Holiness
and the Johari Window
by Kristoffer Paulsson
Have you ever come across Joseph Luft and
Harrison Ingham’s psychological model – the Johari Window? It
is basically a 2x2 window where the first quadrat represents
what you and everyone else knows about you (called the Open
Area). The second quadrat represents
what you don’t know about yourself but what your friends know
about you (Blind Area), the third quadrat represents what you
know about yourself but what others don’t know about you
(Hidden Area) and the fourth quadrat represents what neither
you nor your friends knows about you (Unknown Area).
This method simply makes you find out who you are in
the eyes of your surroundings through collecting data from
them.
As you may
have understood, this window has been used uncountable times
to improve the teamwork in a group where the main goal is to
increase the open area as much as possible and discover things
about others and yourself. However, this article is going to
focus on how we can discover things about our spiritual lives,
through this window.
Before we
get any further and take a closer look at each square, let’s
start with the definition of holiness as “true love that is
nurtured and expressed with relationship with others” (The
Salvation Army handbook of Doctrine, 2010:197), a journey and
a discovery. Let us begin.
Open Area
When
you are thinking about yourself and your life with people and
God, how big is this area? We could look at the open area from
two perspectives - we could see it as a square that we want to
increase at the expense of the blind area and therefore
understand more about ourselves and our spiritual lives. Or we
can see it as an opportunity to show people what we have
inside the hidden area and express our spiritual life. So
there are only pros by making this area bigger.
As Christians who want
to live a holy life, it affects every aspect of our being,
including our relationship with God and other people, our
self-image, our attitude to the created order and our being in
society. We not only want to talk about God but we also want
to show it and when we put our lives with God into action we
will, automatically, make this area bigger in our lives. And
when this square is increased, the blind area and/or the
hidden area are decreased. This does not necessarily mean that
we have to show people everything about our personal life with
God (because we are all different in our personalities) but it
means that we have to show that our relationship with God is
genuine and that our love for others is sincere.
And I would say that sharing our lives with others is a
huge part of living a holy life but it is totally up to you
how to show it and how to make this open area bigger.
We may
think that everything will be solved by making the open area
bigger but I think it’s important to say that actions in
themselves will never save our non-Christian friends but they
can point to the only one who can save them – Jesus!
Blind Area
As
I said in the introduction – Holiness is true love that is
nurtured and expressed in relationship withothers. This is the
part of the window that is “owned” by others and by saying
that “holiness is love nurtured […] in relationship with
others” makes us dependent on others or the holiness will
slowly die because it won’t get nurtured. By saying that, we
can also state that saying that you are holy or living a holy
life is useless in itself. In the end we should endeavour to
decrease this area because the only people who can tell if you
are showing a loving, holy life (except God) are our
“neighbours”. Feedback from the people in our surrounding is
therefore one of the strongest and most effective tools to
help us grow both personally and spiritually. That feedback
can confirm our love and show us what to work with.
We need
great humility and a lot of bravery to ask for that kind of
feedback and work with our weaknesses. To do that is a huge
holiness challenge!
Hidden Area
I find
this area the most difficult area to work with. How much do we
have to give away? We do need to have our own privacy with God
(Matthew 6:6) and grow as a Christians BUT we can’t make our
relationship with God into something private. A wise person
once said: “Christianity is a personal religion but it can
never become a private religion”. What she meant wasthat no
one can take away your personal experience of God but we can’t
keep quiet about Jesus. A private religion is a selfish
religion and I would say that selfishness is the biggest enemy
to holiness.
As we are striving to be more like
Jesus, we have to get rid of our self-interest and realise
that we can’t win anything by doing so.
Personally
I think that we have to make our hidden area more open and
share it, so that you can go through struggle, pain, doubt or
other hard stuff together with others. A good friend of mine
once said: “It’s not about showing people your whole being but
to choose what you’re showing people so that all four squares
work in harmony and that people can look at one of the squares
and get a relatively full picture of your relationship with
God”.
When you
looked at this square for the first time you probably thought
that this was the smallest area of your life. But I would say
that this is the biggest and most exciting area because this
is what only God knows about you. This square is infinite.
To
explore this area is to realise who we are and what we do in
the eyes of the Lord. But how do we decrease this square and
explore this area of our life? We could discover it on our own
by searching God through reading the Bible, praying and asking
for his guidance - but that kind of information would just go
from the unknown area into the hidden area. We could make sure
that people pray for us but if they would discover something
about my unknown area, it would end up in a bigger blind area.
The picture above says that a shared discovery is the most
effective way to find out what is behind the unknown area and
at the same time discover more about ourselves. To think that
your neighbourhood, your friends, your church, you and the
Holy Spirit can discover the unknown area of holiness together
is a fascinating and challenging thought.
Your window is unique and our journeys are different
but we can always discover things together.
Yes, I
said that this area is infinite and therefore it’s impossible
to find out all the things God knows about us. But that’s the
challenge of holiness.
The top
picture is downloaded from:
http://www.mindtools.com/CommSkll/JohariWindow.htm
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