Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life (8 page)

In fact, St. Augustine, the expert on sin, confession and repentance, says of it: “This is our perfection: to find out our imperfections.” Imperfection we will have always with us, it seems. And our most important discovery of it is within ourselves.

But if that is true, what is sinlessness really all about?
We live life coping with the challenge of becoming the best human being we can be. So what are we looking for? What can we possibly hope to attain? And, most of all, how sinful is sinlessness?

The temptation to perfection is a serious one. It gives the impression that such a thing is possible. And that is a dangerous spiritual condition in which to find ourselves. The problem is that perfection may not be able to be achieved but it is both easily faked and easily surrendered. And all in the name of holiness.

It is very easy to be considered perfect. All we need to do is learn to look good in public. Obey. Defer. Follow. Be quiet. It’s a child’s trick that too easily turns into an adult lifestyle. We do what the world expects us to do and the reward is instant holiness. We keep the rules of the institution. We defer to the opinions of the right people. We follow the crowd. We say nothing when the world is crying for something to be said.

And before you know it, we think we’re sinless, too. “You broods of vipers and whited sepulchers,” Jesus says to the officials in town who are only collecting the taxes they’ve been told to collect, who are only teaching what they’re supposed to teach—despite the effects of those rules on the hungry and the lepers, the crippled and the women, the foreigners and the poor.

But there is lurking in this kind of sanctity the very deepest pit of arrogance. Before you know it, we have separated ourselves from “those kinds of people.” We consider ourselves authorized to pass out large monogrammed A’s for the jackets of women who have had abortions, to hound
them in public, to cut off their right to insurance, to ignore their needs for day care and health care and full-salaried jobs. And call ourselves holy for doing so.

We set ourselves up as arbiters of the lives of those who go through life grappling with the very idea of God while we settle for law as a substitute for the God we say is Love. We want capital punishment despite the fact that our scriptures—which we read regularly—are clear: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says God. And at night, hot with anger at others, we struggle instead to suppress the memory of our own sins not yet painted on a billboard next to the sins of those we condemn. The state of our own personal lives we conceal while we present to the world around us the false smiles and false morality we reserve for those who bear their own confusion and pain for all the world to see.

The judgments we render to the world on others admit nothing about the violence of the condemnations we issue in the name of God. Anger and self-righteousness are the tools of the trade.

And so we concentrate on sin rather than on holiness. We turn God into a tyrant rather than a lover. We lose the very qualities we say we want. We spew acid on the soul of the world and call it perfection.

We batter people with what they are not to do and call it God’s word and God’s will and completely forget to teach what must be done instead. The Beatitudes—Jesus’s sermon about the other side of the Ten Commandments—we forget to teach and hesitate to risk. After all, mercy, meekness, justice, and, most of all, poverty of spirit don’t mix well with persecution, anger, condemnation, perfectionism
and religious hubris. In the name of conscience, we lose the very foundation of conscience—the awareness of our own struggles, the sense of our own frailty, the pain of our own woundedness and the limits of our own perfection.

With this kind of religion, there is no room for the love of God. The “love that casts out fear” is long gone. We are harsh on others because, in the center of us where the light shines and cannot be hidden, we do not trust the God we say we serve. It is our own sins for which we fear. It is we ourselves whom we doubt can possibly survive in the presence of a just God. Then, knowing how really weak we are, have been, will be again at the very first opportunity, we do our best for the world by condemning all the rest of those who have not condemned us as we deserve.

That is the fear, the pain, the anguish that comes in the dark of the night to torment us. It is that fear of God that drives us to despair. It is the substitution of the God of Wrath for the God of Love in us. It is the punishment we think we deserve and so project onto others. It is one of the greatest burdens of the human soul, this sense of self-loathing.

And it all comes out of succumbing to the sin of perfectionism, the failure to admit that we are not perfect, the norm of the world, the icon of sinlessness. Our only answer is Augustine: “This is our perfection: to find out our imperfections” so that we never need fear our capacity to sin against God by sinning against others.

Everybody is ashamed of something. I remember, at the age of nine, being left alone in the house of a family friend with one direction: “At three o’clock, Joan,” they showed me, “turn this knob on the stove straight up so that the black mark is pointing up to the ceiling.” Easy, I thought. “Do you promise to remember?” Of course I would.

It was after 5:00 when I remembered. It was about 5:30 when they returned. The roast was shrunken and black and ugly. Still hot, in fact. I swore I’d turned the oven off at 3:00, that I couldn’t imagine how it could have gone on again, that the roast looked exactly like that when I turned it off.

It was only a child’s fault, of course. But it heralded the impact on me of all the other choice points that would
surely follow in life: the promises, the failures, the lies. It has stayed with me all my life: the failure to keep the promise, the lie that followed the failure. It stung with a poisoned stinger that burned on in me long after the roast was forgotten and the disappointment in the eyes of those who had trusted me had faded.

Most of all, I remember the shame. Not only had I failed, I had lied. I was not the person they had all thought I was. I had put a barrier between me and people I loved. The whole scene became a template for the future. And, surprisingly, a good one.

The lifelong question now became what was worse—having to face the long-term sting of shame or bear the short-term pain of truth. And so began my journey from guilt to growth. It became what the church calls, in its explanation of sin as the reason for the coming of Jesus, “the happy fault.” The understanding of sin that comes from careless sinning itself, the necessary fault that turns our lives around, that becomes a wisdom to live by.

