JACS LIBRARY - ARTICLES

by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham

Baseball teaches us, or has taught most of us, how to deal with failure. We learn at a very young age that failure is the norm in baseball and, precisely because we have failed, we hold in high regard those who fail less often--those who hit safely in one out of three chances and become star players. I also find it fascinating that baseball, alone in sport, considers errors to be part of the game, part of its rigorous truth.

 Spirituality teaches us, or has taught most of us, how to deal with failure. We learn at a very young age that failure is the norm in life... errors are part of the game, part of its rigorous truth.

 Discovering spirituality in the game of baseball is not so strange as it sounds. For literally thousands of years, sages and saints have explored the ordinary and everyday in the attempt to understand the extraordinary and divine. The ritual of the Japanese tea ceremony--simply carrying and serving tea--is a profound spiritual exercise. The posture of kneeling in prayer conveys acceptance and mindfulness. Standing up in a crowded room and saying, "My name is John, and I'm an alcoholic," calls forth the spiritual realities of humility, gratitude, tolerance and forgiveness.

 Spirituality takes many forms, and all spiritualities do not look on failure and imperfection in the same way. But through the centuries, a recurring spiritual theme has emerged, one that is more sensitive to earthly concerns than to heavenly hopes. This spirituality--the spirituality of imperfection--is thousands of years old. And yet it is timeless, eternal and ongoing, for it is concerned with what in the human being is irrevocable and immutable: the essential imperfection, the basic and inherent flaws of being human. Errors, of course, are part of the game. They are part of our truth as human beings. To deny our errors is to deny ourself, for to be human is to be imperfect, somehow error-prone. To be human is to ask unanswerable questions, to persist in asking them, and to be broken and ache for wholeness, as well as to hurt and to try to find a way to healing through the hurt. To be human is to embody a paradox, for according to that ancient vision, we are "less than the gods, more than the beast s, yet somehow also both."

 We are not everything, but neither are we nothing. Spirituality is discovered in that space between paradoxical extremes, for there we confront our helplessness and powerlessness, our woundedness. In seeking to understand our limitations, we seek not only an easing of our pain, but an understanding of what it means to hurt and what it means to be healed. Spirituality begins with the acceptance that our fractured being, our imperfection, simply is: There is no one to "blame" for our errors--neither ourselves nor anyone, nor anything else. Spirituality helps us first to see, and then to understand, and eventually to accept the imperfection that lies at the very core of our human be-ing. Spirituality accepts that "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."²

 Rabbi Zusya said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?'"

 The spirituality of imperfection speaks to those who seek meaning in the absurd, peace within the chaos, light within the darkness, joy within the suffering--without denying the reality and even the necessity of absurdity, chaos, darkness and suffering. This is not a spirituality for the saints or the gods, but for people who suffer from what the philosopher-psychologist William James called "torn-to-pieces-hood" (his trenchant translation of the German Zerrissenheit). We have all known that experience. To be human is to feel at times divided, fractured, and pulled in a dozen directions... and to yearn for serenity, for some healing of our "torn-to-pieces-hood."

The spirituality of imperfection speaks to both the inevitability of pain, and to the possibility of healing within the pain. This story can be traced back thousands of years to Egyptian pharaohs, Hebrew prophets, and Greek thinkers. Beginning in the ancients' anguished questions about the nature of human life, the spirituality of imperfection took on new meaning with the dawn of Christianity and the seemingly endless, often inspired questions posed by the early Christians, as they discovered the implications of their new way of life.

 From the Desert Fathers and Mothers to Saint Augustine and Saint Francis, into the Renaissance and Reformation, the spirituality of imperfection was continually created and re-created, adapted and modified, told and retold. In the eighteenth century, Hasidic reawakening to ancient insight inspired a renewal of Jewish inspiration. At the same time, on the new American continent, the Puritan theologian and pastor Jonathan Edwards began delineating the "sense of the heart." This signaled the beginning of a uniquely American contribution to this on flowing stream of spiritual insight.

 Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this self consciously imperfect tradition continued to challenge the very different, generally perfectionistic, expressions of spirituality that were the main response of most religions to the modern age.³ As contact with Oriental cultures increased, so too did an appreciation for the variety of spiritual sensitivities and expressions. Within the Western tradition itself, unconventional thinkers from S�ren Kierkegaard and Abraham Lincoln to William James and Carl Jung enriched the story with their insights into the wrenching realities of modern life.

