The Spirituality of Imperfection

First published in 1992, The Spirituality of Imperfection, subtitled “Storytelling and the Search for Meaning,” is the first book I’ve written about on this blog that has two authors: Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham. Ernest Kurtz received his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University in 1978. His doctoral dissertation was published as Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous. He’s also the author of A.A.: The Story and a book called Shame and Guilt. (A.A. plays a significant role in The Spirituality of Imperfection, the second part of which is called “The Discoveries of Alcoholics Anonymous.”) Katherine Ketcham is well-known for her best-selling books, Under the Influence: A Guide to the Myths and Realities of Alcoholism, as well as Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial. She most recently wrote a memoir called The Only Life I Could Save. Ernest Kurtz died of pancreatic cancer is 2015, five months before the second book he coauthored with Ketcham, called Experiencing Spirituality, was published.

I found out about The Spirituality of Imperfection through my husband, who’s owned a copy for many years. I recently spotted it on one of our bookshelves, took it down and flipped through it and said, “Yes, I will make a blog about this.” And right here at the start, I will state the main takeaway. And again, this is just my main takeaway from Part One of the book, or roughly its first one hundred pages. And that takeaway is: human beings are imperfect! You might be thinking, “Tell me something I don’t know! Captain Obvious strikes again.” But I’ll borrow an insight from Ram Dass here and say that I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know. That is not why spiritual teachings exist. They exist so that we might remember, or see more clearly or from a new angle, what we already know.

But there is something that makes what Kurtz and Ketcham have to say about human imperfection take on a little more depth than might exist in well-worn adages like “to err is human.” And this is something that Marion Woodman also talks about in Addiction to Perfection: the reason we humans are so imperfect is because we are just another manifestation of Life, which is itself imperfect. I’ll provide just a few recent examples from own life to illustrate this truth that you already know but might benefit from seeing from another angle.

A couple weeks ago my husband and I went to Knoxville, Tennessee, to see Jerry Seinfeld perform. If you heard the post I did about Seinfeld back in early May, you might recall that he is one of my great heroes. I bought tickets for the Knoxville show soon after writing that post, which meant I had over five months to prepare for it, to make it a perfect experience. Of course there was not much I could do to prepare, aside from hiring a pet-sitter for that night and reserving a hotel room and, on the day of the show, packing a bag and making sure we left Asheville in time to have dinner in Knoxville before the event. We did have said dinner at a lovely place called Babalu, and were finishing our meal with nearly an hour to spare. So I said, “Let’s get dessert! If we leave now we’ll just be sitting in the auditorium waiting.”

Wrong. As it happened, there were two significant sporting events happening that night, in close proximity to the civic center where Seinfeld was performing. So, due to the resulting traffic, it took us a good thirty minutes to drive the mile and half from Babalu to the venue. We would have been much better off just feeding the street meter some more and walking. Our tickets said that the show started at seven; seven came and went as we waited in the stop and go (but mostly stop) traffic. I tried to console myself by saying, “What show ever starts when the ticket says?” Well, I’ll tell you: a Jerry Seinfeld show. But luckily there was an opening act, and Jerry himself didn’t take the stage until about 7:30—literally the second that my husband and I stepped into the auditorium, after the security check people made Whitman throw his treasured pocket knife away (there was no time to take it back to the car, and God forbid they should just hold onto it for him) and I’d purchased a five-dollar bottled water. With the help of an usher we found our seats in the pitch black darkness.

And there I was, in the same room as Jerry Seinfeld, which had only ever happened once before, when I saw him perform in Charlotte in 2005, and would probably never happen again because he’s not getting any younger and his tickets aren’t getting any cheaper. (Well, maybe the latter will happen at some point, who knows.) But I couldn’t fully enjoy the experience because (a) I knew at least fifty percent of the jokes he told, which was disappointing, and (b) I was paranoid that I’d left my car running! Thanks to its “smartness,” it is possible, if one is distracted or in a hurry or not so bright or all of the above, to leave that car running because it doesn’t require that a key come out of an ignition. You just push a button to turn it off. And if you don’t push that button, it doesn’t turn off. I’d learned this a couple years ago when going out to dinner and returning two hours later to find my car still running. And every now and then I get paranoid about doing that again, and for whatever reason, that paranoia decided to strike while I was at the Seinfeld show. So, though I tried my best to enjoy it fully—or you might say perfectly—I couldn’t. And I had not, in fact, left my car running.

