Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

The Blessings of Imperfection

 

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
August 27, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

Reading

“The Blessings of Imperfection”, G. Peter Fleck (Beacon Press, Boston 1987)

In his book The Medusa and the Snail, the biologist Lewis Thomas observes that we humans “are built to make mistakes, coded for error,” that is, for being imperfect. “We learn, as we say, by trial and error … Why not ‘trial and rightness’ or ‘trial and triumph?’”; And he concludes: “The old phrase puts it that way because that is, in real life, the way it is done.” In other words: progress requires error. What persuasive reasoning: our response to our imperfection, he seems to say, is the very thing that can make us more perfect. …

This principle does not apply to humans only. It permeates creation. It is the very stuff of which evolution is made. Take the amphibians. The first one that crawled out of the water onto the land may not have done so because its feet were so strong, but because its gills were so weak. The imperfection of its gills made that first amphibian into an animal of a higher order. But one can imagine its parents’ distress at having a child that was so conspicuously unable to live a normal aquatic life, a child with which there was obviously something wrong, and one can imagine how it was jeered at by its peers. Nor did that first amphibian have any idea of what was happening to it. It had no idea that its “wrongness” had led it into a “betterness.”

Sermon

A joke from an old comic strip:¹ A young woman is reading aloud the label on her new, fashionably crinkled outfit: “Wrinkles and imperfections are part of the desired look.” Her elderly mother responds: “Now they tell me.”

The book by Peter Fleck has been sitting on my shelf for a couple of years now, and each time the title catches my eye I pause and wonder. Are there any blessings of imperfection? Is it actually desirable?

One thing seems clear: imperfection is something we’re all stuck with, so we may as well admit it, instead of carrying the burden of pretending to be perfect. After all, this is a spiritual community and part of its purpose is to help each of us to grow; a basic assumption is that we aren’t yet exactly the way we hope one day to be.

What helps you to become a better person? Does fretting about not being the perfect parent make you a better parent, or do you feel most connected to your kids and your calling as a mom or dad when you simply strive to be, as one wise book advised, A Good Enough Parent? Is your job performance improved by middle-of-the-night sweats about mistakes you’ve made, or do you do best when you can face mistakes, take them in stride, and move forward? The false goal of perfection does a great deal to make us miserable and afraid. As a spur to improvement? — it’s, well, far from perfect. In fact, it’s as much a barrier as it is an encouragement. Because a common response to the shame and failure we feel when we see the insurmountable gap between ourselves and perfection is to deny our imperfections. They are just too painful to face. And we need to acknowledge our imperfections if we are to improve.

But none of this makes imperfection a blessing. It just makes it a fact of life that we’d be better off facing than denying. Along with Fleck, I go further. I believe that imperfection itself is a blessing. Its opposite, what has been touted as perfection, is in fact utter stagnancy, and that is not at all a good thing, much less a perfect thing. To explain what I mean, I want to detour into a little philosophy and history.

Plato said that only the idea of each thing, its Ideal Form, was perfect. Everything we know in reality is a distorted imitation, a mere shadow of those perfect things. The orange you hold in your hand is an imperfect example of the perfect, ideal form of orangeness. This philosophy is a bit abstract for my way of thinking, but in terms of pressure to be perfect ourselves, it’s not so bad. In Plato’s world, we can hold the ideal in our minds as a kind of template, always with the reassurance that we are not failing if we don’t attain it — we’re just living in the real world. To use a metaphor of my colleague’s, the Reverend Darcey Laine, perfection is not reachable, like the top of the mountain we are climbing. It’s the star above the peak, 100 light years away, something we may be able to see and aim for, but that we can never reach.

That was Plato. His student Aristotle made things more difficult. He turned his thoughts to God, and called God the Prime Mover, the one who sets everything in motion but is never moved by anything else, the one who creates everything but is not affected by creation. As [the Worship Associate] Florence said [in her reflection], four hundred years later, the religion that sprang up in the Greece-influenced Mediterranean, Christianity, absorbed these ideas as it was first taking shape. And so even Jesus, who generally spoke of God as a much more down-to-earth dad, preached that notorious line Florence quoted about being “perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). How are we to be perfect? And what does it mean to say that God is perfect?

At the peak of the Reformation, John Calvin took the perfect, Aristotelian God to its logical conclusion. A perfect God knew everything that would ever happen and controlled everything that would ever happen. After all, that must be the meaning of perfect omniscience and perfect omnipotence. Human freedom was an illusion; we are in fact helpless puppets. Appeals to God were pointless, because a perfect being cannot be budged off its course, which is already perfect. Attempts to change oneself were just as pointless. Whether one was virtuous or not had been foreordained by God before the universe was created; if we could become better people off our own bat, then it must mean we have a power to overrule God, a power to introduce something God did not predict or expect. And that’s impossible, said Calvin.

All very logical … except that this perfect God doesn’t seem so perfect after all. It seems utterly stagnant. It bears little resemblance to the God of the Bible, who was capable of mercy, love, and compassion, as well as anger, jealousy, and impatience. All of these, all emotions, require one to be able to change.