 And yet profound as these insights were, they found little expression in the daily lives of ordinary people. Most men and women in the twentieth century were cut off from this spirituality. They had no vocabulary and few concepts in which to articulate it, and the emphasis on perfection common to most religious expressions of the time, suggested a different approach. Then in 1934, the year historian Sidney Ahlstrom named annus mirabilis--"that year to be wondered at"--the tradition of a spirituality of imperfection found a thoroughly modern voice.⁴

 On a chill, rainy afternoon in November 1934, two men sat cattycorner at the kitchen table of a brownstone house in Brooklyn, New York. On the white oilcloth-covered table stood a pitcher of pineapple juice, two glasses and a bottle of gin recently retrieved from its hiding place in the overhead tank of the toilet in the adjacent bathroom.

 The visitor, neatly groomed and bright-eyed, smiled gently as his tall, craggy-faced host reached for the bottle and offered him a drink.

 "No, thanks," Ebby said. "I'm not drinking."

 "Not drinking! Why not?" Bill was so surprised that he stopped pouring to look with concern at his old friend. "What's the matter?"

 "I don't need it anymore," Ebby replied simply. "I've got religion."

 Religion? Damn! For a fleeting moment, Bill wondered about his friend's sanity. Ebby, after all, was a drinking buddy from way back. Now, apparently, he had gone off the deep end--his alcoholic insanity had become religious insanity!

 Bill gulped a slug of gin. Well, dammit, not him. Religion was for the weak, the old, the hopeless; he'd never "get religion."⁵

 Bill Wilson never did "get religion," but he did get sober, and unlike Ebby, who would die destitute after thirty more years of sporadic drinking, Bill stayed sober. How? Through a spiritual program that grew precisely from his realization that religion, with its canons and commandments, wouldn't work for him and the seemingly contradictory understanding that without help from a power greater than himself, he was lost. "We must find some spiritual basis for living," Bill later said about himself and other alcoholics, "else we die."

 Alcoholics Anonymous has been called the most significant phenomenon in the history of ideas in the twentieth century.⁶ In the half century since William Griffith Wilson, Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith and their first followers gave the new fellowship a name, A.A. has helped millions of alcoholics to get and to stay sober. More important for our story--the story of the spirituality of imperfection--many other individuals have found in the twelve-step program pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous, healings they were unable to find in either psychology or religion. Although it insists on the necessity of "the spiritual" for recovery, A.A. has always presented its program as "spiritual rather than religious." The problem with organized religions, Bill Wilson once complained, "is their claim how confoundedly right all of them are."⁷ The spirituality of imperfection that forms the heart and soul of Alcoholics Anonymous makes no claim to be "right." It is a spirituality more interested in questions than in answers, more a journey toward humility than a struggle for perfection.

 The spirituality of imperfection begins with the recognition that trying to be perfect is the most tragic human mistake. In direct contradiction of the serpent's promise in Eden's garden, the book Alcoholics Anonymous suggests, "First of all, we had to quit playing God." According to the way of life that flows from this insight, it is only by ceasing to play God, coming to terms with errors and shortcomings, and by accepting the inability to control every aspect of their lives that alcoholics or any human beings can find the peace and serenity that alcohol, (or other drugs, sex, money, material possessions, power, or privilege), promise but never deliver. Where and how did the earliest members of Alcoholics Anonymous discover this ancient "spirituality of imperfection" that would offer so much to the modern world? After all, they were not great thinkers, at least not in the usual sense. They were everyday people who struggled, as we all do, with the ordinary tasks of daily living. Yet their experiences, drinking and newly sober, allowed them to assemble a patchwork quilt of spirituality, weaving threads borrowed directly and indirectly from the traditions of Greek, Jewish and Christian thought that shaped the culture in which they lived, piecing together the thoughts and experiences of more than twenty-five centuries of spiritual thinkers.

 In the spirituality of Alcoholics Anonymous, we can recognize the contributions of such spiritual geniuses as the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah and the Greek philosopher Socrates. Church Fathers such as Ignatius of Antioch, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the monks Basil and Gregory, the saints Augustine and Benedict and Francis of Assisi, as well as mystics such as Julian of Norwich, reformers as diverse as Calvin and Luther and Caussade, the rabbinic commentators and the Baal Shem Tov, William James and Carl Jung, the brothers Niebuhr, and D. T. Suzuki are the names of some of the most obvious influences. A.A.'s earliest members "tried on" the ideas and insights of these brilliant, often eccentric thinkers, and whatever matched their own experience became part of the patchwork.