But the next morning, as we were about to leave the Holiday Inn parking lot and drive home in time for me to work at ten, my damn car wouldn’t start! The battery was totally dead. Talk about imperfection! But then, in an instance of perfect synchronicity, there was a man looking under the hood of the car right next to mine! This was at 6:45 in the morning. It was still dark out. Of all the other parking spots he could’ve parked in the night before, he’d parked right next to mine. And he had jumper cables! This was also fortuitous because, though I had jumper cables in my trunk, I could not access my trunk, because my stupid smart car requires battery-powered technology to open the trunk. The nice man—whose name was Jared—got us on our way within ten minutes, and I got home with a whole hour to spare.

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That example of imperfection got away from me. Here’s a shorter one: I live out in Leicester in a very beautiful spot. Classic mountain countryside vistas, with a couple farms nearby. I regularly get to watch baby cows running—one of the best things a person can see—from my back yard. Of course, the dark side to seeing that—what makes the seemingly perfect country life deeply, deeply imperfect—is the knowledge of what will eventually happen to those baby cows. They’re being raised in order to be slaughtered. Another imperfect aspect of living near farms has manifested this past week in the form of noise pollution. A giant silo dryer has been whirring and grinding along incessantly for days—and I mean incessantly. My husband called the farm owner to find out what was making the noise and when it was going to stop. That’s how we learned it was a dryer, for drying seed corn. Our fear, of course, was that it would never stop. But the farmer said it would end in a few days, especially if the humidity in the air stayed down. The humidity has not stayed down and the noise has been happening for over a week now. And then there’s the imperfection of air pollution, which out here comes in the form of our neighbors burning trash. This phenomenon has been a significant source of frustration and rage for me over the years, because it’s not as if I have a choice to breathe the air that they are poisoning. I know the air we breathe is already poisoned, but must you make it that much worse by burning plastic in your yard? Come on!

My point is that nothing is perfect because nothing is supposed to be perfect. Including me. Including you. And to expect anything to be perfect is, according to Kurtz and Ketcham, anti-spiritual. They assert that “trying to be perfect is the most tragic human mistake,” and that spirituality ultimately involves “learning how to live with imperfection.” In the epigraph to Chapter One of their book, they quote an AA member who said, “Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for those who have been there.” One could argue that plenty of religious people have been to hell, too, but for the purposes of this blog post I will just focus on spirituality, which need not involve any godhead or church-going or scripture-reading. And I will speak for myself when I say that spirituality is something I’ve come to value as a result of experiencing hardship. In many cases, this hardship has itself been the result of my human imperfection, while in others it’s just the imperfection of life itself. All you need to do is listen to just a few minutes of the news to be reminded of how horribly, horribly short of perfect this life falls, all the time, every day. In turning towards the spiritual life, we are essentially seeking help for the distress this imperfection causes us. And in that help-seeking, we admit that we cannot do this whole life-thing on our own. We need some support, some guidance. Kurtz and Ketcham say that spirituality is born when we acknowledge and accept that we’re not in control. We’re not okay. Something is wrong with us. But according to a spirituality of imperfection, “there is nothing wrong with that, because that is the nature of our reality.”

So the next time you find yourself anxiously wondering, “Is there something wrong with me?” you can answer your own question in the affirmative, and instead of fretting over how to make it otherwise, you can set about trying to accept it. Learning to live with our human—you might even say God-given—flaws, or what the philosopher-psychologist William James called our ‘torn-to-pieces-hood,’ is the essence of living a spiritual life. Resisting or denying our flaws is anathema to such a life.

Kurtz and Ketcham say, "the essential paradox of human life [is that] we are always and inevitably incomplete, on the way, slipping and sliding, making mistakes.” But this is not a failure on our parts; it is exactly the way it’s supposed to be. We are ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. When we insist on being only extraordinary, we essentially kill ourselves, we deny our own humanness. Maybe this is what Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous and quoted many times in The Spirituality of Imperfection, meant when he said, “We must find some spiritual basis for living, else we die.” As Kurtz and Ketcham say, we must avoid dichotomizing ourselves, or viewing ourselves as needing to be either good or bad. We are both.

