The Spirituality of Imperfection Quotes

“One of the disconcerting and delightful teaching of the master was: "God is closer to sinners than to saints."
This is how he explained it: " God in heaven holds each person by a string. When you sin you cut the string. then God ties it up again, making a knot-and therby bringing you a little closer to him. Again and again your sins cut the string-and with each further knot God keeps drawing you closer and closer.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“The question "Who am I?" really asks, "Where do I belong or fit?" We get the sense of that "direction" -- the sense of moving toward the place where we fit, or of shaping the place toward which we are moving so that it will fit us -- from hearing how others have handled or are attempting to handle similar (but never exactly the same) situations. We learn by listening to their stories, by hearing how they came (or failed) to belong or fit.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“I’m Not All-Right, and You’re Not All-Right, But That’s Okay—THAT’S All-Right”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“The message of all spirituality is that, in some mysterious way, we are all one—that therefore the joy and the sorrow of any one of us is the joy and the sorrow of all of us.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“Spirituality is one of those realities that you have only so long as you seek it; as soon as you think you have it, you’ve lost it. In rediscovering this basic spiritual insight, the earliest members of Alcoholics Anonymous tapped the essence of open-endedness that characterizes a spirituality of imperfection. Spirituality is boundless, unable to be fenced in: We do not capture it; it captures us. As much as we might like to “wrap things up,” to lock spirituality in and hold it fast, it will forever escape our grasp.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“Humor, humility, humanity … we cannot work on one without working on the others. We cannot have one without having the others. To attend to any one of the three begins the process of bringing us home—home to ourselves, to the mixed-up-ed-ness of our human be-ing. Home is the place where we can be ourselves and accept ourselves as both good and bad, beast and angel, saint and sinner. Home is the place where we can laugh and cry, where we can find some peace within all the chaos and confusion, where we are accepted and, indeed, cherished by others precisely because of our very mixed-upedness. Home is that place where we belong, where we fit precisely because of our very unfittingness. Humility allows us to find the fittingness in our own imperfection.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“William James, in his “Talks to Teachers,” derided that “ceaseless frenzy” in which we always feel that we “should be doing something else.” The ceaseless frenzy, the race through life, are symptomatic of the numbing of spirituality.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“But through the centuries a recurring spiritual theme has emerged, one that is more sensitive to earthly concerns than to heavenly hopes. This spirituality—the spirituality of imperfection—is thousands of years old. And yet it is timeless, eternal, and ongoing, for it is concerned with what in the human being is irrevocable and immutable: the essential imperfection, the basic and inherent flaws of being human. Errors, of course, are part of the game. They are part of our truth as human beings. To deny our errors is to deny ourself, for to be human is to be imperfect, somehow error-prone. To be human is to ask unanswerable questions, but to persist in asking them, to be broken and ache for wholeness, to hurt and to try to find a way to healing through the hurt.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for those who have been there. Ross V.,”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“Life hurts—where is there growth without suffering?”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“Without imperfection [...] there would be no story.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“The problem with organized religions, Bill Wilson once explained, "is their claim how confoundedly right all of them are.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“The essence of tolerance lies in its openness to difference.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“When we accept ourselves in all our weakness, flaws, and failings, we can begin to fulfill an even more challenging responsibility: accepting the weakness, limitations, and mixed-up-ed-ness of those we love and respect. Then and only then, it seems, do we become able to accept the weakness, defects, and shortcomings of those we find it difficult to love.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“Those who lack gratitude’s vision do not possess things; things possess them. And that is misery.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“a journey becomes a pilgrimage as we discover, day by day, that the distance traveled is less important than the experience gained.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“We are all looking for, but we find what we are looking for only by being looked for. We find miracle only when we stop looking for magic.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“The spiritual teachers universally recognized as “great” did not give commandments nor did they impose their way of life on others. They knew that when any “map” was mistaken for the territory, it became more hindrance than help. And so they invited their followers to question the handed-down maps by making available their own maps—their own stories. Rather than trying to tell their listeners’ stories, rather than imposing interpretation, the sages and saints told the kind of stories that invited identification.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“We modern people are problem-solvers, but the demand for answers crowds out patience—and perhaps, especially, patience with mystery, with that which we cannot control.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“The search for spirituality is, first of all, a search for reality, for honesty, for true speaking and true thinking. At least from the time of the Delphic oracle’s first admonition, Know thyself, the arch-foe of spirituality has been recognized to be “denial”—the self-deception that rejects self by attempting to repudiate the essential paradox that is our human be-ing.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“who think of themselves as “spiritual rather than religious” tend to equate religion with belief, and therefore with doctrine and authority; with”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“My dear, do you want forgiveness … or an explanation?”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“what one is.”9 A spirituality of imperfection suggests that spirituality’s first step involves facing self squarely, seeing one’s self as one is: mixed-up, paradoxical, incomplete, and imperfect. Flawedness is the first fact about human beings. And paradoxically, in that imperfect foundation we find not despair but joy. For it is only within the reality of our imperfection that we can find the peace and serenity we crave.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“Spirituality is a reality that must touch all of one’s life or it touches none of one’s life. Spirituality is pervasive for the same reason that spirituality cannot be analyzed: the spiritual has no parts. And because the spiritual has no parts, it cannot touch only part of us. Spirituality’s pervasiveness, then, has two dimensions: “The spiritual” not only touches all of our surface—it penetrates to all of our depths. We must live it, think it, feel it, and, most important, act it in our own lives, for only if we do it, only if we practice it, will we come to understand what it is.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“Then, in November 1934, Bill Wilson had his last drink, and in May 1935, he happened into Bob Smith’s life. On that Sunday evening, as the two men alternately sat and paced for more than five hours in the library of Henrietta Sieberling’s residence in Akron, Ohio, something was added to the Oxford Group message. The identification that sprang from their listening to each other helped both Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith to the understanding—the vision—that the purpose of life wasn’t to get but to give … for only when you give, do you get!”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“The remedy for “keeping something to oneself” is not “letting it all hang out,” which is a modern-day perversion of pervasiveness.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“Listen! Listen to stories! For spirituality itself is conveyed by stories, which use words in ways that go beyond words to speak the language of the heart. Especially in a spirituality of imperfection, a spirituality of not having all the answers, stories convey the mystery and the miracle - and the adventure - of being alive.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“But somewhere along the way our ability to tell (and to listen to) stories was lost. As life speeded up, as the possibility of both communication and annihilation became ever more instantaneous, people came to have less tolerance for that which comes only over time. The demand for perfection and the craving for ever more control over a world that paradoxically seemed ever more out of control eventually bred impatience with story.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“Once we accept the common denominator of our own imperfection, once we begin to put into practice the belief that imperfection is the reality we have most in common with all other people, then the defenses that deceive us begin to fall away, and we can begin to see ourselves and others as we all really are.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“For women and men, for alcoholics and non-alcoholics, spirituality is one of those realities that we have only so long as we seek it; as soon as we stop seeking, we stop finding; as soon as we think we’ve got it, we’ve most certainly lost it.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning