We Attain Perfection Only After We Accept and Embrace Our Imperfection

     The spirituality of imperfection speaks to those who seek meaning in the absurd, peace within chaos, light within darkness, joy within suffering-- without denying the reality and even the necessity of the absurd, chaos, darkness and suffering. 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 are part of our truth as human beings. To deny our errors is to deny ourself, for to be human is to be imperfect. To be human is to ask unanswerable questions, to be broken and ache for wholeness, to hurt and to try and find healing through the hurt. To be human is to embody a paradox, for according to ancient vision, we are “less than the gods, more than the beasts, yet somehow also both.”
     Spirituality begins with the acceptance that our fractured being, our imperfection, simply IS: There is no one to blame for our errors-- neither ourselves or anyone or anything else. Imperfection is the crack in our armor, the wound that lets God in. God comes to us through the wound. “To get at the core of God at his greatest, one must first get to the core of himself at his least” (Meister Eckhart).

excerpts from The Spirituality of Imperfection by Ernest Kurts and Katherine Ketcham

I believe that God is truly closer to sinners than to saints. It’s evident in the Gospels where we see clearly that Jesus spent so much of his time with the most wounded and marginalized people. He chose the wounded and marginalized to be his Apostles. He chose the imperfect because there were no perfect people to choose.
 

Say it out loud: There are no perfect people! I am not and cannot be perfect! And that’s OK because it is part of God’s plan. We are wounded and God is the ointment that we ache for to heal our bleeding emptiness. We allow God to nurse our wounds by accepting our imperfections and admitting that we are broken and powerless in many ways. We must own up to our errors, take responsibility for them and make peace by blaming no one-- not even ourselves. No one is to blame.
 

The ability to own up to our mistakes is the triumph of the true self over the ego. It is where human and divine embrace. It is rising above our animal nature into the nature of the Divine. It is a place of perfect harmony-- perfect love, perfect humility, perfect balance-- that can only be achieved through a living spiritual connection with God. The divine embrace allows us moments where we almost feel fully alive; where hatred is silenced by love, fear is quenched by faith and darkness is feathered with light.
 

The divine embrace is the space where we meet our true selves through God. Naked before God we can no longer deny our imperfections, our brokenness; nor can we cruelly whip ourselves with them. Before God we see the true beauty of our being-- despite it’s many flaws-- and we are at peace with ourselves. Our self-hatred dissolves as we are able to see ourselves through the eyes of God, who only sees beauty in His creation.
 

Seeing the beauty in ourselves, we too are then able to see the unique beauty in all that is God’s creation. We see it in our brothers and sisters, in nature, in every aspect of life-- and best of all-- we see it through the many flaws in all that our eyes and hearts encounter.  We find beauty and healing in the wounds of the world. We find healing in the heartbreak, in the sadness, in the despair. How? Because we now choose to face them, embrace them and feel them fully until they pass through us and take us to a higher place; that higher place being the peace and joy we eventually feel once we have faced our fears and allowed God to help us heal our wounds.
 

Love becomes are salvation, our place of refuge, and there is no place more sacred than Love. Love is the space between us that unites us. The authors of The Spirituality of Imperfection, Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham, tell a story of two brothers who raise grain together on the family farm. Both become concerned that there is not enough grain for the other. So they both steal off silently in the night and place extra grain in each others bins without the other knowing. Finally one night they run into each other and discover that they have both been aiding each other through the power of Love. They have truly embraced each other through Divine love. The story goes that “God witnessed their meeting and proclaimed ‘This is a holy place-- a place of love-- and here it is that my temple shall be built.’ And so it was. The holy place, where God is made known, is the place where human beings discover each other in love.”
 

Discover yourself in love. Make your heart a holy place. Allow God to nourish your wounds by accepting your brokenness. Open yourself to the Divine Embrace. Breathe in life-- fully aware and fully alive. Then discover others in Love-- that Holy Place where all of creation unites with God-- and allow your soul to shine!