Imperfection: The Perfect Spirituality
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My youngest sister Beth was very talented physically. When she was seven she could roller skate across the basement, up the stairs, down the steep driveway and the steeper hill of the road with perfect balance and grace. But she was very shy. Her teachers at school would comment on her quietness at every parent-teacher conference, and my well-intentioned mother would encourage her to be more outgoing. Beth found this impossible to do without a great deal of anxiety and thought there was something very wrong with her.
When Beth was fifteen, she and our 12-year-old brother found a cure for shyness. They started playing a fun and dangerous game with some other neighborhood kids. They would each steal alcohol from their parents’ liquor cabinets, bring it to the playground and pass it around. My brother says that it only took one drink for him to physically crave another one. Beth was delighted to discover that her anxiety went away. One drink and she became outgoing. Two drinks and she was the life of the party. It felt great. It was worth any downsides to be able to overcome her imperfection.
It was even worth the time she passed out drinking at the playground and her frightened friends left her there to die. One of them had the presence of mind to call our home and (anonymously) report where she was lying unconscious so that we could rescue her.
When Beth was 28 she became ill with cancer. Beth never admitted she was an alcoholic, but she did have a fleeting notion while recovering from her first operation that drinking a six-pack of beer every day might be a mistake.
Her sisters had frequently encouraged her to do numerous things to help her stop drinking. So Beth went to one A.A. meeting. People stood up and told terrible stories of abuse, family dysfunction and tragedies that led them to drink. She sat there thinking, “I had a nice childhood, good parents, caring brothers and sisters, and now I have a loving husband and a beautiful baby. I can’t be an alcoholic.”
As soon as Beth was well enough to socialize, she returned to her six-pack-a-day habit. Drinking did not kill her four and half years later; the cancer did. But I grieved more than her death. I grieved Beth’s life. She had never found peace with herself just as she was. In my grief I learned an important lesson, however. I loved my sister unconditionally. I loved her with all her human limits and imperfections. I could not get her to live a life I thought would be healthier—I could not influence her, control her, help her or even guide her. I tried. She was never interested.
My brother’s story was very different. He figured out his life was not working very well while he was still in college. He went to A.A. and was able to take the first step, admitting that he could not control his addiction to alcohol. He had no idea that acting on the next ten steps over the years ahead would change him. But it did.
He said that Step 12, which sounds like an end to the process, is really the beginning: “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps…I now live these principles in all that I do.” He has been in recovery now for over 20 years. I asked him about this sermon and he said, “It’s all about understanding that we are not in control of our lives—how to live knowing that we can affect some things, but not others. It’s all in the serenity prayer.”
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change
the things I can,
And the wisdom
to know the difference.
Living with and loving this brother and sister, I have learned that they are no different than I am. I have never had an alcohol or drug addiction (though some would say that I do have an addiction to over-work and would kill for chocolate). But I too have had to learn that I am not perfect and not in control. Or as Bill Wilson, one of the founders of A.A. said, “It seems absolutely necessary for most of us to get over the idea that man is God.”
I think Bill Wilson had a particular image of God when he said that. His God was all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect and in control. I thought I didn’t believe in that God anymore, but I was still trying to live as if I were created in that God’s image. It was a set up.
Human beings have great imaginations. We can imagine ideals higher than we can live up to. That’s good, because it gives us something to reach for and room to grow. But it’s bad if we think we can live those stratospheric ideals and never fail or fall short. We can imagine having no boundaries, but we are all bounded with perfectly natural human limits. We might imagine being in complete control, but we soon discover that our world is so much bigger than the circumference of our power to control. A life committed to loving relationships and spiritual study has taught me to accept my full humanity, imperfections included.
In The Spirituality of Imperfection, Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham gather classic spiritual stories that offer alternate visions to “playing God.” Some are very ancient, suggesting that this is a primal human temptation. For instance, they tell about the mid-2nd century Desert Father Hermas who described a conflict between good and bad angels within each person. “We must take care,” he warned, “not to put our trust in the wrong angel.” Hermas offers no hope that we can entirely rid ourselves of the bad angel within us; he suggests not a plan for perfection but a program of survival—surviving our mistakes. We all sin; we all fall short, from time to time. The important question is whether we survive those errors.
