Earthly Spirituality, Realism & Paradox – The Spirituality of Imperfection By Ernst Kurtz

This post is extracted from Chapter 1 ‘The Fragrance Of A Rose’ of the book ‘The Spirituality Of Imperfection’

“Those who know do not say; those who say do not know.”

When the Master entered, they asked him what the words meant. Said the Master, “Which of you knows the fragrance of a rose?” All of them knew. Then he said, “Put it into words.” All of them were silent.

What is spirituality? To have the 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 color nor texture; they cannot be gauged in inches or ounces 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 odor, they have no taste, they occupy no space.

And yet they exist; they are. Love exists, evil exists, beauty exists, spirituality exists. These are the realities that have always been recognized 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.

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.” In terms that would appeal to the boundary-stretching practices of the desert monks, the English essayist Gilbert Keith Chesterton described paradox as “Truth standing on her head to attract attention.”

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.

Said the Jewish leader Lizensker Rebbe: “Only God is perfect. Man’s actions must be basically defective in part. If one believes his good deed or holy study to be thoroughly pure and perfect, this is a sure sign that they are thoroughly bad.”

The lessons of the ancients are wise and continue to hold meaning for modern men and women. The search for spirituality is, first of all, a search for reality, for honesty, for true speaking and true thinking. At least from the time of the Delphic oracle’s first admonition, Know thyself, the arch-foe of spirituality has been recognized 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.

Rabbi Elimelech Lizensker said: “I am sure of my share in the World-to-Come. When I stand to plead before the bar of the Heavenly Tribunal, I will be asked: ‘Did you learn, as in duty bound?’ To this I will make answer: ‘No.’ Again, I will be asked: ‘Did you pray, as in duty bound?’ Again my answer will be: ‘No.’ The third question will be: ‘Did you do good, as in duty bound?’ And for the third time, I will answer: ‘No.’ Then judgment will be awarded in my favor, for I will have spoken the truth.”

To speak the truth: spiritual writers such as Thomas a Kempis and August Hermann Francke found in that phrase one definition of prayer, for from flawedness flows the need for help. A spirituality of imperfection suggests that the first prayer is a scream, a cry for help. “O God, come to my assistance: O Lord, make haste to help me,” reads Psalm 70, sung for over a millennium and a half at the beginning of each monastic hour.

Our darkness—our sins, our doubts—is a thirst … for “God,” for “the spiritual,” for whatever might alleviate this painful side of the human condition, for whatever might somehow fill the empty hole in our human be-ing. We seek help for what we cannot face or accomplish alone; in seeking help, we accept and admit our own powerlessness. And in that acceptance and admission, in the acknowledgment that we are not in control, spirituality is born. Spirituality begins in suffering because to suffer means first “to undergo,” and the essence of suffering lies in the reality that it is undergone, that it has to do with not being in control, that it must be endured. We may endure patiently or impatiently, but because we are human beings, because we are not at each and every moment in ultimate control, we will suffer.

The spirituality of imperfection is always mindful of the inevitability of suffering. As Simon Tugwell noted in his analysis of the Ways of Imperfection: “The first work of grace is simply to enable us to begin to understand what is wrong.” And one of the first things that is “wrong” is that we are not “in control”; we do not have all the answers. The reality of that lack of control, the sheer truth of our powerlessness in the face of it, makes available the fundamental spiritual insight that insists on the necessity of kenosis—the ancient Greek term that signifies an “emptying out.” Expressed in modern vocabulary, kenosis points to the need for “surrender,” or, in the language of Alcoholics Anonymous, “hitting bottom.” In the process of kenosis—emptying out, surrendering, hitting bottom—comes the realization that by ourselves, we are lost.

The spirituality of imperfection begins in the recognition and rejection of human claims to be “God.” The Hasidic tradition offers numerous stories intended to remind human beings that we are not in ultimate control, that we are not all-powerful, that we are not God. From the ancient Hebrew shema (“ Hear, O Israel, I am the Lord, your God”) to A.A.’ s “First of all we had to quit playing God” is not a large leap.

