I got involved in a thread over at the Tea House recently, and it started me thinking about bad times. Many of us see ourselves as spiritual people, and that’s easy to see when things are going our way. But when the going gets tough, and the cracks in our composure start to show, we often feel like we’ve failed spiritually.
I feel that there’s a tendency to overlook our very human limitations, we over-focus on the nice things and forget that there are other nastier traits there as well. When these traits surface, we’re shocked because we’d been so busy tending to one side of things, we’d quite neglected the other side.
These things are part of our nature, we try to pretend they’re not there and we set ourselves up for failure by trying to match up to the image we have of our spiritual idols. Thing is, they were human too, we just never got to see the nasty side of them.
When the going gets tough, we may not match up to our lofty ideals, but that doesn’t make us spiritual failures. These times can be as much a source of true spiritual development as the good times.
Casey Kochmer says:
Nicely put
In fact the tougher times are when deeper spirtual insights can be discovered many times.
1 April 2006, 3:35 pmThe Rambling Taoist says:
My word. I agree with both you & Casey. In fact, I’d go a little further. About the ONLY time we truly grow spiritually is when we face obstacles and hurdles and find ways to transcend them.
1 April 2006, 4:55 pmLittle Dragon says:
Intriguing post.
I would say that the problem with our belief that we have failed spiritually during times of trouble may be that these moments expose weak spots in our beliefs - about how the world works, our beliefs about other people as well as our beliefs about ourselves.
We can all get too comfortable with how things are - a constant questionning of where we are and where we are going might help us to weather these storms with fewer feelings of spiritual failure.
2 April 2006, 9:20 pm