That sounds awfully moralistic, doesn’t it? I admit that something in me recoils at the word “bad” as a way of describing myself or my human race. Same goes for the word “sin.” But as I’ve mentioned before on this blog, the word “sin” actually means “to miss the mark.” I think I first learned that from Eckhart Tolle in his book The Power of Now. Defining sin that way takes the heavy moralistic connotation out of it. In order to “survive our sins,” as Kurtz and Ketcham say, we have to first and foremost acknowledge that we missed the mark—whatever that might be in a given scenario—and that we did so, not because we’re stupid or totally inept or doomed to fail in everything we attempt, but because we are creatures that are prone to missing the mark on a regular basis. To expect ourselves to not ever miss the mark, or to see it as an aberration from our “true” form, is simultaneously self-aggrandizing and self-negating. Kurtz and Ketcham cite the English mystic and anchoress of the Middle Ages, Julian of Norwich, who described sin as “behoovely,” meaning that it’s necessary, “because without it there would be no sensuality.” (An anchoress, by the way, is a woman who, for religious reasons, withdraws from secular society so as to be able to lead an intensely prayer-oriented, ascetic, or Eucharist-focused life. The male version would be called an anchorite. And Julian of Norwich not only wrote the sole surviving English language works by an anchoress, but her writings, now known as Revelations of Divine Love, are also the earliest surviving English language works by a woman (although it is possible that some anonymous works may have had female authors)). Julian of Norwich was not referring to sex when she wrote about sensuality. Rather, she was referring to “the whole of human life, lived as it is within the confines of our bodies and our world; it is within our sensuality, she assures us, that God wants to dwell.”

Marion Woodman, whose book Addiction to Perfection I’ve discussed in a previous blog post, says something very similar. Kurtz and Ketcham quote her in The Spirituality of Imperfection. Woodman identifies addiction as a sin (in this case addiction) that “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.” The German Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart, whose “Book of Divine Consolation” I’ve also talked about on this blog, put it this way about 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.” It is only through sin that we need God, and we only find Him when we need Him, when we request His presence in our lives. For this reason, we can see our sins as reason to celebrate, because each one brings a little more God into our lives.

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If you can’t get on board with the God-stuff I was just talking about, here’s yet another way you can conceptualize sin, or “missing the mark,” or being imperfect, as an ultimately good—as in necessary or “behoovely”—thing. Kurtz and Ketcham cite the French Jesuit priest and writer, Jean Pierre de Caussade, who exhorted us to “‘rejoice’ whenever we discover a new imperfection, for only when we learn how to put up with ourselves can we arrive at a place of interior peace.” In other words, with each new imperfection we discover, each new mistake we make, we are learning how to stomach our sinfulness, how to metabolize it better. Of course, we can only learn if we’re really paying attention. Kurtz and Ketcham say that a “classic monastic admonition” is “Pay attention to yourself! The emphasis is always and continually on self-knowledge, knowing oneself and honestly accepting—‘owning’—one’s own imperfections.” They put the word “owning” in quotes there, which I appreciate, because it implies that “owning” need not mean “identifying with.” I can, for instance, take responsibility for my tendency to sometimes seem stand-offish in social settings, but that doesn’t mean I beat myself up for it or even see it as something I’m always in control of. In other words, it’s not like I’m trying to be stand-offish. I can’t always help the way I come across to others, just as I can’t always help how I think or feel. I can and must take responsibility for those things, and keep paying attention to them, but I don’t always have to take the blame for them. And when we can blame ourselves less for how we are, we're more likely to blame others less for how they are, and when that blame falls away, compassion has more room to arise.

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Part One of The Spirituality of Imperfection consists of an Introduction followed by six chapters. The chapters are titled, “The Fragrance of a Rose,” “Beyond the Ordinary,” “The Reality of Limitation,” “A Sense of Balance,” “Experiencing the Spiritual,” and “Shared Vision, Shared Hope.” I’ve already touched on some of the key ideas from the first three chapters and will now turn my focus to the latter three.

