Opening Words: by 19th century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker (Singing the Living Tradition # 683)
Be ours a religion which, like sunshine, goes everywhere;
Its temple, all space;
Its shrine, the good heart;
Its creed, all truth;
Its ritual, works of love;
Its profession of faith, divine living.
Reading: by Tal Ben-Shahar from The Pursuit of Perfect (p. 105)
We are constantly bombarded with perfection. Adonis gracing the cover of Men’s Health and the flawless Helen on the cover of Vogue; women and men on the larger-than-life screen, resolving their conflicts in two hours or less, delivering their perfect lines, making perfect love. We’ve all heard the self-help gurus tell us that there is no limit to our potential, that what we can believe we can achieve, that where there’s a will there’s a way. We’ve been told that we can find perfect bliss if only we follow the road not taken or the road taken by our serene spiritual leader - the one with the best smile on the cover of the New York Times bestseller.
Reading: by the Christian church father Saint Paul from his first letter to the congregation in Corinth (1 Corinthians 13:9-13)
…Our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide; but the greatest of these is love.
Reading: by Paul Oehser, “Parable of the Perfectionist” (The New Yorker, Mar. 30, 1946)
There was once a man who was looking for something. He was a poet, and every few days he would write a poem, and every poem he wrote he thought was better than the previous one, and as he finished a new one, he threw the old one away. As a result, he never had more than one poem.
By and by he gave up on poetry and became a painter. Every picture he painted he thought was better than the one before. He liked each one of them until he made a new one; then the previous one disgusted him, so he burned each picture as soon as he had another to replace it.
This went on for many years, until one morning he woke up and discovered that he was seventy-five years old. He said to himself, “Judas priest, I ought to be having an exhibition of my work.” So he rented a gallery and hung up his one painting and placed his one poem under a glass on a table nearby. Many people came to see, and one day he overheard a famous critic says, “This man’s art is infinitely better than his poetry.” At this he removed the poem and destroyed it. The next day he heard another critic say, “This painting is wonderful; it transcends even the artist himself.”
They found him the next morning with the gas turned on, his body slumped on the floor. The painting went for the rent of the gallery. After that it hung for a dozen years or so in a dentist’s office in Manhattan. The dentist’s wife, however, did not like the picture and finally gave it to a rummage sale.
There are many persons like that who do not appreciate art.
A Perfect Life
A Sermon Delivered on October 24, 2010
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
When I was a child, I thought like a child, and reasoned like a child. There was a time in my life when my heart’s desire was caught up with the wish for a perfect pet. (Unlike the boy in our story this morning (Wanted: The Perfect Pet, by Fiona Robertson), the pet I had in mind was not a dog. I had humbler ambitions.) What I wanted - I remember it well - was my very own hamster.
The little turtle that had been living in a small box on my bookshelf was simply not engaging enough. A hamster would be much better, cute and cuddly, a perfect friend. The hamster I finally got was everything I had hoped for. A fine and lively critter, strong, too. So I named him Muscles. This is my perfect pet, I thought.
I wonder what my turtle thought about that. I wonder if the turtle remembered the day, not too long ago, when he was my perfect pet. I wonder if the turtle felt a twinge of resentment at having been relegated to second place, now mostly ignored, and basically rejected.
The parable of the perfectionist is a sad story. And yet - as all good parables do - it conveys a profound truth about the quest for perfection. Even though the ideal of perfection may seem like a worthy goal, and a reasonable way to live life to the fullest, in fact, our longing for perfection can sometimes lead to a rejection of life.
* * *
Religions have long grappled with the idea of perfection. Saint Paul imagined perfection as something that awaits us in an other-worldly realm. God is perfect, and God’s heavenly kingdom is perfect. And if we get there one day, we too will be perfect.
Up until that point, however, we are flawed and imperfect. Our knowledge is imperfect, our prophesy is imperfect. When the perfect comes, that is when the imperfect will pass away - according to Paul. We humans are stuck in a state of imperfection, until a heavenly hand reaches down to lift us to loftier realms. This image of human limitation and divine redemption is a key concept in Christian thought.
