Let’s think together about the Myth of Perfection.

We have evolved scientists . . . and so we know a lot about DNA, but if our kind of mind had been confronted with the problem of designing a similar replicating molecule . . . we’d never have succeeded.  We would have made one fatal mistake: our molecule would have been perfect. . . . The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA.  Without this special attribute we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.
                                     Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail

What is it about humankind that assumes that because we find ourselves to be lacking in a variety of ways there must be something or someone or some place in which there is no lack?  If we find that our power is limited, is it necessary to assume that there is, somewhere, somehow, something that is omnipotent?  If we discover ourselves to be finite, is there necessarily an infinite?  Since we are less than all-knowing, must there be omniscience?  Less than complete, a completeness?  Less than ultimate, an ultimacy?

Aren’t these ideals, abstractions set up by humankind, and as unprovable as they are unreachable?  (Is infinity, as a mathematical principle, an exception?  I don’t know.  Or is it of the same order of abstraction for mathematicians as omniscience and omnipotence are for theologians?)

However abstract and unmeasurable these ideals are, we humans adopt them as measuring sticks and find ourselves to be wanting, to be less than ideal.

Why do we do this to ourselves?  Why do we put ourselves down this way?  And why do we keep ourselves down by creating religions that define us over against perfection, that define us as sinners in some primordial sense?  (And what is so perfect about a creator who would design us to be sinners?)

To be sure, we experience a world that transcends us.  We stand in awe and reverence before beauty that is beyond our ability to create, as in a glorious sunset, or truth that we can only glimpse or sense, as in an intuition about the nature of the cosmos, or goodness, as in the concept of liberty and justice for all, all ideals that defy our best efforts to attain. Can we build a religion that draws us toward these ideals and that encourages our best efforts rather than emphasizing our limitations?

I would prefer a religion in which humankind is seen as “only a little lower than the Angels,” “the salt of the earth,” “the light of the world,” rather than “sinners.”  This would be a religion of loving encouragement rather than shame and blame, a religion of St. Jesus rather than St. Paul.

When we posit perfection, totality, ultimacy, none of which match our experience, are we not simply adding to our list of “either/ors,” along with human/divine, natural/supernatural, sacred/secular, etc.?  I have written elsewhere that our Western propensity for defining by duality is a self-defeating process.  When we set up these false dichotomies we rule out all possibility of gaining the enrichment that is to be found in a “both/and” universe, particularly the possibility that we are both human and divine, that “God” is incarnate, embodied not only in Jesus but in all humankind.

In Robert A. Johnson’s parlance, “What did you expect?”  What can we reasonably expect of ourselves?  Not perfection, except perhaps to be perfectly who we are, warts and all.  Neither omniscient nor omnipotent, neither totally loving nor completely fair, but the best we can be here and now, given who we are.  Can’t that simply be “good enough”?

After all, isn’t that what God is reported to have said (and who was there to report it anyway?) when he looked out on his creation?  He found it "good.”  Not perfect, but good.

I would opt for that rather than for a humankind that begins its journey in the mythical paradise of Eden and lives for the hope of the equally mythical paradise of Heaven.

Many of us were brought up with the New Testament admonition to “Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.”  More recently, at least one version of the Bible translates it as “be compassionate, as God is compassionate.”  I am told that “perfect” has also had the meaning of “having all its parts,” as when the doctor reports to the mother of the new-born that her baby is perfect, meaning that it has all ten fingers and all ten toes.  The Latin root means “thoroughly made or done.”  (One might say, “not half-baked.”)  So perfection means, perhaps, wholeness, and it is the one who has it all together, the whole person, who expresses that wholeness by being compassionate.

At a certain stage of life, a stage of immaturity that has nothing to do with chronological age, one seeks to deserve love and acceptance by conforming to the expectations of one’s peer group.  Only with maturity does one come to the realization that the opposite is true, that it is our departures from the norm, our blemishes that endear us to those who matter.  We become lovable, not because we look or dress or act like everyone else but because of our uniqueness, not because of our perfection, but precisely because we are not perfect when compared with some external standard.

Have we spent too much of our lives trying to “get it right”?  What standard have we been trying to live up to?  If we want to be perfect or to do something perfectly, then we doom ourselves to failure.  In the words of Sophia Lyon Fahs, “some beliefs are like blinders [which] weaken self-hood [and] blight the growth of resourcefulness .”  She urges us to find beliefs that “nurture self-confidence and enrich . . . feelings of personal worth.”

The myth of perfection has for too long controlled us (me, at least).  I hope I have given it up, both as a description of Ultimate Reality – omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, the epitome of justice – and as the standard by which I measure my life and its actions.  Instead, I look within and seek to express with compassion the wholeness that I find there.

And to accept failure as a learning opportunity.

And to praise second chances.

And that’s good enough.
 

This “Musing” is offered with thanks to the Reverend Wendy Fish for her sermon, “Getting It Wrong” and for G. Peter Fleck’s book, The Blessings of Imperfection: Reflections on the Mystery of Everyday Life.  Thanks also to Plato who early on knew the difference between the ideal and the real.

 

(Copyright 1999 by C. Grey Austin, all rights reserved.)

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