One of the things that I love most about The Spirituality of Imperfection is that it’s a great primer on all kinds of spiritual traditions and thinkers. I’d never heard, for instance, of Julian of Norwich. I’d also never heard of the Egyptian monk Evagrius Ponticus, whom I’ll talk about later. One person I had heard of but am always glad to be reminded of was Reinhold Niebuhr. Kurtz and Ketcham reference him in Chapter Four, “A Sense of Balance.” They quote the American theologian and author of the Serenity Prayer as saying that mankind “stands at the juncture of nature and spirit,” and is the subject of “both freedom and necessity. On the one hand, he is involved in the order of nature and is therefore bound. On the other hand, as spirit he transcends nature and himself and is therefore free. Being both bound and free, both limited and unlimited, he invariably experiences anxiety.” This is my kind of explanation for anxiety! The more existential the better in my book! I’d love to hear a parent say to their anxious child (as our children are more anxious than ever now), “That’s normal, honey. You have anxiety because you stand at the juncture of nature and spirit. You are both bound and free. It’s natural to feel uneasy. Try not to take it personally.”

Another way to describe our double-naturedness is as French philosopher and Catholic theologian Blaise Pascal did, by calling us both “angel” and “beast.” If we identify with one over the other, problems inevitably result. As Pascal said, “He who would be an angel becomes a beast.” Just as we are going to suffer all the more if we expect our lives to be totally free of suffering, we will do the same if we expect ourselves to be totally free of flaws. Kurtz and Ketcham call it a form of dishonesty, of self-deception, when we deny our own both-and-ness. They provide a cute anecdote in which a preacher asks a class of children, “If all the good people in the world were red and all the bad people were green, what color would you be?” One of the children raises her hand, her face bright with the right-ness of her answer, and proclaims, “Reverend, I’d be streaky!” Yes, dear one, we’d all be streaky. Of course, some of us are more green than others and some are more red, but none of us is all red or all green.

But what about the saints? Aren’t they nothing but goodness? And what about the murderous psychopaths? Aren’t they nothing but badness? I’m inclined to say, “Probably not.” And Anthony Hopkins would agree. Just today (I’m writing this on Halloween) I heard him say on an archival episode segment of the NPR show Fresh Air, that in playing Hannibal Lector in the film The Silence of the Lambs, he focused on the good qualities that Lector possessed—his grace, intelligence, and self-control (the latter of which obviously falls away when he’s eating the faces off of people). Hopkins said that such focus is a good rule of thumb for any actor playing an evil character, because no one is completely evil, and by emphasizing what goodness they possess, you more accurately convey their humanity. He asserted that the converse is true for playing saintly characters: an actor should emphasize that character’s darker side, because just as no one is purely evil, no one is purely good.

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I’ve had to reconcile with my own mixed-up-ness, both-and-ness, I-contain-multitudes-ness, for the past couple of weeks, as I have once again been wrestling with a desire that seems very out of character for me. Back in mid-September, I started obsessing over a certain 1966 Chevy Nova 2. I went so far as to test drive it, and I tried to get my mechanic-neighbor to go look at it, but his work schedule was so busy that trying to coordinate anything was proving impossible, so I decided not to buy the car. It was “just too crazy,” I told myself, and I am, as my favorite astrologer once said, “the queen of practicality.” And it felt good to no longer have to deliberate over the damn Nova. It was a relief.

But I didn’t stop thinking about it from time to time. Every few days I’d get online to see if it was still for sale, and was always glad to see that it was. And then I drove to Knoxville and found myself distracted through all of Jerry Seinfeld’s performance that I’d left my stupid smart car running, and the next morning its battery was mysteriously dead, etc., and I got to thinking about buying the Nova even more. I got to thinking that maybe the reason for not buying it the first time around could actually be a main reason to buy it now—because it was crazy. Because, though I do tend to be a very practical person, that doesn’t mean I have to practical all the time. To speak in Kurtz and Ketcham’s terms, if I expect myself to always be any one way, I am denying my very humanity. And right around this time, my mechanic neighbor had shoulder surgery and wasn’t allowed to work for awhile, which meant he had a lot of free time on his hands. So after lots and lots of thinking, I texted him to see if he’d be able to go look at the Nova sometime in the next few days. And whereas for the first time around, in September, he had responded with a lot of uncertainty as to his availability, this time it was a piece of cake. So the next day we drove to the classic car place and he looked at the Nova. I figured I should follow through with at least that step of the info-gathering process. If my neighbor told me the car was a mess and I’d be a fool to buy it, then I wouldn’t buy it, and my mind could rest easy knowing that the car was a disaster. But he didn’t say that. His verdict, after looking at the undercarriage while it was up on a lift, and then under the hood while the engine was running, was, with a surprised tone, “It’s pretty clean.” I took it for a second test drive with him in the car and he still saw no red flags.