Now, why am I dwelling on all this? We Unitarian Universalists long ago parted ways with Calvin and his Puritan followers, and are bound neither by the Biblical visions of God nor the cold philosophy that shaped so much Christian theology. But this history is significant, because we are haunted by the same image of perfection and perfectibility. We turned it inside out. Calvin said that humans were literally incapable of improvement, much less perfection. The Unitarians protested, insisting that humans were perfectible. In the immortal words of James Freeman Clarke, a 19th-century Unitarian minister, one of the central tenets of our faith was “The Progress of Mankind, onward and upward forever.” Always forward, never back, never setting a foot wrong, and headed to that glorious perfection that was, surely, attainable. It was a very American philosophy, optimistic and a bit arrogant.

I think it was a trap. Perfection for ourselves makes no more sense than perfection for God. And I think too much emphasis on perfection holds us back, as surely as the Aristotelian God ends up being stagnant and immovable.

Last spring we met to discuss the draft of our new Relational Covenant. There were only a couple of sticking points, and one was the phrase in the preamble to the effect that we are imperfect beings. Some people really liked that — they felt it was not only true, but gave us permission to make mistakes and admit our mistakes. People lose their temper, they fall short of their promises, they forget to extend the same compassion to others that they wish for ourselves … imperfection is a given in a human community. Several other people commented that it was of course true, but did we need to say it? It was as if our imperfection were a shameful secret that ought not to be put into print.

I think the concern about describing ourselves with the word “imperfect” is a reaction to the Puritan dourness against which our ancestors rebelled and we are still rebelling. We say “of course we’re imperfect,” but we can’t quite take it in stride the way we do other statements of human fact like “we are mammals” or “we walk upright.” We harbor a sense of shame about it, as if deep down, we believe along with the Puritans that we ought to be perfect. As if we don’t quite accept that imperfection is written into the human condition. We certainly don’t accept that it can be a blessing.

But it is a blessing, precisely for the reasons that perfection is a curse. What is our calling? To improve, sure! To go onward, and upward. To continue evolving, like the amphibians who first crept onto land, evolving due to our flaws as well as our advances. (My one quibble with the reading by Fleck, in fact, is that lung-breathing is not more advanced than gill-breathing. It’s simply different, and a better adaptation to its particular situation. Evolution isn’t progress ever upward — it’s change.) The idea that there is one perfect state of being just gets in the way of our happiness, because one of the greatest blessings of human life is change. The opposite of stagnancy. Perfection is the death of change. Which makes it not so good after all.

I mean, what would it be like to live with someone who was perfect? Living with someone who merely thought he or she was perfect would be maddening, of course. He would never admit he was wrong. She would never change her mind. People have sued for divorce for less. But let’s try to imagine relating to someone who not only thinks she’s perfect, but truly is. We’ll call her Angela, since she’s an angel. Angela never loses her patience or gets angry. She does her share of the chores, is never late, always does what she promises, and never promises more than she can deliver, because she can do anything. She’s the perfect cook, the perfect companion, the perfect everything.

And there is nothing, nothing at all you can teach her. There is nothing you can give her that she doesn’t already possess. She can’t laugh at your jokes, because jokes rely on a twist, an appearance of the unexpected, and Angela anticipates everything. She is always the same, day in, day out. She is like that nightmare God who knows all and controls all and is not at all moved by our presence.

Our liberal religious tradition may occasionally get hung up on perfection, but its core is this: Our purpose is not to be angels. It is not to play out the puppet-show controlled by a powerful being somewhere up there. Our purpose is to be human, which is not perfection but something better. It is the ability to change, to grow, to travel along a road that sometimes leads to reversals and recommitments. To be able to say, unlike poor Angel, “Oh, I was wrong! I see a new way, a better idea,” and then to be able to say months or years later, “No, that new way wasn’t quite what I want either — here’s an even better one. Let’s see where it goes.”

One last thing, to welcome people to our church on this special Bring-a-Friend Sunday. There’s an old joke, beloved of ministers: a profile of the perfect minister. I’ve revised it this morning to be the profile of the perfect congregation.

The perfect congregation is 10 years old, with the fervent energy of a new organization, and it has 250 years of history in this town. Its members speak out on every timely and sensitive issue, and never disagree with each other. Its office is open from 8 in the morning to 10 at night, and its budget for administrative staff is $50,000 a year. This church has the highest possible moral ideals, and no one ever fails to live up to them, because that would make them hypocrites. It changes with the times and always does things the good old way. Its ministers are always available for meetings, spend twenty hours a week preparing their brilliant sermons, visit sick people all day long, and are never out of their office when someone is trying to reach them. No one has to pledge more than two hundred dollars, and it has a million-dollar budget! Everyone volunteers cheerfully for whatever needs doing, and no one has to go to any committee meetings.

We took it out of our covenant in the final draft, but I’ll say it now: we are not perfect. We aren’t perfect people, and this isn’t the perfect church. The reason is that there is no such thing as the perfect person and the perfect congregation exists only in our imaginations. What we are, what we commit to be throughout our lives as Unitarian Universalists, is people who are changing, growing, learning, striving, thinking. Never completed — never finished. We know the blessings of imperfection. And we commit to walk together as we find our way through this imperfect and beautiful life.

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