The Spirituality of Imperfection

A.A.’s earliest members “tried on” the ideas and insights of these brilliant, often eccentric thinkers, and whatever matched their own experience became part of the patchwork.

The problem with organized religions, Bill Wilson once complained, “is their claim how confoundedly right all of them are.”7 The spirituality of imperfection that forms the heart and soul of Alcoholics Anonymous makes no claim to be “right.” It is a spirituality more interested in questions than in answers, more a journey toward humility than a str

What recovering alcoholics “have” is not a stake on ultimate wisdom or a lock on virtue, but a way of life that accepts imperfection as imperfection, permitting such spiritual qualities as “serenity” and “the joy of living” to coexist with such earthly realities as “defects” and “shortcomings.”

To be human is to be “a history-making creature who can neither repeat the past nor leave it behind,” noted W. H. Auden in a brief biographical sketch of D. H. Lawrence. In Kierkegaard’s most famous words: “Life must be lived forwards, but it can be understood only backwards.” And as Mark Twain put it in his inimitable style, “Although the past may