So now I had some more thinking to do. I’ll spare you all the agonizing deliberation that went into this second round of Nova-obsessing—but I will say it included a professional tarot reading and an astrology reading; I refrained from consulting the I Ching. In the end, I decided to buy the damn car. I did it because it was crazy and because I wanted to see how it felt to do something so impractical. I thought of Ray Kinsella in Field of Dreams, gazing out in amused disbelief at the corn field he’d just turned into a baseball diamond and saying, “I’ve just created something totally illogical,” and how his wife responds, “That’s what I like about it.” (Marion Woodman would say that such an attitude is a product of the conscious feminine principle.) I also did it because the world is crazy and why shouldn’t I do the occasional crazy thing, too? I did it because I am imperfect; because yes, even though I consider myself an environmentalist, I also just love classic cars and think it would be really fun to have my very own for awhile. I did it because the world is ugly and the Nova is beautiful, and buying it felt like my way of giving the finger to all that ugliness. I did it because I so often feel like the world is ending, and I may as well enjoy its worldly offerings while I can.

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And how do I feel, now that the Nova is mine? I’ll be honest: not great! There goes that imperfection again. I very much enjoyed driving the car home from Sweeten Creek via the back roads, and having my husband film me from our driveway as I came down our dirt road with it for the first time, and having him take my picture standing next to it, but within one minute of stepping inside our house—and that’s no exaggeration—one minute—I felt regret. My stomach got uneasy and I had a metallic taste in my mouth that, for me, always indicates fear. I did yoga, wanting to move some of that anxious energy through me, which helped some, but for much of the forty-minute practice I was watching myself have a visceral reaction to the very significant purchase I’d just made. Mostly it was the environmentalist in me, shaming me for bringing this gas-guzzling, stinky thing into my life. How had I let the aesthete in me—the part of me that just plain loved how the car looked—win out over the environmentalist in me?

When I finished yoga, I told my husband what I was feeling and he talked me down off the ledge, saying that I was going to drive that car so infrequently, the environmental impact would be nothing compared to all the diesel-chugging semis that clog countless highways everywhere, all the time. Yes, that helped. And then we went for a ride and I felt a little better still, until we got stopped at a place where some road work was happening and in idling I could smell the fumes the Nova was emitting, and the noise of its engine was that much more noticeable, and it just felt like so much to have taken on, when my life had been so simple and basically burden-free before, just yesterday… Whitman, who’d never been especially jazzed about my buying the car, was very sweet in his attempts to soothe me, saying that I’d get used to it, I’d learn more about it and feel more comfortable. “Just have fun with it,” he said, reminding me of the whole reason I bought the damn thing—to have fun. And I’ve had to remind myself that I also did it because it was crazy, and I wanted to see how it felt to do a crazy, totally unnecessary thing. And now I know. It feels awful.

Maybe that will change. Meanwhile I can take some comfort in the aforementioned Marion Woodman passage about how “god comes through the wound.” In this state of regret I am vulnerable, and Woodman says that “the very point of the vulnerability is where the surrender takes place—that is where the god enters.” I can definitely attest to there being no choice for me, at this juncture, but to surrender to what I’m feeling. As much as I’d like to call the outfit that sold me the Nova and ask them if they’ll take it back, I’m not going to do that (and I doubt they would take it back). I am, as Meister Eckhart would say, “getting into the core of myself at my least,” and hopefully he’s right that by doing so, I will “get at the core of God at his greatest.” My sin, or my “missing the mark” in this way, thinking that an antique car would bring some joy into my life and it has instead done the opposite, can be seen as a reason to celebrate, because it’s bringing more God into my life. And for me, this means that it will force me to more deliberately and humbly seek for the inner peace that always exists within me, regardless of what’s happening or what I’ve done, the part that knows everything is and always will be okay, regardless of any crazy purchase I have made.     

