Forty-five years ago I wrote a book with Ernie Kurtz that changed my life. The Spirituality of Imperfection introduced me to the wisdom of storytelling and the power of stories to heal and make whole. Over the years I have collected more than 500 wisdom stories, originally told by Hasidic rabbis, desert-dwelling Christians, Sufi mystics, Zen masters, Jesuit priests, Native American spirit guides, modern philosophers, believers, and skeptics. Every one of these stories illuminates, in one way or another, the profound truth that “I am not perfect.”
What makes a good story? Only this: that you can see yourself in the story, which is simply another way of saying that these stories provide a mirror into what it means to be human. For of all the devices available to us, stories are the surest way of touching the human spirit.
“Woman Waiting for the Moon to Rise” by Shoen Uemura (1944)
Happiness can exist only in acceptance — George Orwell
I am not perfect. You aren’t either.
Those seven words sum up the essence of this collection of stories, drawn from both ancient and modern sources of spiritual wisdom. Acceptance of imperfection, both within ourselves and outside ourselves, marks the first step toward finding a place where we fit and belong. A place we can call “home.” If we deny our basic imperfection, happiness however defined—serenity, peace, balance—will elude us.
Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash
There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened. — Charles Baudelaire
Spirituality involves an awareness that comes not through the eyes, the ears, the hands, or any specific sense but through an ever-enlarging openness to life’s experiences. One purpose of stories and storytelling is to kickstart us into heightened awareness. Stories nudge us, gently at times and with great force and urgency at others, calling us to attention. If we continue to snooze, they pull out the chair from underneath us. “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” the story exclaims with exasperation. “Time is passing! Open your eyes, wake up, and pay attention!”
Harvest in Provence, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888
God's dream is that you and I and all of us will realize that we are family, that we are made for togetherness, for goodness, and for compassion. — Desmond Tutu
Our need for community arises from our imperfect, flawed nature, for by ourselves we are never enough. We need others to help us; we need others in order to help them. Thus, the question "Who am I?" carries within itself another, even more important question: "Where do I belong?"
We find self only through the actual practice of locating ourselves within the community of our fellow human beings. 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 found a way, or failed to find a way, to fit and belong.
Toyokuni III/Kunisada (1786 - 1864)
There is a crack in everything God has made and - not least of all - in each one of us. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Good and evil coexist in the world, but the line separating them runs not between nations or institutions or groups or even individuals—the line that separates good and evil runs through the core of each nation, each institution, each group, and, most tellingly, through the core of each one of us.
In acknowledging our own imperfections and limitations, even perhaps our own potential for evil, however defined, we begin to develop compassion for the imperfections and limitations of others. As we learn to “put up” with ourselves, a growing sense of compassion teaches us how to “put up” with others. At the most fundamental level of our very humanity, compassion is the recognition that we connect with each other most healingly not on the basis of our common strengths but in the reality of our shared weakness.
Detail of “View of the Port of Miravete, Old Madrid Road” by Manuel Barrón y Carrillo, 1869
Human forgiveness is not doing something but discovering something – that I am more like those who have hurt me than different from them. I am able to forgive when I discover that I am in no position to forgive. —John Patton
Perhaps the most complicated, even confounding of all spiritual experiences, forgiveness is beyond our control, even beyond our understanding. Forgiveness happens if we are open to it, but we cannot will it to happen. We are forgiven only if we are willing to forgive, but we are able to forgive only in being forgiven.
Words fail to capture this paradoxical experience, but stories reveal how resentment, bitterness, pride, and despair fall away when we open our hearts to forgiveness and discover in the process that we ourselves are forgiven.
Photo by Nick Fewings
“You can never get enough of what you don’t really need.” — Eric Hoffer
All spiritual teachers and storytellers have asked, in one form or another, "What do you have that you have not received?" That question can lead in two directions. Gratitude responds, "Thank you." Greed demands, "More.” Those who lack gratitude’s vision of thank-full-ness for the gifts already received—and the recognition of “gift” in every moment and experience—do not possess things for “things” possess them. The yearning for more, the push to acquire more, win more, own more, have more, or even be more is a sure pathway to misery. Misery is misery because it does not know the meaning of enough.
