The problem I and so many others have always had with spirituality is the idea that only saints can be truly spiritual. People who never get angry or say or do anything they regret. Those of us with complex or mercurial temperaments are deemed to be too human to be truly spiritual.

I’ve been working on my spirituality for decades now; it was Thomas Merton and his writing that drew me to the country in the first place; like him, I yearned for solitude and the space and quiet to think and meditate about who I wished to be.

I admit that I did think a bolt of lightning from God would get me where I wanted to go, a holy moment, a moment of revelation,  a burst of light, and I would be a truly spiritual man, a man of peace and love and compassion.

That, I know now, is Hollywood’s idea of the spiritual man; it is not reality.

After years of working on it, I remain a person with A schizophrenia temperament, lurching back and forth from anger and anxiety to peace and empathy.

“Well,” said a friend, a fellow seeker, “at least you are interesting.”

I am a person of Temperament; there is a lot of anger and intolerance in me, it bursts out now and then, and sometimes there are bursts of love and compassion in me. I think both occupy equal parts of my soul, and I sometimes despair of shedding the angry one. I’m not even sure it’s something I ought to go.

I’ve learned to love myself if I ever wish to be loved. I am who I am; I don’t believe I can become someone else. I don’t believe I want to.

I forgot for a while what Merton wrote about it and remembered it recently: “Temperament does not predestine one man to sanctity and another to reprobation. All temperaments can serve as the material for ruin or salvation. We must learn to see that our Temperament is a gift of God, a talent with which we must trade until He comes.”

Merton taught me that I didn’t have to be a saint to be a spiritual person. He acknowledged that he had much anger and doubt in him. He fought with his bishop for many years.

It doesn’t matter how complicated a temperament I might be endowed with. If I make good use of what I have, if I make it serve my better angels and desires, I can do better than someone who merely serves his Temperament instead of making it serve him.

I often get angry in the name of good, and I am coming to terms with this. I sometimes get more done in that way; I do not have a subservient or worshipful personality.

But I do wish to do good and have done more than I ever imagined possible, even as the flawed and confused person I am.

I hate no human being – expect possibly hypocrites, the lowest form of life on the earth to me – but there are things about our society that I dislike intensely.

The elderly have been abandoned; they struggle primarily alone in the darkness. More and more, we blame the poor for being poor and the refugee for being desperate.

As a culture, we have turned away from empathy and towards grievance, anger, and judgment.

We have forgotten – many Christians especially –  Jesus’s call from the mount to care for the needy and the vulnerable.

For me, spirituality is just the opposite: it is about mercy and forgiveness at its core. You do good when you can, and as much as you can.

I was relieved to understand that I didn’t need to be a saint to be a spiritual person; I just needed to want to be spiritual and to do good. That’s all it takes. If you want it, it is yours, one of the few things you can choose for yourself and that no one can take from you.

I am no Christian, but I wear the cross in a necklace every day over my heart. Jesus was the most spiritual person I know of in all of human history. He inspires me every time I touch the cross to do good. That is what spirituality means to me.

St. Thomas said in the Bible that a man is good when his will takes joy in what is good, evil when his will takes delight in what is wrong. I am virtuous when I find happiness in a moral life, writes Thomas,  sinful when I take pleasure in a sinful life.

Other people are always trying to define me, but they can’t: the things that I love tell us all who I am.

A temperamental man or woman may be more inclined to anger than another.

But as long as he remains sane, they are still free not to be angry.

Anger, at times, can be turned either to good or evil, depending on our wishes.

If I desire evil, my temper could become a weapon of evil, even against my own soul. If I desire what is good, my temper can become a controlled instrument to help other people overcome the obstacles they face in the world.

And above all, I’ve learned this about my search for the spiritual life: I must worship the truth and face it: first about me, and then about the world beyond me because I can’t do one without the other.

“There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life,” wrote Merton, “than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our strong relations with realities outside and above us. When our life feeds on unreality, it must starve. It must therefore die.”