The Spirituality of Imperfection

“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

We do not create miracles, we witness them. In witnessing them, we must acknowledge that they exist. In acknowledging that they exist, we must admit that we do not know “why” or “how.” Somehow above and beyond human reason, miracle, like mystery, is inexplicable, unsolvable, incomprehensible.

The typical newcomer to Alcoholics Anonymous hears in “the spiritual” another name for religion—a program for perfection, a fellowship of those who claim to be, or at least hope to become, “holy.” Such a way of life holds little appeal for a down-and-out drunk, even if he is at the moment a nondrinking drunk. Who wants to sit in a church, even if o

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

The difference between magic and miracle reflects the difference between willfulness and willingness. Willfulness involves the demand for change—usually some change in realities outside the self, but also, at times, the demand for change in oneself. Willingness involves the acceptance that one is not in absolute control, thus opening up the possibi

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

The problem with “willing what cannot be willed” is that we step into a territory that is not ours—we stake the claim to be God. This attempt to wrest control from the uncontrollable has become the keynote characteristic of our “Age of Addiction.” We try to command those aspects of our lives that cannot be commanded, we try to coerce what cannot be

Addiction represents the ultimate effort to control, the definitive demand for magic … and the final failure of spirituality. Turning to the “magic” of chemicals signifies the desperate (and doomed) attempt to fill a spiritual void with a material reality—to make “magic” a substitute for miracle. Addiction has been described as the belief that when

Spiritual teachers (who are never “experts”) do three things: First and foremost, they listen. Second, they ask questions. Third, they tell stories. Each practice reflects the acceptance of not having all the answers, and each teaches the essential truth of spirituality’s open-endedness.