The Problem with Perfect

Guest editorials

The Problem with Perfect

Susan McCaslin

Volume 26  Issue 5 & 6 | Posted: June 24, 2012

Introduction

Introduction

I am a poet who was roused, awakened, by what I called God when I was about seven years old. The verb “to rouse” was used originally to describe “hawks shaking the feathers of the body,” a rather appropriate image for a sense of spiritual excitation and enthrallment. Later the word came to mean simply “To stir up, provoke to activity.”
    In many sacred traditions spiritual arousal or awakening lies at the very heart of things. Empathy and compassion must be awakened in us before we can embody them in our lives.
 My early spiritual concepts were conditioned by my Presbyterian upbringing, but somehow the mystical side of religion, the sense of direct experience of the divine, of the interior Christ, was what really mattered. From early childhood I had a sense of the divine as a loving, compassionate presence within me, beyond me, and present in everything else, though I wouldn’t have articulated my intuitions in this way. Later, in high school, I was stirred up by the God of Poetry, or, you could say, the God of Poetry began to awaken in me.
   This mystical, mysterious God transcended gender and lay in a realm beyond explanation, something like a Poem making itself new in each instant. Hans Christian Anderson, the Bible, and the poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson and Tennyson first provided me with continuing entrances into enchantment. Whether experienced through the pulse of writing, meditation, or daily life, an intense longing to awaken and be awakened by Spirit never completely left.
   Spirit for me is that in each of us that wants (needs) to make meaning and purpose out of the particularities of our everyday lives. For me as a literary person and as a poet, this quest has everything to do with language, the interplay between words and silence. In both my life and in my writing, Spirit mysteriously appears, disappears, and reappears. There are times when I think the original intensity has abandoned me, only to discover it has gone underground like a lustrous stream that breaks to the surface from hidden depths.

 The Problem with Perfect

But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise in the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous…Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Matthew 5:44-48

   When I was a girl I tended to take on a lot of household responsibility and be overly conscientious at school. Some people called me Little Miss Perfect. I knew at the time I was far from perfect, especially in the sense of “flawless,” so this label confused me and didn’t make me feel any better about myself.
   When we say someone is perfect, we often mean that they approximate an ideal we all know no one can really emulate. This kind of perfectionism is tied to the myth of the infinite perfectibility of the material world and of our status within it through individual effort. It is at the root of a deep malaise in Western culture.
   Modern perfectionism and the accompanying sense of never measuring up often lead to self-criticism. After a little research, I found that it was not until 1656 that the word was used in the theological sense as “the notion that moral perfection may be attained in earthly existence.” And it was not until 1934 that “perfectionist” was used to indicate “one only satisfied with the highest standards.”
   Perfectionism in our culture affects our youth in dire ways. Young girls, and increasingly boys, ingest the images of unhealthy thinness or extreme buffness that inundate them in the media and sometimes find themselves struggling with anorexia and “anorexia athletica.”
   Moms and dads often become workaholics in the quest for perfect careers, communicating with each other mostly through email. Many of us, despite our regimented lifestyles, are burdened with a sense of always missing the mark, which is itself an older Greek definition of sin or error.
   We are constantly face to face with entropy, sagging bellies, the sense that things are running down, time is running out, and that despite all our best efforts, as Bob Dylan puts it, “everything is broken.” We come to believe that to be happy we need a better face, body, car, or house, and are then urged by advertising to purchase that gadget or life-style that will grant us happiness. Advertisers study how to play on this desire for self-improvement and on our endless dissatisfaction with our imperfect selves.
   It’s easy to see how the quest for perfectionism is futile in the realm of material things, but what about in art, athletics, and morality – areas where perfectionism seems appropriate? If we don’t strive for excellence, would we create great works of art? Would Michelangelo have lain on his back for years inscribing breathlessness into the hand of Adam on the Sistine ceiling?
   Or did he lie stretched there for so long because he was totally in love with the beauty that inspired him? Doesn’t the culture benefit from artists who are somewhat obsessive-compulsive? And don’t Olympic athletes strive to transcend the limits of the body for excellence in the sport?
   As desire to supersede limits is a part of the human spirit; yet there is a distinction between pushing the boundaries for the love of the art or sport, and pushing for fame, approval, and applause. Truly great artists and athletes seldom lose sight of the joy of creation or the activity’s intrinsic pleasure. If this element of joy is eradicated, both art and sport lose their heart.
   In the passage from Matthew at the beginning of this chapter, Jesus says, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Some might take Jesus’ words to (wrongly) mean that perfection is a matter of gritting your moral teeth and “loving” a person who let you down or injured you so that God can heap blessings on your head for going so against your natural impulse to feel anger. However, in the New Testament Greek, the term “perfect” here is teleios, meaning “unblemished, complete, finished, full-grown.” But how can we hear Jesus’ encouragement as anything but an insistence on the impossible?
   The word perfection has many rich connotations throughout the Bible. Though the New Testament was written in Greek, Jesus used Aramaic, where the word for perfect (gmar) is closer to “ripe,” “fully flavoured,” or “fully flowered.” Perfection involves a fulfillment of the potential a thing has within itself all along from the seed state. In Latin, the word means “completely formed or performed,” and the verb “to perfect” means “to bring to full development.”
   The Hebrew word for perfect, taman, also means something close to “mature, “whole,” “complete.” In these older contexts, perfection is a dynamic process to which we surrender. We know we can’t bring about this maturity by ourselves, but have to be part of what constantly re-creates itself and moves toward balance and wholeness. Perfection could be redefined, then, as opening to the flow of the whole – which is the flow of divine love.
   Let’s return, then, to what Jesus might have had in mind when he said to his disciples that they needed to love their enemies. God, who loves perfectly, sees “the enemy” as part of the field of awareness one calls oneself. Let’s try translating the phrase this way: “Be whole, be part of a loving motion toward completeness.” Or “Be in the flowing light of the Godhead,” or “Look at things from a perspective that intuits how all things are interconnected.”
   If we redefine the term this way, then love of the enemy might begin to issue from the heart without so much moral strain, and the enemy we all called to love could be ourselves.
   Imagine a shift of consciousness in which we stop seeing the world in terms of self and other, me and you, them and us. If this perception could be sustained, then loving the enemy might not be a matter of just being nice to someone nasty. Jesus nudges his disciples to assume the viewpoint of a loving, all-compassionate parent.
   Such an act of identification with universal compassion is not impossible if in our deepest interiors we dwell in God and God dwells in us. Jesus’ statement, then, is that a mystic, or one who has experienced directly this sort of oneness and begun to live out of it in a constant way.

   

Susan McCaslin