I started reading a new book yesterday; it is called “The Spirituality of Imperfection” by Ernest Kurtz.  This first couple of pages were very interesting and soothing to me. I can’t wait to finish reading this book!

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.  (Francis T. Vincent Jr., Commissioner of Baseball.)

 Baseball, as its Commissioner points out, teaches that errors are part of the game and perfection is an impossible goal.  Because his thought fits as perfectly as possible the theme of this book, we offer this revision of Mr. Vincent’s insight:

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 the 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 flaw 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, but to persist in asking them, to be broken and ache for wholeness, 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 gods, more than beasts, yet somehow also both.”

 We are not “everything,” but neither are we “nothing.”  Spirituality is discovered in that space between the paradoxes 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 to first 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.”