The Myth of Perfection
A Sermon By Ken Langer
This sermon is the first in a series of four sermons I will be offering over the next four weeks. The themes of this series all come from a book I wrote while in seminary. The name of the book is “The Emergence of God” and its basic idea is that God, or Goddess, or Spirit, or whatever name you want to give to life’s ultimate reality, is not a separate being but may be, instead, an emergent property of the universe. In other words, God is not a noun but a verb.
When I was a child, my family used to visit different churches in town. We never actually stayed with one church for very long. At most we would go to the same church for several weeks then we would start visiting another. Now I am grateful for the experience because I was introduced to a variety of different churches and theologies but, back then, it was just confusing.
On one fine and beautiful Sunday I remember we went to a new church and they were having communion. This church did not do communion in the Catholic manner where everyone lines up at the front of the church to get their wafer and their wine. In this church the communion was passed along in the pews from one person to the next. First came little crackers in a small dish, then came the little cups of red juice in these large and heavy metal plates. Now, why someone thought this was a good idea I don’t know because it was inevitable that someone was not going to be able to control that plate and all those little tiny dark red drinks were going to go splashing onto someone’s new white Sunday shirt. And guess who that someone was! Of course, it was me. Somehow I didn’t have a firm grip on that giant metal dish and so by the time it reached my dad it was no longer horizontal. My dad looked like something out of an episode of Law and Order. We quickly left that church and moved on to another.
My father had at least two very annoying habits. One was that he didn’t talk about his feelings and the second was that he was a bit of a perfectionist. I suspect we kept going to different churches because he was looking for the perfect church. You know, the one with the glorious building and the awesome stained glass windows, where everyone is really nice and invites you over for dinner, where the playground has gilded swingsets and the minister is the most eloquent speaker you have ever heard, and there’s plenty of free parking. We never did find the perfect church but now I know why. It’s because there is no perfect church. In fact, there is no perfect anything. Perfection is a myth.
Our culture is obsessed with being perfect. We are bombarded by ads that claim to help make us be more perfect. Social media helps us create an image to others that suggests we are living the perfect life. People are always in pursuit of the perfect house, the perfect car, the perfect vacation. Medical ads make us believe that if we would just take the right pill our lives would be perfect.
The Greek philosopher Plato claimed that everything we know has a perfect ideal that exists in the realm of thought. He called these ideals the perfect form and, according to him, everything has one. This concept worked its way into early Christianity and has become part of our culture though we may not recognize it. Consider the text of Matthew 5:48 which appears at the end of the famous Sermon on the Mount which reads “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” The idea that there is a perfect form for everything makes us believe that we can work toward finding or achieving that perfect form. Yet, the pursuit of these non-existent perfect forms has caused a great deal of pain and anguish and has led to many less than perfect challenges.
The reality is that no such perfection exists. Attempting to become a perfect anything will only lead to disappointment at best and, at worst, can lead to more serious states of anxiety, depression, and defeat. Perfection suggests that there is an ideal ending to growth. It forecasts a state of completion but creativity is never complete. Creativity is a continuous process and all of us are creative beings. Therefore, perfectionism is a hindrance to creation.
Perfection is also a hindrance to happiness. Striving for a perfect ideal suggests that there is some kind of perfect ideal out there that can and should be attained. Often that ideal is defined by someone else or is defined in some absolute terms so that it is not possible to even achieve it. Since that perfection does not actually exist means that it can never be fully realized. The focus of the work becomes the outcome rather than the process itself. Consequently, the final perfect product is never attained.
Perfectionism can also become a justice issue when one group or person claims perfection. Stories are told about the perfect winners who defeat the less-than-perfect. The ideal of the perfect people or the chosen people looms large in the history of human cultures and often leads to the oppression of one over another. Then there’s the idea that there is such a thing as the ‘perfect society’ and all that is necessary to create it is the elimination of all that is less than perfect. But, as many utopian and, I might add, dangerous experiments have discovered, there is no perfect society and there never will be.
Normalcy is a subset of perfectionism. People who try to define and force normalcy insist that some ways of being are more correct than others. Just as there is no such thing as perfect, there is also no reality to the concept of normal. Everyone around you is not normal. I am certainly not normal. In fact, no one is normal because normal is an ideal with no true form. You are not normal and that is Ok. Like everything and everyone around you, you are unique. There has never been and never will be anyone like you. You are a novel creation of the universe but you still are not perfect because you, and everyone else, and everything else, is a work in progress. Even if you do nothing, you are already part of the creative process of the renewing universe.
For something to be perfect, by definition that something must be whole and complete unto itself. There can be no possibility of any growth or development. There can be no possibility for change. A perfection cannot be a partiality nor can it be separated. I would further argue that perfection cannot be dependent on something else to exist which, to me, means it cannot require that a human mind must first perceive it. I have chosen to build my theology on the world as I experience it without the aid of supernatural or idealistic constructs. In that framework there can only be one thing that is whole and complete unto itself and that is the totality of the universe itself. Everything else is, by definition, imperfect.
All this is to say that there is no perfect car, house, or vacation. There is no perfect job, perfect place to live, or perfect way to grow tomato plants. There is no perfect toy, perfect meal, or perfect all-in-one home Italian Cappuccino Espresso machine, though I am still searching. No one can ever be the perfect friend, the perfect parent, the perfect child, or even the perfect partner.
Perhaps the most dangerous and damaging phrase ever written in the English language are the words “and they lived happily ever after.” I am aware of no one who simply got married and then lived the perfect life for the rest of their days yet this is what is promised. There is no such thing as any kind of perfect union and I have yet to meet any couple who have lived a life together of pure bliss and happiness without having to deal with some degree of conflict and challenge.
The reason that nothing is perfect is that everything in the universe is in the process of evolving into something else. Perfection suggests that everything has an end point but that is not how the universe works. Everything is in constant motion toward renewal. In other words, we live in a universe of continual creativity. In every second of every moment of every day the world is being renewed and novel things and situations appear that have never existed before. I know that sometimes it doesn’t seem that way but when you walk out the doors of this church today the world will be completely new. The temperature will have changed, the grass will have grown, different people will have appeared, a new flower will have blossomed, time will have progressed, the earth will have moved, the solar system will have turned a little more in its arm of the galaxy, and the universe will have expanded. Whether or not you choose to take notice of these things, they will happen nonetheless and the world will be different than before.
New things are always evolving from the combination of existing things and existing things are always decaying to create new source materials. Growth and decay is the ongoing engine of creativity in the universe. This means that nothing can be perfect because it is always evolving into something that will yet evolve into something else. This constant flux means that to maintain something in a certain condition, a constant input of work and attention is needed. Maybe the phrase “and they lived happily ever after” should read, “And after many years of couples counseling, financial advising, decent child care, individual therapy, Gestalt screaming, and hot yoga, they lived a fairly manageable and pleasant life.”
A good relationship or partnership or any endeavor of importance requires constant care and attention to maintain as does a place to live, a career, a garden, or a car. The same can be said for living a good life. There is no such thing as a perfect life but there is the possibility of a good life and good is good enough.
So the next time you spill some wine on someone’s new shirt, take a deep breath and remind yourself that you are not perfect but you are a beautiful part of a beautiful universe all of which is a work in progress.
In the name of that which you hold in your heart to be sacred, May it be so.