Why Christianity Lacks Gurus

The East seeks the perfection of man by way of practice, by way of exercising the strength and virtue latent within him.  Thus, one can find gurus who claim, by their own strength and exercise of the right spiritual practices, found their way to Enlightenment.

In contrast, Christianity is much more like an AA meeting.  There are those who have successfully gotten on the wagon, but only by confessing their radical insufficiency for the task, placing everything in the hands of a higher power, and acknowledging their own aptitude for falling back off the wagon again.  A lot of the guys are there to confess their failures--but the most important part is that they acknowledge them.  You are not cast out of AA for failing again and again--the goal is not the perfection of a way of life, but of acknowledging your brokenness, your dependency, and placing yourself as best you can into the hands and arms and heart of ones who love you, will carry you with them in their hands and arms and heart.  No one here is striding along, confident in their own Promethean strength (if they are, they're gonna fall), nor even walking out of that meeting confident that now they've been cured, they've been healed, they're done with this and can move on.

No--the saints of AA, like the saints of the Church, remain within the organization for their entire lives, knowing that when they see their brethren who have fallen off the wagon that there, but for the grace of God, go I.  Why do some dry out and others not?  No mortal man, without really rare revelations from God, can say, and so we are not to judge, lest we be judged.  We are to love as Christ loved, to tell the truth in the fullness of love, to give up on expressing bewilderment over the sins and failings of others, over their blindness, over their ineptitude, because God puts up with the same and worse from us every single day of our lives--even from the great saints.  We are finite, and he is infinite.  We are fallen, only raised up by him.

"For the just man falls seven times and rises again, but the wicked stumble to ruin."--Proverbs 24:16

If even the just among men fall so often, what about we, the ones scraping along?  The saints went to confession all throughout their lives and received last rites at the end--no confident enlightenment there.  The only ones who went to the grave confident were those who threw themselves on the mercy of God, not the ones who'd wiped out all trace of sin--because I don't think there were any of these.  St. Thomas's confessor at the end came out sobbing, "The sins of a child!" not "He had no sin to confess at all!"