How was your summer vacation, if you had one, that is? Notice I am not asking how your summer was because here in the Valley summer lasts till October. Though July is the official “get away” month for the minister and staff. And yes, it is good to be back in the pulpit again and see your friendly faces. But back to the question how was your summer? Did you have a perfect vacation? And if you did what did that mean for you? Was it beach time, family time, down time or vagabond gypsy time that refreshed your body and soul? To return to work renewed and refreshed is my personal idea of a perfect vacation. Now this is a good way to use the word perfect as in something ideal, something very good, an event or action that serves our purpose and lives up to our expectations. Cold water on a hot day is absolutely perfect!
But there is another way we use that word perfect that can become a heavy club we hit ourselves on the head with. As a recovering perfectionist I know that when our expectations of ourselves or others are impossibly high, when we demand of life that it always goes our way, when we look for the ideal place, person, love, religion or work yet never find it because there is always some flaw, because there is no Eden on this earth, well then perfection becomes a prison for our soul. Yesterday during my usual ritual of sermon writing I was having a very hard time. Then it occurred to me that what I wanted for this my return sermon about the blessings of imperfection was to have the absolutely perfect sermon! Have you ever tried to write that way? With an angry critic sitting on your shoulder like some nasty little gremlin from a horror movie pulling at your earlobe and whispering in a raspy voice: “ Lone, you can’t use that word, too ordinary! Not that metaphor again, that is so cliché! Stupid, stupid, stupid!” Well you get the idea. There is a difference, a huge difference between striving to do you best religiously and trying in vain to achieve perfection. One is arrogance and a trap for not only is perfection impossible but who told us we could ever get there? Would you really want to live with an absolutely perfect person? Someone who is never angry or late or tired or messy and always agree with you? Seems more like a nightmare to me. The other way to simply do the best we can with what we have or with what we are given is real and messy and hard work. It teaches us both humor and humility. But because it is honest it opens up possibilities for real love and commitment and ultimately real satisfaction.
Yet we as a nation seem to want nothing less than perfection. We demand it of our heroes and heroines. And when we find them to be merely human we cut them down to size, as they say in the South: "even lower than a snake’s belly." We live vicariously through people we will never meet. The famous live in their perfect houses, with perfect hairdos, perfect clothes, a glossy paper Eden for sale in the grocery store check out line. Meanwhile we un-famous people waiting in line are harried, tired bear no resemblance to the magazine covers. Middle aged women with graying hair, full body and comfortable shoes seldom make the front cover of Vogue.
There is a deep longing in our fast changing society for someone to believe in. But many feel so powerless that they want that someone to be better than them, perfect, a savior! With the discovery that they are all too human cynics have a heyday. See, the cynic laughs: there are no real good people. Look out for number one that is all there is anyhow, everyone else does.
Our disillusionment then becomes our excuse for doing nothing to make this a better world, for failing to mend the part of this world we can control: our own time, our own efforts and how we act toward each other.
Recently I was moved by a book called Learning to Fall, The Blessings of an Imperfect Life by Phillip Simmons. It is written after he was diagnosed with Lou Gherig’s disease. This would devastate most of us. I have known one woman myself who died from this progressive neurological disorder. You lose your abilities one by one. The balance usually goes first and then walking, your arm movements, muscle strength and in the end you can no longer speak and swallow. Your mind however is still clear. But this is not a sad book. It is full of humor and self- awareness, irony and joy. In one essay Phillip recalls how he, in his youth, went on a search for enlightenment. He studied, meditated and finally traveled to the top of the 12 thousand foot high Snake mountain range in California in search of a grove of pine trees some of them over five thousand years old, the oldest living things on earth. He writes:
These grotesque forms grow where nothing else survives in a high place of wind and snow and stone they push up their delicate offerings of green. I walked among them in silence while sheer walls of stone rose above me a thousand feet to jagged peaks, their crevices veined with ice. Turning my back to the cliffs I could look out over thirty miles of sagebrush valley to where the next peak glittered in the sunlight. If ever there was a place for transcendence this was it. On a tortured trunk of a tree several thousands years old I found one sticky golden drop of bristle cone sap which I placed on my tongue wishing for long life. Then I prepared to meditate. I sat down with my back on the trees trunk, my legs crossed, my spine erect, the gentle breeze lifting the hair on my forearms, I closed my eyes ready for a vision.I waited, quieted my thoughts and stilled my breath. It began as an itch a small one low down on my back, something that with discipline I could ignore. The itch became a tickle and moved higher on my back disturbing my focus. I held on projecting white light from my crown to the heavens seeking contact. The tickle rose to between my shoulder blades became a torment and I could hold out no longer. I scratched trying to hold onto my perfect moment. What was this thing? Was this the stirring of the kundalini energy rising up through my chakra heralding my enlightenment? No, It was an ant. I had come for a miracle. What I got was the ant. Only years later have I come to understand that the ant was the miracle.
