The Myth of Perfection: Being Good Enough

Rev. Roberta Finkelstein October 21, 2007

When people ask me about the essence of Unitarian Universalism, I say something like this: we are a group of diverse people, each with a unique and particular spiritual path. Our paths have been determined by a number of factors: life experience, natural bent, and choices made. One of the choices each of us has made is the choice to come together here, sacrificing a bit of our individualism in order to create a place where together we can affirm our inherent worth, celebrate our similarities and our differences, nudge each other on to greater things, and challenge each other when we stray from the path of integrity.

Those are some lofty reasons for creating a liberal religious community. At the heart of our coming together there is another reason, more basic, less dramatic, but still a truth we hold in common. As separate individuals, isolated or alone, we are simply inadequate to the task of living a complete and healthy spiritual and ethical life. Wholeness, shalom, is found in the company of others. In their book called The Spirituality of Imperfection, Katherine Ketcham and Ernest Kurtz say, “Our need for mutuality arises from our very flawedness and imperfection, it originates in the fact that by ourselves we are never enough.”

The reality is, I am not perfect, nor am I perfectible. Not as a person, not as a mother, not as a wife, and certainly not as a minister. Every day, even on my best days, I will fail to meet some of your expectations, I will be less attentive than some of you wished, I will forget something important, I will have some good ideas and some bad ideas, and I will miss having a good idea about something that really needs a good idea applied. This would make for an unbearable situation were it not for the further reality that not one of you is perfect either, nor perfectible. Not as persons, not as parents, not as partners, and certainly not as parishioners. Every day, even on your best days, you will fail to meet all of each other’s expectations. You will be less attentive than somebody wished you to be, you will forget something important, you will have both good and bad ideas, you will be unable to solve a problem that somebody wants you to solve. You will fail to be present at a time when somebody or some group really wanted you to show up.
We are a community of imperfect people constantly bumping up against our own imperfections and each other’s imperfections. And I personally believe that this is what makes us so wonderful together. People in our culture spend far too much time and energy in the relentless pursuit of perfection. If I take one more class, or read one more self-help book . . . then I can be the perfect mother or I can have the perfect relationship. We have a whole industry, the wedding industry, built on the very damaging fantasy  that a perfect wedding can set the stage for a perfect marriage! Where did all of this come from? The struggle to understand human nature, to know whether or not it is possible to achieve some kind of perfection, is one of the of the threads of thought that has been woven into Judeo-Christian theology for millennia.

In the early centuries of Christianity, few doctrines were settled, including the doctrine of human nature. Original sin was one idea, not the only idea. In the latter half of the 4th century, a man named Pelagius made quite a reputation for himself by denying that doctrine of original sin. Pelagius was an ascetic concerned about the immoral state of society. He declared that every human being has the innate ability to choose not to sin. Human free will was central to his thesis. What was outrageous about his position was that he claimed that our human ability to choose not to sin was not dependent on God. This made him pretty unpopular with the powers that be in the emerging Catholic church. He was declared heretic, and his theology was ridiculed. Human perfection without divine intervention? Anathema. End of story.

Except we all know that just because you label somebody a heretic doesn’t mean their ideas go away. Fourteen hundred years later, along came John Wesley. Now Wesley wasn’t a heretic; he believed in the necessity of the atonement. Jesus had to die for our sins and by his death we are justified. Justification came first, he taught, but once you had placed your life God’s hands, you could, using a method of intentional spiritual growth, achieve sanctification. Which some people confuse with perfection. I went to a Methodist seminary, and I remember a seminary friend returning from his first grilling by the group of people that bestows the blessing of ministry on Methodist students. He was completely blown away by the really hard theological question they had asked him. “What was it?” I asked. Looking appalled, he said they had asked him to explain the difference between Pelagianism and Wesley’s doctrine of Christian sanctification. “Good question,” I said. “What did you tell them?” Still looking completely appalled, he sputtered, “Pelagius was a heretic, Wesley wasn’t!”

“Oooh, bad answer,” I thought to myself. I admit to a certain feeling of smugness in my theological freedom, but the truth is, Orthodox Christians are not alone in continuing to struggle with the question of where betterment ends and perfectionism begins. Our own William Ellery Channing urged each of us to ‘grow our souls’. Too often we have mistaken that as a mandate to human perfection. We have worshipped excessively at the altar of progress. When 19th century Unitarian James Freeman Clarke professed his faith in ‘the progress of mankind onward and upward forever’ he may have been a bit overly optimistic.
We are in the midst of the Building Your Own Theology class right now. One of the first exercises was to identify a religious belief from your childhood that you now reject. I grew up Unitarian and then Unitarian Universalist, and the belief that I have rejected is that very same assertion that all of human history is a history of unidirectional progress.

