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Spirituality of Imperfection 1

Fr. Douglas Robertson

 

Introduction:

 

Spirituality takes many forms, and all spiritualties do not look on failure and imperfection in the same way. But through the centuries a recurring spiritual theme has emerged, one that is more sensitive to earthly concerns than to heavenly hopes. This spirituality - the spirituality of imperfection - is thousands of years old. And yet it is timeless, eternal, and ongoing, for it is concerned with what in the human being is irrevocable and immutable: the essential imperfection, the basic and inherent flaws of being human.

 

The spirituality of imperfection speaks to those who seek meaning in the absurd, peace within the chaos, light within the darkness, joy within the suffering - without denying the reality and even the necessity of absurdity, chaos, darkness, and suffering. This is not a spirituality for the saints or the gods, but for people who suffer from what the philosopher-psychologist William James called “torn-to-pieces-hood” (his trenchant translation of the German Zerrisssenhiet). We have all known that experience, for to be human is to feel at times divided, fractured, pulled in a dozen directions … and to yearn for serenity, for some healing of our “torn-to-pieces-hood”.

 

The Spirituality of Imperfection relates the continuing story of a spirituality that speaks to both the inevitability of pain and the possibility of healing within the pain. The spirituality of imperfection took on new meaning with the dawn of Christianity and the seemingly endless, often inspired questions posed by the early Christians as they discovered the implications of their new way of life.

 

The spirituality of imperfection begins with the recognition that trying to be perfect is the most tragic human mistake. In direct contradiction of the serpent’s promise in Eden’s garden, Bill Wilson suggests, “First of all, we had to quit playing God”. According to the way of life that flows from this insight, it is only by ceasing to play God, by coming to terms with errors and shortcomings, and by accepting the inability to control every aspect of ones life that we can find the peace and serenity that alcohol, or other drugs, or sex, money, material possessions, power, or privilege promise, but never deliver.

 

We must find some spiritual basis for living, else we die. (Bill Wilson)

 

Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for those who have been there. (Ross V.)

 

What is spirituality? To have to answer is to have misunderstood the question. Truth, wisdom, goodness, beauty, the fragrance of a rose - all resemble spirituality in that they are intangible, ineffable realities. We may know them, but we can never grasp them with our hands or with our words. These entities have neither colour not texture; they cannot be gauged in centimetres or grams or degrees; they do not make a noise to be measured in decibels; they have no distinct feel as do silk, wood, or cement; they give no odour, they have no taste, they occupy no space.

 

And yet they exist; they are. Love exists, evil exists, beauty exists, and spirituality exists. These are realities that have always been recognised as defining human existence. We do not define them, they define us. When we attempt to “define” spirituality, we discover not its limits, but our own. Similarly, we cannot prove such realities - it is truer to say that they “prove” us, in the sense that it is against them that we measure our human be-ing: the act and the process by which we exist. Life is not what we “have”, or even what we do, connected as these may be: we are what and how and who we are, and be-ing is a real activity. Like “love”, spirituality is a way that we “be”.

 

This way of be-ing defies definition and delineation; we cannot tie it up, in any way package it or enclose it. Elusive in the sense that it cannot be “pinned down”, spirituality slips under and soars over efforts to capture it, to fence it in with words. Centuries of thought confirm that mere words can never induce the experience of spirituality.

 

“Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality,” wrote Joseph Conrad. But when words fail, where can we turn? In order to understand spirituality, in order to live a spiritual life, we must first be able to imagine (“image-in”) such a life, to form a mental picture (a “re-presentation”) of what it might look and feel like. But to do that, to see and feel spirituality, we need a deeper level of language to help us fathom our experience. And so, as people have done throughout the ages, we turn to metaphors, images, and stories.

 

Spirituality is a lot like health. We all have health; we may have good health or poor health, but it’s something we can’t avoid having. The same is true of spirituality: every human being is a spiritual being. The question is not whether we “have spirituality” but whether the spirituality we have is a negative one that leads to isolation and self-destruction or one that is more positive and life-giving.

 

Spirituality has to do with the reality of the here and now, with living humanly as one is, with the very real, very agonising, “passions of the soul”. Spirituality involves learning how to live with imperfection.

 

The search for spirituality brings down to earth, plants the feet firmly on the ground, and allows a vision of self as it is, as we are - imperfect and ambiguous. “Earthly spirituality” may sound like a contradiction, but it is instead paradox, and paradox is the nature of spirituality, for paradox is the nature of human beings. Paradox has been defined as “an apparent contradiction”: it combines two realities that don’t seem to belong together, thus calling into question our assumptions about “seeming”.

 

The core paradox that underlies spirituality is the haunting sense of incompleteness, of being somehow unfinished, that comes from the reality of living on this earth as part and yet also not-part of it. For to be human is to be incomplete, yet yearn for completion; it is to be uncertain, yet long for certainty; to be imperfect, yet long for perfection; to be broken, yet crave wholeness. All these yearnings remain necessarily unsatisfied, for perfection, completion, certainty, and wholeness are impossible precisely because we are imperfectly human - or better, because we are perfectly human, which is to say humanly imperfect.

 

This is the essential paradox of human life: We are always and inevitably incomplete, on the way, slipping and sliding, making mistakes. But the ancient voices insist that this is not failure; it is rather the necessary reflection of the paradox that we are. Paradox is the nature of be-ing human, of human being; paradox is the way it is meant to be, the way it should be, for it is the way we are made.

 

The search of spirituality is, first of all, a search for reality, for honesty, for true speaking and true thinking. The arch-foe of spirituality has been recognised to be “denial” - the self-deception that rejects self by attempting to repudiate the essential paradox that is our human be-ing. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre termed such self-deception mauvaise foi, the “bad faith” of “the attempt to flee what one cannot flee - to flee what one is.”

 

A spirituality of imperfection suggests that spirituality’s first step involves facing self squarely, seeing one’s self as one is: mixed-up, paradoxical, incomplete, and imperfect. Flawedness is the first fact about human beings. And paradoxically, in that imperfect foundation we find not despair but joy. For it is only within the reality of our imperfection that we can find the peace and serenity we crave.

 

I would like to conclude this introduction by quoting from the book “Alcoholics Anonymous” (fourth Edition 2001, p.25):

 

“There is a solution. Almost none of us liked the selfsearching, the leveling of our pride, the confession of shortcomings which the process requires for its successful consummation. But we saw that it really worked in others, and we had come to believe in the hopelessness and futility of life as we had been living it. When, therefore, we were approached by those in whom the problem had been solved, there was nothing left for us but to pick up the simple kit of spiritual tools laid at our feet. We have found much of heaven and we have been rocketed into a fourth dimension of existence, of which we had not even dreamed.

 

The great fact is just this, and nothing less: that we have had deep and effective spiritual experiences, which have revolutionized our whole attitude toward life, toward our fellows, and toward God’s universe. The central fact of our lives today is the absolute certainty that our Creator has entered into our hearts and lives in a way which is indeed miraculous. He has commenced to accomplish those things for us which we could never do by ourselves.”