanted her to bring? Yes, I said: my steamer trunk. It had been my grandmother’s and held my
journals, autographed baseballs, old coins, childhood mementos. Sorry, too big, she replied. From my three thousand mile remove, deep in
the drama of becoming an adult, my childhood was basically on fire.
Amazingly, my mom’s neighborhood survived, protected by fire
fighters who somehow held the line in the hills above. But even if it had joined the blocks and
blocks of smoldering ruins, stone steps descending to nowhere and chimneys
rising from rubble, the question of what to take and what to leave behind – of
how to walk with integrity – would have persisted.
Integrity is not simply honesty. It is integrative, incorporative. Integrity springs forward from the
foundations of who and where we have been, into futures as surprising as they
are authentic.
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