Being damned is quite liberating. That’s why the saved fear the damned, and why they damn them in the first place. Salvation, as too many of us imagine it, is ultimate conformity to one or another system of belief or behavior, while the damned are those who insist upon living outside that system. Authentic spiritual practice–disciplines that don’t merely mirror the imagined world of any given system of thought, but shatter the mirror to see what is on its own terms–is about living outside the system, any system.
-Rabbi Rami Shapiro, from “Standing Barefoot Before God: The Agony and Ecstasy of Writing as a Spiritual Practice,” published in Ode magazine, October 2010