When Rabbi Bunam was asked why the first of the Ten Commandments speaks of God bringing us out of the land of Egypt, rather than of God creating heaven and earth, he expounded: “Heaven and earth! Then man might have said: ‘Heaven—that is too much for me.’ So God said to man: ‘I am the one who fished you out of the mud. Now you come here and listen to me.’”

What is spirituality?” Our pursuit of the question has unearthed more questions than answers, more things that spirituality is not than features of what it is. Timeless wisdom suggests that spiritual is elusive, ineffable, unbounded; it does not involve demands for perfection; it is rooted in paradox; it is a cry for help.

Traditions as diverse as the Buddhist, the Christian, and the Muslim agree that we speak most truly of the divine and therefore of “the spiritual” by recognizing what it is not. Somehow this process of the via negativa, the “negative way,” in which we wander down divergent paths exploring what something is not, brings us closest to the place where we want to go. For there is a kind of spirituality in the recognition that in our effort to understand spirituality, we have encountered something bigger than our efforts to capture it. We discover a helplessness before

the very word, the powerlessness that is the necessary beginning of spirituality itself.

T.S. Eliot described this spiritual path of the via negativa in “East Coker”:

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.

One word of necessary caution before setting out on this particular pathway. The via negativa or “route of negation,” in which we come to know something by observing what it is not, has its own pitfalls—the dangers of comparison and judgment.

The spirituality of imperfection suggests that there is something wrong—with me, with you, with the world—but there is nothing wrong with that, because that is the nature of our reality. That is the way it is, just because we are human, and therefore limited, flawed, and imperfect. The name of the game, according to this vision, is I’m Not All-Right, and You’re Not All-Right, But That’s Okay—THAT’S All-Right

The ancient tradition that we are exploring, the tradition that finds its modern fulfillment in Alcoholics Anonymous, suggests that spirituality involves first seeing ourselves truly, as the paradoxical and imperfect beings that we are, and then discovering that it is only within our very imperfection that we can find the peace and serenity that is available to us. This is not an ideology claiming to have discovered immutable truths, but a vision celebrating experience and enabling choice; it is not a therapy interested in explanations and techniques, but a way of life; it is not exclusive, dogmatic, and authoritative, but open-minded, questioning, and capable of laughing at itself. The spirituality of imperfection is above all a realistic spirituality: It begins with acknowledgment and acceptance of the dark side, the down side, of human experience. Rather than seeking ways to explain away or ignore suffering and pain by focusing on sweetness and light, the spirituality of imperfection understands that tragedy and despair are inherent in the experience of essentially imperfect beings.

“Man is the creature who wants to be God,”

Jean-Paul Sartre observed. The spirituality of imperfection wrestles directly with that quest, assuring that—although “first of all, we have to quit playing God”—whoever or whatever “God” is, He, She, or It does not scorn our quest or despise us for our defects and imperfections. Imperfection is rather the crack in the armor, the “wound” that lets “God” in. As Meister Eckhart wrote almost seven hundred years ago: “To get at the core of God at his greatest, one must first get into the core of himself at his least.”

In a modern expression of Eckhart’s insight, Jungian analyst Marion Woodman identifies addiction as one of the “wounds” that lets “God” in:

Addiction keeps a person in touch with the god.… At the very point of the vulnerability is where the surrender takes place—that is where the god enters. The god comes through the wound.

“God comes through the wound”: Our very imperfections—what religion labels our “sins,” what therapy calls our “sickness,” what philosophy terms our “errors”—are precisely what bring us closer to the reality that no matter how hard we try to deny it, we are not the ones in control here. And this realization, inevitably and joyously, brings us closer to “God”: One of the disconcerting—and delightful—teachings of the master was: “God is closer to sinners than to saints.” This is how he explained it:

“God in heaven holds each person by a string. When you sin, you cut the string. Then God ties it up again, making a knot—and thereby bringing you a little closer to him. Again and again your sins cut the string—and with each further knot God keeps drawing you closer and closer.”