Our Unitarian forbears took these traditional ideas and interpreted them differently. They shifted the focus of our religious endeavors from God’s perfection to the human capacity pursue perfection. In 19th century New England, the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing wrote, “The desire for an excellence never actually reached by humanity, the aspiration toward that Ideal which we express by the word perfection, this is the seminal principle of religion. And this is the root of all progress in the human race.” In his mind, religion is not a matter of focusing our attention on God, and nothing else. Religion is rather defined by our desire to improve ourselves, to strive toward ever greater moral and spiritual perfection. “Nothing can make us truly happy but our perfection,” Channing writes.
Our religious heritage, it would seem, encourages us to be perfectionists. This can be a problem.
* * *
Tal Ben-Shahar is a self-described perfectionist. In his own life, he identified perfectionism as the source of unhappiness, poor choices, and self-induced failure. He tells the story of how, as an ambitious and athletically gifted young man, he aspired to become the world’s best squash player. In 1987 he was Israel’s youngest national squash champion. His goal was to become world champion. So he moved to England, and started visiting the gym where he knew the current world champion practiced. He observed the training regimen of his idol, and carefully emulated it. He ran the same seven miles every day, lifted the same kind of weights, and played the same number of training matches daily. Within a few months Ben-Shahar had become a regular training partner of the world champ, thus learning even more about the champion’s style and skill. Ben-Shahar’s game improved considerably, however, his ambitious and unrelenting training took it toll. Strangely, despite his technical improvements, in competitions he found himself doing poorly, making critical mistakes under pressure. Then he suffered a series of injuries. First simply muscle cramps, then a pulled hamstring, then a sore knee. Despite the hints his body was giving him, that he was over-doing it, he pushed himself harder, ever focused on his ambitious goal, and bent on achieving it as quickly and directly as possible. Not surprisingly, his injuries increased, so that at the ripe age of twenty-one, his physical ailments forced him to quit squash, and give up his dream of being the world’s best player. Instead he turned his attention to academic pursuits. He was drawn to the field of psychology, and there attempted to make sense of his troubling life experiences.
He reached the conclusion, that his failure at squash was linked to a particular deeply-seated notion of perfection, which, in combination with his pronounced ambition, created a self-defeating tendency toward perfectionism.
Ben-Shahar sees three interrelated dimensions of perfectionism, each of which touches on an unwillingness to embrace certain life experiences. Perfection involves a rejection of failure, a rejection of painful emotions, and, finally, a rejection of success.
Perfectionists tend to expect the path toward any goal to be direct, smooth and unhindered. When they inevitably realize this is not the case, and that, in fact, we do encounter obstacles and setbacks, and we do sometimes fail, then the perfectionists among us tend to get extremely frustrated, and have a harder time coping.
Perfectionists tend to believe life ought to consist of an uninterrupted stream of positive experiences and positive feelings - this is their idea of a perfect life. By clinging to this ideal of unblemished happiness, the perfectionists among us invariably tend to reject painful emotions. When we suffer a loss, we may deny our feelings of sadness. When we are hurt, we may suppress our feelings of deep pain.
And Perfectionists are never satisfied. They have a habit of setting goals and expectations for themselves that are basically unattainable. In this way, the Perfectionists among us reject the possibility of success. No matter what we achieve, no matter how well we do in school, no matter how high we climb the career ladder, we are never satisfied with our accomplishments. No matter how much money we make, no matter how wonderful our life partner is, no matter how much recognition we receive from our peers, we are never content. Regardless of our objective successes, we never feel successful.
Once recognized, each of these three aspects of perfectionism, can be addressed. Tal Ben-Shahar calls the alternative to perfectionism “optimalism.” Rather than rejecting the reality of failure, the Optimalist accepts it as a natural part of life, and an important step in learning and self-improvement. When we are able to approach life in this frame of mind, we emerge from our set-backs stronger and wiser, more humble and more resilient. Rather than rejecting painful emotions, instead we accept them as inevitable aspects of life. We understand that the pain of loss is in direct proportion to the depth of love we have felt. And finally we learn to celebrate our accomplishments, we acknowledge our incremental improvements, even if we are nowhere near the highest goals we hope to achieve someday. Rather than stubbornly dwelling on impossibly unrealistic expectations of ourselves, we accept the realities of our limitations, even as we persistently work to move beyond them.