 "Matched their own experience." The spirituality of imperfection is based in the lived acceptance of human limitations and powerlessness. In keeping with this tradition, Alcoholics Anonymous tested ideas, not on the basis of some revelation or dogma, but against the reality of everyday living. If a thought or idea didn't fit their own experience, it was rejected. More than anything else, A.A.'s Twelve Steps came to embody a spirituality that works, offering not just theory or technique, but a way of life and a way of thinking with a language, traditions and insights uniquely oriented to the realities of twentieth century living.

 In that collision between the old and the new, a spirituality many thousands of years old was both rediscovered and re-created. At the heart of this rediscovery was the telling of stories. Once upon a time, in the midst of sorrow and in the presence of joy, both mourners and celebrants told stories. Especially in times of trouble, when "a miracle" was needed and the limits of human ability were reached, people turned to storytelling as a way of exploring the fundamental mysteries: Who are we? Why are we? How are we to live? These most basic questions are spiritual questions, and so the stories that people told concerned spirituality. They also concerned imperfection--the limits experienced by those subject to failures of knowing and to other "unables" and "cannots." Without imperfection's "gap between intentions and results," there would be no story.

 When the founder of Hasidic Judaism, the great Rabbi Israel Shem Tov, saw misfortune threatening the Jews, it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted.

 Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Maggid of Mezritch, had occasion for the same reason to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say, "Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer." Again the miracle would be accomplished.

 Still later, Rabbi Moshe-leib of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say, "I do not know how to light the fire. I do not know the prayer, but I know the place and this must be sufficient." It was sufficient, and the miracle was accomplished.

 Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhin to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God, "I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer and I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient."

 And it was sufficient.

 For God made man because he loves stories.⁸

 Listening to stories and telling them helped our ancestors to live humanly--to be human. But somewhere along the way our ability to tell and to listen to stories was lost. As life speeded up, as the possibility of both communication and annihilation became ever more instantaneous, people came to have less tolerance for that which comes only over time. The demand for perfection and the craving for ever more control over a world that paradoxically seemed ever more out of control eventually bred impatience with story. As time went by, the art of storytelling fell by the wayside, and those who went before us gradually lost part of what had been the human heritage--the ability to ask the most basic questions, the spiritual questions.

 "One of our problems today is that we are not well-acquainted with the literature of the spirit," the mythologist Joseph Campbell observed. "We're interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour." Thus distracted, we no longer listen to those "who speak of the eternal values that have to do with the centering of our lives."⁹

 "The news of the day and the problems of the hour." We have inherited a world that has lost all real sense of time. Our most common complaint is that we "have no time." We modern people are problem-solvers, but the demand for answers crowds out patience-- and perhaps, especially patience with mystery, with that which we cannot control. Intolerant of ambiguity, we deny our own ambivalences, searching for answers to our most anguished questions in technique, hoping to find an ultimate healing in technology. But feelings of dislocation, isolation and off-centeredness persist, as they always have. What do we do with this confusion and this pain? How do we understand that inevitable part of life captured in the term Angst--the anxiety and anguish that seem an essential part of being alive today?

 Spirituality hears and understands the pain in these questions, but its wisdom knows better than to attempt an "answer." Some answers we can only find. They are never "given." And so the tradition suggests: Listen! Listen to stories! For spirituality itself is conveyed by stories, which use words in ways that go beyond words, to speak the language of the heart. Especially in a spirituality of imperfection, a spirituality of not having all the answers, stories convey the mystery and the miracle--the adventure--of being alive.

 The great master Mat-su, as a youth, was a fanatic about sitting in meditation for many hours at a time. One day, his patriarch's disciple Huai-jang asked him what on earth he hoped to attain by this compulsive crosslegged sitting.

 "Buddhahood," said Mat-su.

 Thereupon Huai-jang sat down, took a brick, and started to polish it assiduously. Mat-su looked at him, perplexed, and asked what he was doing.

 "Oh," said Huai-jang, "I am making a mirror out of my brick."

 "You can polish it till doomsday," scoffed Mat-su. "You'll never make a mirror out of a brick!"

 "Aha!" smiled Huai-jang. "Maybe you are beginning to understand that you can sit until doomsday, it won't make you into a Buddha."¹⁰

 If that story speaks to the limits of our endeavor, this story suggests the hope and ultimately the promise of our shared journey:

 Time before time, when the world was young, two brothers shared a field and a mill. Each night they divided evenly the grain they had ground together during the day. Now as it happened, one of the brothers lived alone; the other had a wife and a large family. One day, the single brother thought to himself, "It isn't really fair that we divide the grain evenly. I have only myself to care for, but my brother has children to feed." So each night he secretly took some of his grain to his brother's granary to see that he was never without.

