“Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”

Leonard Cohen sang it with that voice of his that sounded as if he had spent a hundred years in a monastery and then a hundred years in a brothel, and had found the same truth in both houses. We are obsessed with perfection, with the unblemished, with the spotless escutcheon. But it is the crack that lets the light in. It is the fault line where grace begins.

Look around you. Look at the shadow side of our society, at the things from which we discreetly avert our gaze, or at which we stare with a mixture of fascination and disgust. Condemnation is everywhere. We live in an age that calls itself sexually liberated, but that – paradoxically – judges those who lose control more harshly than ever. The man drowning in pornography, the woman filling her emptiness with a parade of contacts, the man who cheats on his family for a night of ecstasy: in the eyes of polite society they are defective. They are weak, sick, morally bankrupt. We slap labels on them: addicted, narcissistic, untrustworthy.

The numbers do not lie, and they paint a picture of a hidden epidemic. It is estimated that more than ninety percent of men – and an ever larger share of women – look regularly at pornography. From a strictly theological point of view, certainly within orthodoxy, this is disastrous. It is mortal sin. It breaks the state of grace. It reduces the other, who is created in the Imago Dei, to an object of consumption. It is, in short, a great mess.

But let us look at that mess with different eyes. Let us put off, for a moment, the moralist’s spectacles and put on the spectacles of the physics of the soul. To make a truly grand mess of your life – to keep up an addiction that steals your nights, undermines your relationships, and bleeds your bank account dry – takes an unimaginable amount of energy. There is a driving force, an engine running into the red. The orderly citizen who tucks himself into bed at ten o’clock after a cup of chamomile tea does not know that energy. The sinner does.

We are too quick to condemn the “mess” and forget to look at the fuel that caused the explosion. Fire is dangerous. Fire destroys houses, burns skin, leaves nothing but ash. But fire is also the only way to find warmth on a freezing night. Fire is also what burns on the altar. The central thesis we must dare to examine, however uncomfortable it may feel, is this: the fire by which the sinner destroys himself is in essence the same fire by which the saint is purified. The difference is not in the substance of the flame, but in the direction in which it blows.

The French philosopher Georges Bataille, who mapped the abyss of the human soul like few others, understood this mechanism. For Bataille, sexuality, violence, and religious ecstasy were closely intertwined. Why do people seek out sin? Why this drive toward the excessive, toward what is ‘too much’? According to Bataille it is a desperate, often destructive attempt to break through the boundaries of the isolated “I.” We are caught in our own individuality, in the banality of useful, productive life. Sin, the orgy, the addiction is an attempt at sovereignty. It is an attempt to touch the sacred, even if this happens in a profane and ultimately disappointing way. The sinner, like the mystic, is searching for a form of continuity, for the lifting of the loneliness of being. That he ends up in the gutter is tragic, but the impulse – the urge to break the boundaries – is of a metaphysical order.

Here we encounter a concept that, in our lukewarm time, is of vital importance: intensity. The greatest enemy of the spiritual life is not sin. The greatest enemy is lukewarmness. Apathy. The “bourgeois virtue” that is nothing but a lack of opportunity or energy to sin. There is a kind of decency that is spiritually dead. It is the decency of the man who never cheats on his wife, not because he loves her with all his soul and fears God, but because he is too lazy to begin an affair or too afraid of the trouble. Is that virtue? Or is that spiritual anemia?

In the Book of Revelation we find one of the harshest sayings in Scripture: “So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.” God prefers that you be cold – an open atheist, a rebel – or hot – a fervent believer. But lukewarmness, the gray middle, is nauseating to the Divine.

The Flemish mystic Jan van Ruusbroec wrote in his Spiritual Espousals piercingly of God’s aversion to lukewarmness. For Ruusbroec, energy – the “minne” (love) – is intrinsically divine. The soul must burn. A radical sinner, someone who places his life in the balance for his desire, possesses at least that intensity. He is on fire. He lives on the edge. And paradoxically he is, for that very reason, closer to the saint than the self-satisfied citizen who supposes himself “good enough” because he does not break the laws. The sinner has the engine running already; he is only driving in the wrong direction. The lukewarm man has switched off the engine. It is easier to redirect a moving car than to set a stationary one in motion.

