After dropping out of school when failing to complete a senior art thesis in my first year at Antioch College, I needed some direction in my life.

Seeking the opposite of my previously unstructured life, I enrolled at a Zen monastery in the Catskills for a few months. On the long and winding bus ride from the airport I rehearsed it all in my head– ascetic practice, meager food, and brutal awareness were going to be mine. Stoic monastics would instruct me, reforge my will out of iron, and I’d get stronger every day. The training montage is one of my favorite cinematic devices: years of careful study and progress get compressed into a quick series of cut scenes where our protagonist masters a discipline in a few minutes.

That fantasy didn’t last too long.

I spent four months meditating on my own in a tiny dorm room. I felt like I was on the shore of some greater understanding. I could feel the cold waters of enlightenment lapping at my feet but I just couldn’t seem to get any deeper no matter how hard I focused.  That shore that I was standing on was mostly a heroic daydream culled from a lifetime of comic books and martial arts movies. I hadn’t been practicing meditation to understand the human condition- I had been working hard and pushing my will because I wanted something more out of my life. During my stay I was exposed to several paths but none of them were the hero’s journey that I figured accompanies great understanding. I was given wise counsel to let go of my personal spiritual melodrama and to embrace the present.

Sisyphus was famously punished for his great escape from the underworld by being sentenced to push a boulder up a hill for the rest of his afterlife. His passion for life is cruelly replaced with eternal and pointless labor. Every time he gets the boulder to the top of the hill it rolls back down and he must start again. Albert Camus argued in 1942, in The Myth of Sisyphus, that our lives are not too different from this tragic hero, and I’m inclined to agree with him. When Sisyphus watches his boulder roll back down to the bottom of the hill he can fall to despair, and how could you blame him for that, or he can acknowledge the absurdity of his fate.

In my work I have been privileged to be with countless people as they died and to care for them and their families. I have worked with colleagues of different faith traditions to try to understand one another and to find a way to be in the world together which encourages mutual flourishing for everyone. I have been blessed to be able to serve others in these ways and to participate in countless other amazing ministries. But what price have I had to pay for these experiences? My work as a hospital chaplain was both emotionally draining and rewarding. Interfaith dialogue can be infuriating but it can also allow for connection with people and ideas which provide growth and wisdom that may well heal the world. One thing is clear to me in all of this: in imagining a world better than this one, and forming ourselves accordingly, we are bound to fail.

This may seem fatalistic, but for me it is a source of hope and inspiration. People, more than ever before, tend to describe spirituality and religion as separate phenomena which can exist independently of one another. The birth of this perspective partially owes its origins to abuses of power by religious authority, but the schism between religion and spirituality can also be traced to unfulfilled promises of the religious imagination. Whether it be the Rapture, which has yet to take the righteous to the heavens, or collective yearnings for social equality expressed by preachers during the 60’s, we almost never get to see our religious ideals manifest in this world. While this lack of coming-into-being is not new to the human condition, we are a resilient species and we find new ways to cope every day. By pulling spirituality out of the religious context, a seeker has a way to be inwardly focused without relying upon a greater whole for fulfillment. Binding yourself with others is at the heart of religious experience. Religion is about the sum of parts being greater than the whole.

Throughout my experience I have never encountered this transcendent mathematics. I have never seen a sum greater than the whole, but it is the world that I dream about. In following my ideals I have often been disappointed, failed to find what I was looking for, and risked burning out. We were born to fail where ideals are at play. None of us, no matter how wise we are, is flawless. This seems to be our condition, and I bear no ill will to those who choose to turn away from religious solutions to the problems we face today. I, however, have learned through the process of my own formation that while I will fail when I seek to be more than I am, that growth is still possible. And while its path is rarely the one that I had envisioned, its rewards are too bountiful to decline.

Though I never said it out loud, I was hoping to be finally be immersed in the training montage that I’d been waiting for when I decided to enroll in seminary four years after my experience at the monastery.  I hoped the process of ministerial formation might be that epic journey of self discovery where I could learn to be better than I was. I thought that I would become more virtuous, I would learn “the way” to do ministry, and finally be Fulfilled, the reward for splashing around for ages looking for the thing that was right for me.

My seminary education has made me a better person. My mentors and colleagues helped shape who I am and continue to do so today. In many ways that person is better than the man who first walked through the doors of Meadville Lombard. However, those who don’t remember the past are typically doomed to repeat it. So you can imagine my surprise when all of my teachers turned out be living, breathing, flawed human beings. There was no supernatural advisor waiting in the shadows to teach me to what I wanted to learn, just trial and error and good deal of compassion.

In facing our condition we become free from it. While success may be an impossible goal in a religious context, once we have encountered that absurdity we are finally free to start re-imagining the world. In both my early Zen practice and my current Unitarian Universalist seminary experience I have failed again and again. While I have yet to be able to achieve my dream of inspirational music blaring in the background as I zip through becoming a better person and changing the world, just aiming for it has been rewarding. All of us are born to fail and that makes our growth and achievements all the more awe inspiring.