Quotes from Ernest Kurtz

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.

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.

To acknowledge, to accept, and to forgive one's parents - both what they gave and what they did not give, both one's dependence upon them and one's independence of them - is the ultimate hallmark of maturity: a perception as valid for institutions as for individuals.

Humility and obedience are two painfully misunderstood virtues that are really the arts of listening. Humility involves the refusal to coerce, the rejection of all attempts to control others.

Spirituality is experienced in our Listening, in our Forgiveness, in our Dark places, in our Confusions, in our stories—not so much in what we "do," but in what and how we be . . . by how we experience the realities that we meet. Spirituality is, in briefest description, a way of life—a way of being.

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.

I'm Not All-Right, and You're Not All-Right, But That's Okay—THAT'S All-Right

As we listen, truly hearing, our understanding of the world changes from a self-centered focus to an other-oriented openness—we come to understand how we are connected

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.

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 HAMMARSKJÖLD

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.

It's nice to have moments when I'm not thinking about me.

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.

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.

Those who lack gratitude's vision do not possess things; things possess them. And that is misery.

a journey becomes a pilgrimage as we discover, day by day, that the distance traveled is less important than the experience gained.

The essence of tolerance lies in its openness to difference.

My dear, do you want forgiveness … or an explanation?

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.

The remedy for "keeping something to oneself" is not "letting it all hang out," which is a modern-day perversion of pervasiveness.

not some thing we have. . . . Prayer has nothing to

who think of themselves as "spiritual rather than religious" tend to equate religion with belief, and therefore with doctrine and authority; with

Influenced by the events surrounding him, Bill Wilson began and ended his portrayal of A.A.'s Twelve Steps as "a way of life" by stressing the continuing necessity of the total deflation of even a raised "bottom" and the persistence in even the "recovering alcoholic" of childishness, immature grandiosity, and infantile defiance.

Listening to stories and telling them helped our ancestors to live humanly—to be human. 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.