But back to The Spirituality of Imperfection. I’ve made my way up to Chapter 5 now, which is titled “Experiencing the Spiritual.” There’s actually an idea in this chapter that contributed to my decision to buy the Nova. It comes from Egyptian monk and saint Evagrius Ponticus, who lived from 345 to 399 C.E. Also known as Evagrius the Solitary, he is most well-known for developing a system of categorizing various forms of temptation—eight, to be exact—from which all sinful behavior springs. These eight patterns of evil thought are gluttony, lust, greed, sadness, acedia (meaning despondency or listlessness), anger, vainglory, and pride. Pope Gregory the First would later revise this list to form the more commonly known Seven Deadly Sins, by combining acedia with sadness and calling the combination sloth, combining vainglory with pride, and adding envy to the list. Anyway, Evagrius Ponticus defined greed or avarice in an unexpected way. According to Kurtz and Ketcham, he defined it as “the principle of thinking about what does not yet exist, a preoccupation with hopes and fears, with imaginary or future things.” Evagrius also counseled that “hoarding money (or anything else) reveals a lack of faith,” and he exhorted us to "leave the future to God.”

And this is the notion that I added to my mental list of justifications for buying the Nova. I’m sure Evagrius would probably scoff at that, but it’s true. One of the main things—well, the main thing—that kept me from buying the car was money. I was very attached to having a certain amount in my savings account—what Evagrius might call hoarding money. And while I’m sure the Egyptian saint would say that the godly alternative to hoarding money would be to give it to those in need—not buy an antique car with it—all I can say is that I am not a saint. I do give money to those in need, but when it comes to spending large chunks at once, I prefer to spend it on myself, on something I can see and touch and enjoy for a long time. Which of course makes me selfish. And: there’s also something meaningful, even spiritual, about my spending more of my savings than I’m totally comfortable with. As Evagrius says, to be overly attached to the money we have is to exercise a lack of faith. He meant a lack of faith in God, but we can also conceptualize it as a lack of faith in the universe, or in things just working out. I feared that if I bought the Nova, I would suddenly be in dire need of the money I spent on it. I’d get some terrible diagnosis, say, that would result in astronomical medical bills. But then I thought, “If I get some terrible diagnosis, that’ll be all the more reason to be glad I bought the Nova. If I’m going to die in my forties I should have fun and enjoy beautiful objects while I can.” And reading Evagrius’s ideas about leaving the future to God further strengthened my resolve to buy the car.

I also like what Evagrius had to say about worry. As I said, he defined greed in part as thinking about what does not yet exist, being preoccupied with fears. I am definitely guilty of this. It is a near-daily occurrence for me to fear that something terrible is going to happen either to me or to someone I love. Evagrius said, “Don’t waste time thinking about what thinking can’t change.” The fact that he calls such thinking a waste of time is refreshing, and it appeals to my pragmatic nature. He emphasized that we get to choose where our attention goes. In The Spirituality of Imperfection, Kurtz and Ketcham point out that William James, “the Father of American psychology,” would make the same assertion sixteen centuries later when he said, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” This agreeing, or choosing, is what Kurtz and Ketcham call “the key to spirituality’s union of vision and feeling.” “Spirituality is experience,” they say. “Choose what you want to think about, and choose it carefully, because that choice determines the way you live your life.”

Here I feel compelled to revisit something I’ve written about before on this blog: social media. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik-Tok, etc. impede our ability to choose what we want to think about. And I’d say other media do the same thing. Listening to the news, for instance (which for me is mostly the NPR show “All Things Considered”), tends to get me thinking about everything that’s awful about the world. The mere mention of Ukraine or Russia has become triggering. In choosing to listen to the news, I’m essentially choosing to think about scary, depressing, enraging, and/or idiotic things.

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Now I’ve made it up to the sixth and final chapter of Part One of The Spirituality of Imperfection: it’s called “Shared Vision, Shared Hope,” and it’s all about the role that community plays in spiritual life. I joined a Buddhist sangha (sangha means spiritual community) last December, took the precepts in May, and have since enrolled in the lay minister training there, which will take at least three years to finish. Since December 26th, I’ve attended the service, meditation, and dharma class that takes place every Sunday morning; at first these were Zoom-only, but since May I’ve been going to the Buddha Hall in-person services. I’ve only missed three Sundays, because I was out of town. I’m not sharing this information in a proud or brag-y way. I just want to give you a sense of what “being in a sangha” looks like for me. Another part of it that not everyone chooses to do is asking someone to be your teacher. Having a teacher is not required for becoming a lay minister, though, and for that reason I haven’t asked anyone to be my teacher yet. There’s also the expectation that whomever you ask is someone toward whom you feel a strong affinity, and I haven’t felt such an affinity toward any of the ministers yet. There is one I could see myself coming to feel that way about, though, in time. But the main reason I haven’t asked anyone to be my teacher is that I haven’t felt the need for a teacher. Any spiritual question I had, I could work out on my own. If that sounds arrogant, maybe that’s because it is. Reading The Spirituality of Imperfection has made me wonder…

