The Spirituality of Imperfection by Ernest Kurtz

Author:Ernest Kurtz [Kurtz, Ernest]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-42423-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-12-22T16:00:00+00:00

And less than a hundred years later …

“What do you think of the world to come?” an admirer asked Thoreau. “One world at a time,” Thoreau replied.9

Time, of course, is one of the ultimate philosophical paradoxes. “What is ‘the now’?” asked Augustine, who intuited a fundamental connection between the conundrum of time and the mystery of spirituality. Not by sheer accident, then, did it happen that the very first name for Alcoholics Anonymous was “The Day At A Time Program.” A.A.’s earliest members recognized how the paradox of time seems singularly illuminated by the drinking alcoholic who, on the one hand, lives only in the present—for this drink, this fix—and seems incapable of learning from the past or caring about the future. The active alcoholic cannot relate to the future, to any project requiring time, and if he isn’t denying the past, he’s wishing either that he could wipe it out or that he had it to do all over again.10

On the other hand, despite that apparent alienation from past and future, active alcoholics “live only in the past or in the future … they have no present tense.” Wanting to have it all “now,” the addicted person has no “now.” Those trapped in this untimely condition, whether by addiction or some other spiritual trap, live out theologian Søren Kierkegaard’s description of the “aesthete.”

Because he denies his finitude and interprets himself as eternal, the aesthete has no sense of his own … self-development. Since for him there is no sense that he belongs to past or future, time becomes a series of now-moments which must be filled with pleasurable distractions. Although thus bound to the present, he is not satisfied with what it offers. He cannot “be here now” because he wants all future possibilities to be actualized along with the present one. There is never enough time for anything. He races through life thinking that—as each minute ticks away—he is missing out on gratification…. Because he is constantly fleeing from the disclosure of his own mortality …, [he] elects to remain locked in his own ego.11

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