This brings us to the heart of what sin actually is. In New Testament Greek the word used is Hamartia. Translated literally, it comes from archery: “to miss the mark.” It is a technical failure, not an ontological wickedness. Picture that archer. He stands there, with a powerful, muscular body. He draws the bow with enormous strength – the strength of his desire, his libido, his vital force. The arrow whistles through the air with deadly speed. The energy is perfect. The stance is powerful. But he aims at the wrong target.

The sinner is no monster; the sinner is an athlete of desire who has gone blind. The addict who clicks night after night on images of naked bodies is not really seeking pixels on a screen. No one can be satisfied by colored light. What he seeks is intimacy. What he seeks is ecstasy, the “standing-outside-of-himself.” What he seeks, in the deepest recesses of his unconscious, is God.

The great mystic John of the Cross lays this mechanism bare in his analysis of the dark night. The soul, he says, has an infinite hunger. A hunger that can be filled only by the Infinite, by the “Beloved.” But by a tragic miscalculation – by that Hamartia – man projects this hunger for the Eternal onto temporal flesh. We try to slake the thirst for the ocean with a glass of salt water. And because the salt water only makes the thirst greater, we drink more, and more, and more. That is the cycle of addiction.

The intensity of sin is therefore really a measure of the intensity of the search for God. The deeper the addiction, the greater the spiritual vacuum that lies beneath. The man who is content with “a little” pleasure may also be content with “a little” God. But the man who destroys himself in excess is crying out without words for the totality of God. His sin is a failed prayer.

There is no story that better illustrates this dynamic than the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well, as described in the fourth chapter of John. It is a scene shimmering with heat and symbolism. It is the sixth hour, the hottest part of the day. The woman comes to draw water at a time when no one else comes, probably to avoid the condemning glances of the other women of the village. She has a reputation.

Jesus is sitting there. He is a Jew; she is a Samaritan. He is a man; she is a woman. He is holy; she is, in the eyes of her community, a ‘loose woman.’ By all the social and religious rules of the time He should have ignored her or condemned her.

But notice what Jesus does. Or rather, what He does not do. He does not begin with a sermon on chastity. He does not say, “Woman, do you not know that you are sinning against the seventh commandment?” He ignores her moral status entirely. Instead, He speaks directly to her thirst.
“Give me a drink,” He says. And shortly afterward: “Every one who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst.”

When the conversation finally turns to her men, Jesus says dryly: “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband.” There is no anger in that observation. It is a diagnosis. Five husbands. Five attempts to fill the void. Five times she had hoped: “Perhaps he is the one. Perhaps in his arms I will find the rest my soul is seeking.” And five times disappointed, now resigned to a sixth relationship that no longer even bears the name of marriage.

Jesus sees her lust, her disordered love life, not as proof of her depravity, but as evidence of her vast, misdirected search for Living Water. He validates her fire. He says, in effect: “You search with the right intensity, but in the wrong place. You are trying to find God in the bed of a stranger. That will not work. But that thirst of yours? It is holy.”

Augustine, no stranger to the sins of the flesh before his conversion, summed it up later in that immortal sentence: “Restless is our heart until it rests in Thee.” The eros of the Samaritan woman was restless. It was a wild, unguided projectile. But Jesus did not extinguish the projectile; He changed the coordinates of the target.

And here we run into the paradoxical usefulness of sin. Sin can act as a wrecking ball against our greatest enemy: pride (Superbia). Spiritual pride is many times more deadly than carnal lust. The man who has everything in order, who is successful, who keeps the rules and looks down on the rabble, builds a fortress around his ego. He has no need of God; he has his own morality. He is impervious to grace, for grace is by definition something one does not deserve, and he is convinced that he deserves all that he has.

But the sinner? The man who wakes up in the morning with a hangover, with the shame of the night before, who looks in the mirror and is disgusted by his own reflection? That man has lost his fortress. Sin has torn a breach in the wall of his self-conceit. He lies in the abyss. He can no longer pretend that he is “good.” His bankruptcy is total.

Ruusbroec uses the image of the valley and the mountain. Water always flows to the lowest point. Grace is like water. As long as you stand on the mountain of your own excellence, you remain dry. Only when you descend, or fall headlong, into the valley of humility, can grace flood over you.