In their chapter on spiritual community, Kurtz and Ketcham say, “The meeting between the novice and the experienced practitioner is essential not because the elders are necessarily wiser or holier, but because the seeking itself signifies the humility and willingness to learn that makes spiritual wisdom possible.” Humility and willingness to learn. Those are definitely lacking, I see now, in my reasons for not having a Buddhist teacher. The willingness to learn only applies if I’m learning how I want to learn—by reading books. I’d rather not involve another person. But have I looked closely enough at that? Probably not. Kurtz and Ketcham also caught my attention when saying, “Those wrestling with spiritual dilemmas do not need answers but presence—permission to confront the dilemma and struggle with it aloud.” How many people, including myself, have given as their main reason for not starting psychotherapy, “That stranger can’t tell me anything I don’t already know”? Well, those people are probably right. But what if answers—things we don’t already know—aren’t what we really need, deep down? What if all we really need is someone else’s presence? Permission to confront the dilemma and struggle with it aloud? That’s a mindblower.

Kurtz and Ketcham say that “only in telling another the truth about ourselves do we discover the truth about ourselves.” Again, we don’t have to be asking any questions, per se. We can just be doing the telling. It is a vastly different thing, to have words that only exist in your head, and to say those words out loud to another person. If you’ve never experienced how different, I can’t really put it into words for you. Kurtz and Ketcham come pretty close when they say, “We can ‘tell’ only what we know, but we come to ‘know’ only in the telling.”

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Now for a final update on the Nova. I’m writing this on the morning after buying the car, so Wednesday, November 2nd. Yesterday evening I wound up in the fetal position on our guest bed, requesting my husband come spoon me and tell me everything was okay. And I’m pretty sure he could’ve gone all night, giving me one reason after another as to why it wasn’t a big deal, my buying the Nova, and why everything was going to work out. I never could have known that buying the car—doing the crazy thing—would make me feel that terrible, and so suddenly, so viscerally. There was only one way to acquire that knowledge, and now I had it, and wished I didn’t. I’m telling you, it was ridiculous. But Whitman did succeed in comforting me, and I managed to eat a little dinner despite the remaining knot in my stomach. And a couple hours later while in the shower (so often a place of revelation), I realized with a flash of relief that the Nova is my teacher! I still plan on getting a human spiritual teacher soon, but in the meantime this damn car is going to contribute a LOT to my spiritual growth, if I can let it. Due to its sudden, inexplicable presence in my life, a huge amount of ego stuff is rising up full-force, bringing all kinds of painful, difficult feelings, and I have to sit with them. I have to detach, remember that all is basically well, all is basically well. If worse comes to worse and I just need to get rid of the damn thing and no one will buy it from me, I’ll give it away, to some sort of charity. And then this silly selfish thing I did can become a good thing I did. I can feel downright altruistic…

Oy, me.

Thanks for reading this. I know my little Nova problem seems shallow and absurd, compared to other, much realer problems. I guess I didn’t have enough problems in my life and felt compelled to remedy that. It really does feel like I just bought myself a problem! I must laugh to keep from crying, and I must trust that there must be a greater reason for all this absurdity. And if you yourself are going through a hard time for any reason, just know you’re not alone. Life is such a freakin’ ass-kicker. It is far, far, far from perfect, and therefore so are we, and the thing to do is not take it all so seriously. That’s what I was trying to do by getting the Nova, but it backfired, and now I’m taking things more seriously than ever. So the trick, I guess, is not to force the taking life less seriously. You need not make a grand gesture. Those can be really fun to fantasize about, but I’ve learned that the fantasy is a fantasy for a reason. Instead, we can practice taking life less seriously in small ways, throughout the day. And knowing how deeply imperfect it is—because that is exactly how it’s supposed to be—we can be all the more grateful for the ways in which it’s beautiful.