The Spirituality of Imperfection

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

Jean-Paul Sartre termed such individuals absolutists, offering this scathing description: Absolutists want to exist all at once and right away. There is an original fear of oneself and a fear of truth. And what frightens them is not the content of truth which they do not even suspect, but the very form of the true—that thing of indefinite approxima

On the other hand, despite that apparent alienation from past and future, active alcoholics “live only in the past or in the future … they have no present tense.” Wanting to have it all “now,” the addicted person has no “now.”

Only when we face self-as-feared, do we find self-as-is.

In bringing us face to face with our own imperfection, stories confront us with our self in a way that helps us to accept the ambiguity and mixed-up-ed-ness of our human be-ing. Storytelling helps us to create a “whole,” a whole that does not deny that it is made up of incongruous, fractured pieces, but whole nonetheless. “Healing” through storytel

Alcoholics are not in A.A. to escape themselves, but to accept themselves as they are—flawed, imperfect, wounded, alcoholic—and through that acceptance to be healed, to be made whole, by being integrated into the reality of their own reality. Healing means not the elimination but the embracing of imperfection, for only thus is it possible to find w

“Spirituality is like that mortar in the fireplace,” he offered pensively, finally breaking the long silence. “Just as the mortar makes the chimney a chimney, allowing it to stand up straight and tall, beautiful in its wholeness, ‘the spiritual’ is what makes us wholly human. It holds our experiences together, shapes them into a whole, gives them m

Spirituality thus resides at our center, flowing into all that we are and do; it is at the very core of our be-ing. We cannot “borrow” it, putting it on for an hour or a day, using it like a cloak to cover the hardness in our heart or the angry or jealous thoughts in our mind. Spirituality is not a pet project that we can take up for a month or two

Spirituality is a reality that must touch all of one’s life or it touches none of one’s life.