Dostoevsky is the prophet of this insight. In his novels it is not the holy little prigs who find God. It is the murderers, the prostitutes, the drunkards. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, or Dmitri Karamazov. Why? Because in total defeat, in the complete disintegration of the self-image, the “crack” appears that Cohen sang of. Sin demolishes the illusion of control. And in that wreckage, among the shards of a failed life, there is suddenly room. Room that was not there before, when everything still seemed so perfect. The felix culpa, the happy fault. Not that the sin in itself is good, but the fall that follows breaks the heart open so that God can finally enter in.

What must then happen is what the Greeks called Metanoia. We translate this poorly as “conversion” or “penance,” and we then think of busywork or a doleful face. But Metanoia means literally “a turning of the mind,” or “a change of thinking.” It is an energetic term.

Conversion is not the extinguishing of the fire. It is not: “Stop being passionate and become a dull churchgoer.” Absolutely not. Conversion is the reorientation of energy. It is the archer who keeps his strong arm and his drawn bow, but moves his feet so that the arrow now points at the true target.

Look at the Apostle Paul. Before he was Paul, he was Saul. And Saul was no lukewarm man. He was a fanatic. He persecuted Christians with a zeal that bordered on the demented. He breathed threats and murder, says Scripture. He traveled hundreds of miles to throw people in chains. There was a gigantic fire in that man.
When on the road to Damascus he was struck down by the Light, his character did not change. He did not become a soft, passive weakling. The energy of Saul remained the energy of Paul. The man who once traveled to cities to kill Christians now traveled the world to proclaim Christ, at the risk of his own life, braving shipwrecks and floggings. The fanatical energy was the same; only the target changed. God could have done nothing with a lukewarm Saul. He needed the fire of Saul to build the Church.

The French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil wrote profoundly on the laws of “spiritual gravity.” She argued that the energy that drags the soul downward (toward sin, the earth, the flesh) is in essence the same energy that, when reversed, lifts the soul to God. “The force of the fall determines the force of the ascent,” one could say. He who can fall deeply can rise high. The capacity for evil is an indication of the capacity for good. A small soul cannot commit great sins, but neither can it reach great holiness. A great soul can derail terribly, but if that derailment is bent back by grace, a saint of the caliber of Augustine or Paul comes into being.

This is the hope we must cherish and proclaim. Not the hope that we shall become perfect and never fall again. But the hope that our fall, our hunger, our addictions, and our deepest shame are not the end, but the raw material of our sanctification.

The pornography addict, the incurable romantic, the man with the unappeasable hunger – he is no waste product. He is a potential mystic who has lost his way. He is an “athlete of desire” training in the wrong discipline.

We must stop dousing the fire. The Church, society, the moral knights – they often stand at the ready with buckets of water to extinguish every flame that flares too high. “Just be normal,” they say. “Control yourself.” Of course self-control is necessary; wildfire destroys. But the answer to wildfire is not no fire. The answer is a hearth. The answer is to channel the flame so that it gives light and warmth instead of devastation.

The invitation to the sinner is therefore not: “Be less.” The invitation is: “Become who you really are.” Your desire is too great for that website. Your desire is too great for that one-night stand. You are trying to fuel a nuclear reactor with matchsticks. Turn around. Aim that immense, devouring, dangerous passion at the only being in the universe great enough to receive that passion without being destroyed by it: God Himself.

At the end of the story of the sinful woman who washes Jesus’ feet with her tears and dries them with her hair – an act of enormous, almost erotic intimacy and self-surrender – Jesus says to the shocked onlookers: “Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much.”
There it stands. The measure is love. Not perfection, not regulation, but the intensity of self-surrender. He who is forgiven little, loves little. He who makes only small mistakes knows only small love. But he who has been deep in the darkness and has there found the Light has a power of love that can change the world.

The heaviest arrows, loosed from the strongest bows of our human imperfection, in the end – when the wind of the Spirit catches them – sink the deepest into the heart of God. Do not, then, be afraid of your fire. Be afraid of the cold. And let the light pour in through the cracks of your broken life, so that the fire within may at last find its true fuel.