I confess to having a stereotype in my head of what the spiritual man was like, I am moving rapidly away from it. For many years, when I thought of the Spiritual Man, I thought of a cross between Buddha and the Dalai Lama, maybe with a couple of saints thrown in, a dose of Gandhi. The Spiritual Man, in my mind was quiet, soft-spoken, he had endless patience, anger and accusation rolled off him like water off of a sea lion. He had a gentle smile, loved peace and quiet, lived simply, and did not fall to the ravages of life for humans – pettiness, jealousy, anger, anxiety and impatience.

I learned to chuck this stereotype at various stops on my hero journey. Thomas Merton wrote honestly of his rage and doubt and fear, his conflicts with authority, his retreat from confrontation, his great anxiety about his writing and his choice to leave the secular life for the monastery. The Dalai Lama has written candidly that no one who worked with him at the office would describe him as gentle or patient. He throws fits, is a perfectionist, gets impatient and angry. And if you read too much about Gandhi or Mother Teresa, you learn not to read too much. Like the rest of us, the Spiritual Man knows how to put the mask on and when he can take it off.

I have met a lot of deeply spiritual people on my travels in recent years, and I have taken note of this: they are rarely quiet, their lives are filled with anxiety, conflict and anger, they experience numerous travails, punctuated by great periods of insight, self-examination, peace and change. This, I realized, is why they work on their spiritual lives – they have problems and they understand problems. Problems and struggle lead to insight and the search for peace.  The stereotype of the Spiritual Man (or woman) was impossible for me to sustain. Every time I got angry or sent a snarky message off to some annoyingly self-righteous person,  I feel like I was a failure spiritually. Every time I speak ill of someone, I ask myself if I need to do more work on me. There is this idea that if you are simply human, then you are failing in your spiritual work, if you are not that quiet and totally self-controlled man, then you are not a spiritual man.

I loved reading in Thomas Merton’s journals of his long feud with his bishop, with whom he battled constantly for  decades. Every year, when he taught the novice monks how to chant in Latin, he inserted insults and curses for the bishop which were sung in open mass by the poor and unaware young students. A Spiritual Man after my own heart.

But it is our very humanity, our own embrace and interaction with life that allows us to be spiritual, which is not the same as being perfect or completely self-controlled or flawless in our dealings with the world. We all have doubts, we all need work, there is no perfect human being.  The Dalai Lama has to deal with doctors, internal politics, troublesome employees, mood swings and chronic anxiety by his own admission, and he is on Facebook counting his likes (he has millions of them) just like the rest of us. He often speaks of the fact that none of the people who work with him recognize the smiling, gentle man who speaks all over the world to adoring audiences. That doesn’t lessen his message for me, it makes it all the more appealing.

It is a revelation to me and for me to come to understand that spirituality does not ask us to be inhuman, but to recognize our humanity and our frailty and to love ourselves all the more. I do not need to be perfect, I need to be open to change and peacefulness and decency in my dealings with the world. It is a trip that never ends, a project without deadline or end. The spiritual man (or woman) is you and me, no better, no worse. Some wake up to it, some never do.