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Very soon, my fourth book will be out. It will be in my eighth year as a book author, and many more years as a writer of articles and poems, a speaker, and a facilitator of contemplative activities. Anyone who has been paying attention to me knows that I am an advocate of contemplative practice, virtue, and especially love, as keys to transformation and unlocking our greatest potentials as human beings. Those themes are certainly present in the next book too. In fact, some of you have probably known me to say everything is ultimately about love. I love to contemplate and communicate about love. I even have a kind of personal manifesto focused on love that I included in the afterword of my third book.

With all my internal and external talk about love, I feel compelled to publicly acknowledge that me being a loving presence with others often takes a back seat to different intentions. There have been countless times when I have missed an opportunity to be more kind, compassionate, and caring. Such moments may happen because of a lack of lucidity, or of not being centered in the heart, yet there are times when I am following deep internal guidance to regard something else as a higher priority.

At 63-years of age, I’ve become very familiar with some patterns in these matters. There are surely people reading this who have seen some of my patterns as well. Probably the most common example is that when I connect with people in person, I’m typically pretty good at staying focused on them and relating with empathy, sincerity, open-mindedness, and patience. But when I’m not seeing them in person, I have often gone for very long periods of time without any outreach on my part, and have even been slow to respond to theirs. Some might say it’s the “out of sight, out of mind” syndrome, and there have been times when I have given myself a lot of grief about it. There are many factors involved in this pattern, but I won’t go into detail here because there is a point to this other than confession.

In getting to that point, I want to note that I bring to my own issues all the education and experience of decades in the mental health field, plus decades of contemplative self-exploration and self-assessment, some profound spiritual experiences, and the feedback of friends, family, coworkers, teachers, and mentors. Despite all that inner work, assistance, and the resulting insights and growth, this pattern and others are still manifesting to some extent. Why?

The eye cannot see itself.

The fingertip cannot touch itself.

Back in the 1990s, when I was in my 30s, I was already painfully aware of this truth. I recall speaking to one of my spiritual teachers about it. He nodded with a sympathetic expression on his face, and then stated he had his own recurrent shortcomings. He explained this is one of the ways we are challenged to humbly embrace our humanity, and that in doing so there is a different kind of growth we might experience. In short, he introduced me to the foolishness in the drive to fulfill our egoic ideas of “perfection.” We spoke of the complex and conflicting interplay of attitudes like pride and shame.

Since those years, I have come to see how honest humility is beautifully interwoven with gratitude, compassion, graciousness, and genuine virtue. I have also come to deeper understandings about the mysteries of my own soul and the personality’s role therein. I could speak of this development in terms of spiritual gifts, and me discovering and accepting more of what mine are and are not. But beyond the personal insights, there is also greater appreciation for how important it is to make the most of our gifts and talents rather than trying to excel in every way. There’s a school of thought called Positive Psychology that is firmly rooted in this principle, observing that people tend to be happier and more successful when more effort is given to maximizing their natural talents than to trying to overcome their weaknesses. It could be argued that we generally have a more beneficial impact on society that way too.

As comforting as these insights can be, they may also prove challenging for a Mason. To begin with, it might seem that they contradict the Blue Lodge lesson of the Common Gavel. In that lesson, a Mason is likened to a quarried stone, suggesting that each of us is being squared and polished through education, contemplation, the practice of virtue, and the support of others. We represent progression toward the idealized state with the Rough Ashlar and Perfect Ashlar. In the Scottish Rite, we even have an entire set of degrees called The Lodge of Perfection, culminating in the degree of Perfect Elu (which has the even more grandiose title of Grand Elect, Perfect, and Sublime Mason!). Given that the idea of perfection typically includes the quality of completeness, it appears that acceptance of our limitations, of our incompleteness, is anathema to Masonic teachings. How can we, in any honest way, say that perfection is an achievable goal?