So let us, for the sake of our souls, forsake the myth of perfectibility. It is not good for us. The writer Anne Lamott writes that “perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.” Hugh Prather, a contemporary Methodist minister and popular author of spiritual self-help books, says that “perfectionism is slow death.”
The alternative is a spirituality of imperfection. According to Kurtz and Ketcham this spiritual path is an amalgam of wisdom from such diverse sources as ‘ancient Greeks, early Christians, Zen teachers, and Jewish scholars.’ Combine these varied teachings with the insights of contemporary 12 Step programs and you have a spiritual approach that invites us to be truly and fully human. In order to accept this invitation, we need to learn the art of acceptance. Anna Quindlen wrote, “The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” So we accept the inevitability of our imperfection, but it is not a fatalistic giving up. The acceptance of imperfection is the beginning of true growth and transformation.

Along with acceptance we learn to practice forgiveness. First self forgiveness. We really do have to forgive ourselves for the fact that we will never be as good as we wish we could be. I watched a profile of Eric Clapton a couple of years ago. Clapton, as some of you may know, is as fine a guitar player as one could imagine, as well as a writer of some lovely and lyrical and haunting music. Clapton spent years in a miserable struggle with drug addiction. He was asked why, given his incredible success and wealth and popularity, he had fallen into drug use. He said, simply, that he was tortured by the fact that the music he played was never as good as the music he heard in his head. Perfectionism is, indeed, slow death.
Acceptance, self forgiveness, and forgiveness of others. If we regularly practice those elements of the spirituality of imperfection, we can embrace our true human condition: I call it good-enoughness. Freudian psycho-analyst David Winnicott posited the idea of the good enough mother. (Fathers didn’t have much to do with classical Freudian child-raising) “The good enough mother stands in contrast with the perfect mother who satisfies al the needs of the infant on the spot, thus preventing him or her from developing.” So, to be good enough is to leave room for error, for frustration, and thus for growth and change. The educational psychologist Jerome Bruner picked up on that idea of good enough mothering, positing a structure that allows children to learn by figuring out for themselves how to get what they need. Enough support is provided to keep them safe and guide them towards success, but enough freedom is provided to let them find themselves in the process. You will find that the philosophy of Young Church here is very much from that school We have a Sunday School full of good enough teachers. And good enough parents. And good enough children.

To be accepting, and forgiving, to live in a good enough world, is to come back something I said at the beginning of this sermon. That is, to be realists about the limits of our individual and personal capacities is to be realists about the need for community. “Our need for mutuality arises from our very flawedness and imperfection, it originates in the fact that by ourselves we are never enough.” And to take Kurtz and Ketcham’s statement one step further, together we are always enough. And so we come together, week after week, seeking our best selves and seeking to help each other as best we can to find those best selves. I’m pretty sure that Hugh Prather, who said that perfectionism is slow death, bases his theology on a belief in a God who will companion us on our imperfect journeys. We can’t do it alone, we need something outside of ourselves to sustain us. I agree. We can’t do it alone. For some of us, the language of God makes sense, for others it does not. But what we can all agree on is that we need each other. South Church exists because for centuries, people on the Seacoast have recognized the need for a company of fellow pilgrims. We need one another to balance our strengths and weaknesses, we need one another for encouragement and challenge, we need one another because only in community can we practice true acceptance, and true forgiveness, and true love.

This morning we have considered a doctrine of human nature that embraces imperfection and invites each of us to be just good enough. In January, when we install our new board and celebrate South Church as an institution, we will consider a doctrine of the church that extends that theology of imperfection to our communal life. What does it mean to be a covenanted people? An imperfect people who persistently make and break promises and then make them anew?
For now, let us move from words to ritual. In a moment the offering baskets will be passed. We invite your generous support of the work of this imperfect congregation. Last week, the board took a risk. They boldly decided that our culture of generosity would allow us to participate in Association Sunday. We collected enough cash in the offering basket to send $500 to the Unitarian Universalist Association and still have as much left for South Church as we do on an average Sunday. But there is more magic. An anonymous donor matched our $500, so we were able to send $1000 off to the UUA. And the UUA has a donor who has promised to match all Association Sunday collections. So we found $500 that we didn’t think we had, and it has become $2000. Let that spirit of generosity continue this morning.

Benediction (Words by Richard Gilbert)

Be gentle with one another -

It is a cry from the lives of people battered
By thoughtless words and brutal deeds;
It comes from the lips of those who speak them,
And the lives of those who do them.

Who of us can look inside another and know what is there
Of hope and hurt, or promise and pain?
Who can know from what far places each has come
Or to what far places each may hope to go?

Our lives are like fragile eggs.
They crack and the substance escapes.
Handles with care!
Handle with exceedingly tender care
For there are human beings within,
Human beings as vulnerable as we are,
Who feel as we feel,
Who hurt as we hurt.

Life is too transient to be cruel with one another;
It is too short for thoughtlessness,
Too brief for hurting.
Life is long enough for caring,
it is lasting enough for sharing,
Precious enough for love.

Be gentle with one another.