As I have sat and listened to people over the years, I have become more and more convinced that everyone deals, sometime in life, with a necessary fault. What’s more, I am convinced that most people need the Rubicon of the necessary fault. We must consciously begin to choose the kind of person we want to be in life. Without these choices what actually distinguishes character from happenstance in the human soul?

Most of us are not bank robbers because we have never been left alone in the bank with the vault door open. So are we honest or not? Or are we simply deprived of the opportunity to be the least rather than the most of ourselves?

The question is an important one. Do we call prisoners holy because they simply have no chance to rape and plunder, to assault and torture, to change the company books or counterfeit money? Of course not. On the contrary, we know that holiness depends on choices that have been tested by opportunities.

And, if truth were known, this is the very growth that begins in childhood when the feelings of shame emerge to supersede mere theological truisms or notions of responsibility. It is not the shame of which Jung speaks when he calls it “a soul-eating emotion.” It is the kind of shame that challenges us to the fullness of ourselves every moment of our lives. As Louis Kronenberger says, “One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame we have killed off so much real shame as well.”

Indeed, it is shame—a living inner shame, the awareness that we have not lived up to our own moral capacity—that challenges us to scale the very heights of human integrity. And it is that which, when honored, grows in us and eventually turns into holiness.

This consciousness of our own moral immaturity, this commitment to free ourselves from particular obsessions with the self, is the ultimate lesson of life. This is the time of the breaking of the chains. It is the moment in which we look into ourselves and concede—to the self—the motives and aspirations and behaviors of which we’re really made. Then, purged of the need to pose as some charade of a divinized self, we can finally really begin to grow.

Now, at this acme of self-knowledge, all things are possible and all things are clear. But, however important a time of life it may be, it is not an easy time. There is no soul-suffering
more keen than the admission of my humanity to myself: that I am not the perfect parent, that I am not the most responsible employee, that I not the most generous giver, that I am not the most selfless of the group.

And yet, this suffering is not a mortal illness; this suffering of honest self-awareness is an invitation to spiritual rebirth. This is the suffering of which the Sufis speak when they say, “Suffering is a device to turn one’s thoughts in the direction of God.” Having broken the bonds of delusion, we can at last open the self to the inbreaking of God. And shame, remember, has been the bridge to it.

What’s more, once we have faced our inner weaknesses, once we have admitted that what we said we were we have not always been, we come fully alive to ourselves as well as to others. The soul can sing. Now I have begun to grow into the fullness of integrity, into the real richness of the self. Now I am capable of anything because I am no longer a slave to my own delusions. I am free to try and fail, to compete and lose, to know what I can do and surrender what I cannot to those who can. I no longer need to be seen as anything I am not. More than that, I am happy with who I am now ready to become. I do not need to be who I am not. My struggling, honest self is enough for me.

What greater moral stability than that can there possibly be? As George Soros says, “Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.” Then there is no such thing as real failure anymore.

The story is told that when the home of Pablo Picasso, the great neo-expressionist painter of the twentieth century, was burgled, Picasso told the police that he would paint them a picture of the intruder. “And on the strength of that picture,” the French police reported later, “we arrested a mother superior, a government minister, a washing machine, and the Eiffel Tower.”

It is possible that never has a clearer word been spoken about the tense and tender relationship between confusion and creativity. Chaos is its own kind of order. Creativity is what a person makes out of the confusion. This emerging new order, forged out of disarray and shaped into vision, defies the future. In the end, creativity develops another glimpse of life previously unknown, perhaps, even to the person who manages to create it.

At the same time, confusion is something our highly technological world wars against. Technology exists to
assert the assumption that everything must have a visible function. That the function must be precisely defined. That the precision must be productive. And that the productivity must contribute even more to the order of the world around it. It is an orbit in a circle that maintains a cosmology that can be comprehended—tolerated, in fact—only by the creation of more order.

Except that confusion is part of the process of creation and so cannot, dare not, be lost in some kind of mad service to order. No less a scientist than Albert Einstein himself has confirmed the process: “I used to go away for weeks,” he said, “in a state of confusion.”

How can what appear to be two completely irreconcilable approaches to life possibly be the answer to each other? Because confusion is a beautiful thing without which no greater beauty can possibly be imagined. Confusion simply upends the expectations that form the steel frames of our lives. “Creativity,” Versace says, “comes from a conflict of ideas.”

Confusion happens when the frames of our lives, the certainties on which we have come to depend, begin to break down. Nature does not act the way we think it should. What used to be clear to us—the rationales that had kept our lives in place for years—become gray and murky. Worse, our notions about morality, artistic taste, social systems, scientific theories, one or all of the givens in life, lose their previously unchallenged place in our private, internal universe. The ways we have been taught to view the world, to make things happen, to put life together, to accept as the norms of human existence become, for whatever reasons, fallible to the point of mere mist on our old selves. Then, it is necessary
to rethink everything. As Erich Fromm says, “Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.” Then we begin, in confusion, to seek a new order of the heart and the mind and the soul.

Then we are ready to make our small world new again. Purple and yellow are no longer a forbidden color scheme, however out of style it might be right now; interracial marriage is no longer unthinkable; cars with wings are debuted at automobile shows.

Confusion stirs the habitual order of things. It throws the deck of lifestyle cards into the air and puts them back together again. Newly.

The chaos of thought rankles the soul in the middle of the night, forcing us to face the upheaval around us. It forces us finally to ask ourselves, How can we possibly survive this latest assault on the past? with a heart pried open by virtue of the fact, if nothing else, that we can no longer escape it.