The same experience that Hermas calls sin—the all too human feeling that we are inadequate, helpless, out of control, twisted, off-balance or uncertain—Buddha describes with the first of his Four Noble Truths: “Life is suffering.” The word translated as suffering is “dukkha, which means (literally) a bone or axle out of its socket, broken and torn apart from itself.”
Buddhist and Christian traditions both teach that to survive being out of joint, sinful or imperfect, we must first acknowledge our imperfections. For the addict, this means admitting that one cannot control one’s addiction or compulsion. For the one who wants to help the addict, it means admitting that one cannot control another person. The first spiritual task for all of us is to name the suffering.
I have worked with many people in spiritual direction: addicts, those who love addicts, adult children of addicts and just plain old everyday people who are trying to be perfect. They are often very disappointed that naming the imperfection does not magically make everything all right. The imperfections, the suffering, the sins, the sicknesses, the human limits are still there. The spiritual task remains after naming it: deciding how to survive it. That’s when you have to decide what you can change and what you cannot.
People start drinking or drugging for different reasons—it’s fun; their friends do it; it’s part of a family or cultural pattern. People become addicted for different reasons—the substance makes them feel better emotionally or physically; it allows them to compensate for an imperfection, hide from a fear, fill an emptiness, inflate a joy, scratch an itch. Addiction can even save lives. Some people have had such unbearably traumatic childhoods that the anesthesia of addiction helped them stay alive until they were grown-ups and had the strength to face the trauma—if the addiction didn’t kill them first, that is.
People love addicts for different reasons—they grew up with them or they work with them or they go to church with them. They might not even be aware of the addiction. They may feel guilty when they figure it out. If they are aware of their beloved’s addiction they might judge it, do an intervention, try to fix it or enable it because it meets their own needs.
Each of these people, within different situations and relationships, will have to make different decisions about how to survive the addictions. But they can all seek wisdom by praying or meditating, studying or reflecting, going to meetings or conversing with the experienced about what to change and what to accept.
This is sometimes very difficult. I will offer a worst-case scenario from a church I once served. An active member, beloved by all, was drunk most of the time. He was also charming, generous and a very talented carpenter. He spent hours fixing things at church. For a few years this had only positive results for everyone. The things he fixed looked great, the relationships he formed seemed sound. He went to A.A. and was in and out of residential treatment. We could fix him. He could fix himself.
But people started to notice that the things he fixed were not really fixed—the furnace did not pass inspection; the kitchen sink was leaking in a different place. He started to demand things of friends and family that they could not do—come find him up in another state where he had blacked out; come stop him from shooting himself. One person after another felt unsafe with him. The board voted that he could not work in the church when he was drunk.
He named it, his family named it, his friends named it, his church named it. He was an alcoholic. No treatment, program or meeting helped him. We all had to accept it. We had to accept the things we could not change.
He accepted it, telling his minister that he planned to drink himself to death, which would be kinder to his family than blowing his brains out with a gun, as his father and brother had done. His friends accepted it and stopped rescuing him. His wife accepted it and left him. When the furnace had to be disconnected in a panic so it would not blow up, the church finally accepted it and enforced their previous vote. These were all painful decisions. Everyone loved him.
And they loved him even unto death—for he did die of liver failure, as he planned. Some people felt guilty that they could not save him. A few others felt angry at other people for not saving him. But most people knew that when their relationship with him became dangerous and destructive, they had to accept that they could not save him, even when we would not stop loving him.
We loved him because he was more than his addiction. He was a loving father, a heartbroken son, a talented craftsman, a teller of tall tales. He was a brilliant and funny companion, a generous soul. He disappointed those who loved him even as he suffered. We loved him because of, or in spite of, the fact that he was fully, completely, imperfectly human. But love does not fix everything.
The question in the end is this: can we love humanity—ourselves and others—just as we are? Can we love one another in the midst of our poor choices, our mistakes, our sins? We were born not to be perfect but to grow in wisdom, not to be in control but to reach out to one another unattached to outcome, not to live forever but to love while we live.
- Imperfection: The Perfect Spirituality - May 1, 2015
This hits close to home. My dad’s niece and nephew fit this pattern of the brother and sister to a tee, although the sister is STILL with us. Her body is closing down , though not from cancer, just the abuse. I find it hard to accept that you can’t save someone who doesn’t believe they have a problem, I have to accept it. It hurts so much.