About 20 years ago, Brother Ted Berry and I joined in a project to produce a set of sayings or aphorisms like the koans and parables of Zen Buddhism, but written in Masonic terminology. You can see the results at a website called Zen Masonry. (This is the second site to host our work, and it was generously developed by Brother Tom Accousti who also contributed to the content.) One of Brother Ted’s compositions is relevant to this consideration of perfection.

Perfected Ashlars

An Overseer of the work came to Grand Master Hiram Abif while at his trestleboard and said, “Master Hiram, one of my hewers keeps cutting all of his stones to dust! What am I to do?”

Hiram said, “Let me see this.”

Hiram, seeing the pile of cuttings and dust, asked the worker, “What are you doing?”

He answered, “When I remove one rough corner or impurity from my stone, I always find another that needs to be removed.”

Hiram turned to the Overseer and said, “The Eternal Temple in the heavens is built with such living stones,” and then returned to his designs.

Now, it would be foolish of me to try to explain everything implied by this little story. For now, I point out that it does not lead me to dispense with the word perfection as something relevant to our work in Masonry. Rather, in the present context it can suggest that one’s ideas of perfection may need to be reconsidered and adjusted, and in some ways even turned on their heads.

It must be said that Ted and I are far from the first Masons to ever contemplate these issues. For instance, I’ve read or heard many Masons speak of perfection as an unattainable yet inspiring goal, something worthy of working toward while never deluding oneself that it has been achieved. Another option is that there is a kind of perfection in which the things we judge as imperfections are better understood as facets on the unique gemstone of one’s life. (John Legend sings of “perfect imperfections” in his lovely song “All of Me.”) A third option is that there already is something perfect within each of us, something nameless, imageless, and formless, that can only be unveiled by letting go of everything else.

Using symbolism other than ashlars (although they’re hinted at with the term dust), each of these possibilities is woven into a poem I wrote after a powerful spiritual experience back in 2006.

Deep Within the Well of this Heart

Deep within the well of this heart,
sliding down in the silent darkness,
sinking into the caverns of spirit,
I found You, beloved One,
the hidden waters,
a mighty rushing in the stillness.

There at Your edge,
where I might have plunged
and fulfilled the fantasy
of a supreme union,
I found instead
the fear of oblivion in You,
and upon this halting
I piled remorse and shame
for my self-judged unworthiness.

Still, I dipped a begging hand
into Your ceaseless current,
washed the tear-stained dust
from this mask of sadness
and sipped a drop of Your cool purity.

Such sweet wine You are,
beloved One,
for this single taste
bestowed an unimagined sobriety,
a joyous awakening to the memory
that this resistance to Your fullness
is among the greatest gifts from You.

In these depths,
all things left within me
that had seemed to interfere
with my dream of perfection
were revealed as channels
for a unique upwelling
of Your goodness.

You created me to be Your lover,
my Beloved.
By Your will we are two
who are nonetheless one.
Never let this be undone
so long as there are others in this world
who thirst for You.

Getting back to my highlighted pattern with love, through reflections such as these I’ve come to recognize that this body, with its unique nervous system, unique experiences, and the unique personality that has formed within it, is best suited (one might even say “designed” to best express) love in some ways more than it is in others. Of course, this insight does not excuse me from accountability for failing to be loving in other ways, like being attentive, kind, caring, or compassionate with people at a distance from me. But it does help remove some of the negativity that I learned to habitually generate toward myself. That negativity was long ago rooted in the mistaken notion that it is a necessary aspect of holding myself accountable and seeking to learn and grow, and it was compounded by immature notions of perfection. In effect, these reflections facilitate loving myself in a more positive and effective way, which in turn better enables me to love others in more positive and effective ways.

So, to wrap up this particular reflection, I’m hoping that these insights might prove helpful to some of you, dear readers. My faith and hope is that, through such contemplations, everyone can more completely (dare I say more perfectly?) know and enjoy Brotherly Love, Relief, and Truth within themselves with others.

Peace