Spirituality itself is a gift. No one "earns" spirituality, no one can acquire it or possess it, for spirituality is a reality spontaneously and freely given, and gratitude is the only possible response to that gift. With that spirit of thankfulness, from that understanding of how much has been given us and how gift-ed we are, we become able to see at work some reality higher, larger, greater than ourselves.
Andre Mouton photo on Pexels.
Be honest to those who are honest, and be also honest to those who are not honest. Thus, honesty is attained. –Lao Tzu
It’s difficult to see and tell the truth about ourselves, and that is just one reason we need stories. Aha! we might think as we read a particular story, I have experienced that before! Uh-oh! we might say, cringing with recognition upon reading another story, I have done that before!
Stories hold up a mirror of truth, allowing us to see ourselves clearly, and because the story features another person’s (or creature’s) challenge and confusion, we can look without flinching. We might even laugh out loud, for that stumbling, flummoxed, mixed-up, story-based person is oddly familiar to us, an old friend or unwelcome acquaintance who suddenly stumbles back into our lives.
Eve Bronizini, Pexels
Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is—is nothing, yet at the same time is one with everything. — Dag Hammarskjold
Humility is an ancient virtue signifying the acceptance that we are human and therefore “not God.” When we recognize the common denominator of our limitations, understanding that imperfection is the reality we have most in common with everyone else in the world, the defenses we put up to protect ourselves begin to crumble. Refusing the claim to be exceptional and rejecting all attempts to coerce or control others, humility is the embrace of ordinariness. We are good enough, even in our ordinariness.
Photo by Ron Lach
The secret to humor is surprise. — Aristotle
When we come face to face with the reality of our own imperfection, which is the reality of being human and thus the foundational truth that we share with every other human being, we can either laugh or cry. At certain moments in our lives, in fact, it seems that the most fundamental choice is to fight or laugh at ourselves.
Laughing at ourselves allows us to stop fighting ourselves. Children—and holy fools—have no problem accepting and living that truth as the stories in this section bring to light.
Illustration by EH Shepard
We shake with joy, we shake with grief.
What a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body.
—Mary Oliver
The message of all spirituality is that, in some mysterious way, we are all one and therefore the joy and the sorrow of any one of us is the joy and the sorrow of all of us. Recognizing and living that reality is not, as many people believe “relationship addiction” or "co-dependence"—it is the meaning, the very definition of, love.
When joy is shared, inevitably, so is its opposite. Grief, sorrow, pity, and pain are as inevitable and unavoidable a part of the human condition as joy and happiness. Willingly participating in another person’s happiness means that we must also share in their sorrow, for joy and sorrow are conjoined at the heart of all that we do, all that we are.
Albrecht Dürer, Praying Hands, 1508
Prayer arises, if at all, from incompetence, otherwise, there is no need for it. — St. Thérèse de Lisieux
For many of us the most difficult words to say are, “Help me.” Seeking control, refusing to let go, we harden ourselves and create a world centered solely on self. Prayer serves to loosen those restrictive boundaries and let in new voices. In silence, seeking answers from within and without, we listen ourselves into a new way of thinking, seeing, and being. Letting go of a self-centered view of the world and admitting we are not the ones in control here (it doesn’t matter Who or What is in control, just that it’s not us), we come to understand how we are connected with others who are also seeking help with their most anguished questions.
Our imperfection—our not-godness—is at the heart of prayer.
Photo by Greg Rakozy, Unsplash
Wonder is the experience of mystery. It is a fascinated recognition of great beauty where a moment before we noticed only routine; it is an attitude of amazement and perplexity, and sometimes a stunned curiosity in the face of the astonishing and inexplicable. In some way, however strange, it is often a form of homage elicited by the presence of something larger than ourselves. — Paul Brockelman
At the heart of all spirituality is a sense of amazement and surprise, the awe that accepts that we can only marvel and delight at everyday wonders: The magnificence of a landscape, the sublimity of a symphony, or the incomprehensible beauty of self-sacrificing love. Standing in awe of a reality that is unfathomably greater than “self,” we experience our relative insignificance . . . and yet, at the same time, our very capacity for wonder reveals the majesty and the miracle of what it means to be human.
Interested in receiving a new story every Tuesday? Sign up for “WORDS WITH WINGS: Soul-Searching Stories.”
PLEASE NOTE: The stories will arrive from katherineketcham.stories@gmail.com