More than in those ancient trees more than in the mountains the true nature of God was revealed to me in the humble climbing of an ant. It was the ant that returned me to the world that called me to another form of worship, the way of things ordinary and small, the way of all that is imperfect.
I agree with him. God and the Universe have a great sense of humor. Just when we take ourselves a bit too deadly seriously here comes the eternal and divine trickster, here in the form of an ant. Kutz in his book The Spirituality of Imperfection suggests that: The question is not whether we "have spirituality" but whether the spirituality we have is a negative one that leads to isolation or one that is more positive and life giving. The spirituality of imperfection begins with the recognition that trying to be perfect is the most tragic human mistake.
How often are we aware of this? A human baby is indeed perfect in all her growing glory, hungry at the right times, crying at the right times and just when parents have reached their limit of endurance smiling and cooing at just the right time. But how about the rest of us, now grown, babies? How many of us have a critic in the back of our head that demands of us that we be perfect, better, always better, have more, do more, not accept our failures or the reality that we are always works in progress? Yes, we are here to make it a better world. But we will never succeed for the world is also a work in progress. Peace is not something achieved for all times it is always hard and messy work in progress. Can we love each other as we are? Can we love ourselves that way? With warts and imperfections? We better for that is the only kind of love that is real.
Perfection can be deadly. The best example is Hitler's Germany. His so-called master race was supposed to be just that perfect, superhuman, strong, blond, blue eyed, a race that could in his fantasy do no wrong. The entire society became focused on a terrifying search for the illusion of perfection in which it became possible and even desirable to discard, kill and destroy other human beings, as long as they were defined by the state as imperfect. The gates of Auschwitz bear solemn witness to the horrors and inhuman cruelty of this pursuit.
Yet it is very seductive this quest of perfection. The critic within each of us that judges our behavior can in some of us be unrelenting, indeed merciless. Maybe that is why we look to others for that perfection we fail to find in ourselves. But that is akin to looking in the mirror. Whatever you admire in others is part of you too. Every human being has capacities for almost infinite good and evil, for creation and destruction, for caring and for hate. The choice is ours.
The truth is that it is not possible to be a perfect teacher, lawyer, doctor, spouse, parent, child etc. One can only pretend if one cannot accept failure. In Addiction to Perfection Marion Woodman, an anorexic woman describes her dilemma: "I go into various stages of perfection. When my life is organized, it is perfectly organized so that if something goes wrong. I can't just make the best of it. I totally fall apart. Everything goes." That is the mask of perfection under which we try to hide our real self. The mask becomes immovable. Once we projected the ideal of perfection onto God. But for some of us that perfection is projected instead onto one's spouse, or onto any other relationship. And as I tell nearly every couple that comes to me for a wedding or a service of union: there is no such thing as a perfect marriage. To move toward perfection is to move out of life, or what is worse never to enter it.
Life's imperfections give meaning to our human existence. Though it may not seem so at times. We stand at the sink with dirty dishes and children screaming and have just had a fight with our spouse and the news is blaring at us about yet another tragedy. Is there meaning in the dirty dishwater? I look in my calendar and discover that I am supposed to be in three places on the same day and time. My heart sinks, oh, now I have to call these people and confess my utter confusion. Failure is part of our human condition. We may not like it very much but there it is. It does not make us bad people. It is real. Accept it. Don’t dwell on it. If you have got to swallow a toad it is good advice not to look at it too long. We need to learn to forgive ourselves but we also need to learn how to forgive others. We need to stop looking for salvation in others and instead look within ourselves. This is one reason we need religion: to hold us to our better selves but also to let us know that we are not alone in our fallibility and human foibles.
So do not come here looking for perfection. We are real, with all the messy concerns that are part of life. Sure we worry about finances and canvass and calendars and plumbing. We experiment with service times and listen to critiques of the minister's sermons, which are either too spiritual or not spiritual enough. And for those in the leadership there are the seemingly endless committee meetings, the ongoing concerns about our very real space problems and the persistent shortage of volunteers for all the great things we want to do. So who wants it? Who needs it?
We do! To quote Peter Fleck:
We, all of us, the congregation and the minister, want it, because we need it. The answer is that the church, and I am now speaking of the liberal church, in spite of its shortcomings, the imperfection that characterizes everything made by humans, is better, is infinitely better, than no church. Maybe I should not have said in spite of its shortcomings but because of its shortcomings. For isn't it true that in our churches, our Fellowships, in these communities of the spirit, we accept each others imperfections, reconcile our differences, forgive and are forgiven, comfort and are comforted, love and are loved? Isn't that what the Church is all about because that is what life is all about? We have to recognize that it is imperfection that gives meaning to the human enterprise. In that sense imperfection is a blessing. (Adapted)