Free Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life by Osb Joan Chittister, Joan Sister Chittister

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-sufferingmore 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.

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T HE C REATIVITY OF C ONFUSION
    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