 But the married brother said to himself one day, "It isn't really fair that we divide the grain evenly, because I have children to provide for me in my old age, but my brother has no one. What will he do when he is old?" So every night he secretly took some of his grain to his brother's granary. As a result, both of them always found their supply of grain mysteriously replenished each morning.

 Then one night the brothers met each other halfway between their two houses, suddenly realized what had been happening, and embraced each other in love. The story is that God witnessed their meeting and proclaimed, "This is a holy place--a place of love--and here it is that my temple shall be built." And so it was. The holy place, where God is made known, is the place where human beings discover each other in love.¹¹

 The spirituality of imperfection is such a place.

 Footnotes

 1. Francis Vincent's observation is taken from a speech he gave at Fairfield University, as reported under the title "Education and Baseball," America 164:13 (6 April 1991), 372-73.

 2. The "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly" quotation is from Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond (Philadelphia: Dufor Editions, 1963; orig. 1937), p. 55.

 The Rabbi Zusya story, which is often retold, may be found most conveniently in Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters (New York: Schocken Books, 1947), p. 251.

 3 . On the connection between perfectionism and the "modern," see Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990), and Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York Macmillan-Free Press, 1990). For a brief summary of the overall point, see the review of Isaiah Berlin's The Crooked Timber of Humanity by Conor Cruise O'Brien in The New York Review of Books of 25 April 1991, "Paradise Lost."

 4. The context here is well-set by Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (Garden City, NY: Doubleday-Image, 1975), vol. 2, pp. 437-38.

 5. This story, often retold, is based on details drawn from many sources, as reported in Ernest Kurtz's research study, Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous (Center City, MN.: Hazelden Educational Services, 1991).

 6. The best-known statement of this perception appears in the wording of the American Public Health Association's Lasker Award, awarded to Alcoholics Anonymous in 1951, which may be found reprinted in Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age (New York: Alcoholics Anonyrnous World Services, 1957), p. 301. Other early statements were offered by the philosopher Gerald Heard, "The Ad Hoc Religions," Fortnight, December 15, 1954; and the psychologist O. Hobart Mowrer, "Alcoholics Anonymous and the 'Third Reformation,'" Religion in Life 34 (1964), 383-97. More recently, the idea can be found in several articles in a specia1 issue of Journal of Psychoacttve Drugs 19:3 (July-September 1987).

 7. Because such detailing seems useless as well as unnecessary, we choose not to offer specific citations to the Wilson correspondence.

 8. This story is retold in many versions. Perhaps the most accessible source is its appearance as the frontispiece of Elie Wiesel, The Gates of the Forest (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967). This is a translation (by Frances Frenaye) from the French, Les portes de la for�t. In Souls on Fire (New York: Summit Books, i972), pp. 167-68, Wiesel ends this story more somberly instead of the concluding "God made man because he loves stories," there appears this italicized paragraph: "It no longer is. The proof is that the threat has not been averted. Perhaps we are no longer able to tell the story. Could any of us be guilty? Even the survivors? Especially the survivors."

 9. Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 3. Those interested in the power of Campbell's thought will find most useful his first large work, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949). For a fuller perspective on the great myth teacher, see also Fred Siegel, "Blissed Out & Loving It: The Eighties & the Decline of Public Life," Commonweal 117:3 (9 February 1990), pp. 75-77, and perhaps especially Brendan Gill, "The Faces of Joseph Campbell," The New York Review of Books (28 September 1989), pp. 16-19.

 10. This story appears in several slightly varying versions; we rely here especially on Frederick Franck, "The Mirrors of Mahayana," Parabola 11:2 (May 1986), p. 66.

 11. We borrow this version from Wilkie Au, By Way of the Heart (New York Paulist Press, 1989), p. 46, who cites Belden C. Lane, "Rabbinical Stories: A Primer on Theological Method," Christian Century 98:41 (16 December 1981), pp. 1307-8. Versions of the story also appear in William Bausch, Storytelling: Imagination and Faith (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1984), pp. 68-69, and Anthony de Mello, Taking Flight (New York: Doubleday-Image, 1990), p. 60.

Excerpted by permission of Bantam Books fromThe Spirituality of Imperfection, copyright (c) 1994 Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham.

©2011 JACS
135 West 50th Street, 6th Floor · New York, NY 10020
Phone: (212) 632-4600 · Fax: (212) 399-3525 · jacs@jacsweb.org
[JBFCS site] [Jewish Connections Programs]