Perfectionism is not a trait that is found only in a distinct portion of our population that self-identifies as perfectionist. It is a habit of mind most of us find ourselves in every once in a while. And when we do display some hints of perfectionism, we tend to apply them only to select aspects of our lives. For instance, some of us might be perfectionists when it comes to completing a particular project at work, but be completely indifferent to the dirty dishes cluttering up our kitchen counters - or vis versa. Some of us might be perfectionists when it comes to managing our household finances, but be completely oblivious to aesthetic conventions when it comes to color-coordinating our daily wardrobe - or vis versa. Some of us might be perfectionists when it comes to fixing a leaky faucet, but are completely insensitive to what it takes to maintain good family relationships - or vis versa. Whatever shape it takes, perfectionism can be a problem.
Tal Ben-Shahar writes,
“Perfectionists reject reality and replace it with a fantasy world - a world in which there is no failure and no painful emotions and in which their standards for success, no matter how unrealistic, can actually be met… In essence, Perfectionists reject everything that deviates from the flawless, faultless ideal vision, and as a result they suffer whenever they do not meet their own unrealistic standards.” (p. xxii, xxiii)
* * *
Perfection is the seminal principle of religion. This is true not only in the religions of the West. Perfection is an ideal envisioned in the East, as well. Buddhism has conceived of the ten Paramitas, the ten Perfections. The Paramitas reflect the love of categories and classifications typical of Indian culture, each of them concerned with a particular aspect of the religious life, which can be practiced, improved, and ideally perfected. The ten Perfections a devout Buddhist is encouraged to practice include: giving, morality, forbearance, zeal, meditation, wisdom, compassion, aspiration, spiritual power, and knowledge.
The Buddha is a fully enlightened being, endowed with pure and complete wisdom and compassion. Coming from a Christian culture, we might imagine that the Buddha fully embodies the ten Perfections. We might imagine the Buddha reached the to goal toward which all believers aspire. But this is not the case. The Buddha continues to practice the Paramitas. This work is never completed. As one scholar puts it, “Nobody, least of all the Buddha, can say, “I have accomplished it.”… There are milestones on the path, as the Buddha found under the Bodhi tree, but they are no more than milestones and are not any kind of ultimate consummation. Perfection is a process.” (The Practice of Perfection, Robert Aitken, p. 2)
* * *
Perfection is neither a place in heaven, nor a goal we can reach on earth. It is a process never ending. As such it is forever changing. Taking different shape at different times in our lives, as we ourselves change, moving from childhood to old age.
The perfection toward which we strive is a moving target. Often misidentified, misunderstood, or missed altogether - when we mistake true perfection with the ubiquitous images forever bombarding us from billboards, cinema screens, or the pages of glossy magazines. We will never find perfection as long as we try to conform to the notions preached by self-proclaimed saviors and bestselling self-help gurus.
Perfection is not what it seems. It is not hidden in heaven, but hidden in plain sight. Six centuries before the Common Era, Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao te Ching: True perfection seems imperfect, yet it is perfectly itself. (Chapter 45) To would-be critics he said, “Some say that my teaching is nonsense./ Others call it lofty but impractical./ But to those who have looked inside themselves, this nonsense makes perfect sense. (Chapter 67)
* * *
Channing’s vision of perfection was not that we conform to a particular preconceived ideal of the Perfect. He said, the idea of perfection is that “the whole nature of a being is unfolded in due proportion.” Perfection means allowing our highest and worthiest powers to flourish. It means allowing our abundant gifts and unique talents to unfold. “Perfection of mind,” he writes, “consists in well-proportioned activity and life, through all its faculties, affections, desires, powers, whereby they all grow into one harmonious whole.” This will look different for each of us. And it will change as we grow and change.
Perfection is not a place we will ever reach. It is the process of living our lives the best we know how.
Every day, doing our best to be a little kinder, a little wiser. Every day, doing our best to grow in spirit, practicing perfection in gestures of generosity, morality, forbearance and zeal. Every day, growing in knowledge and compassion.
If perfection truly is the essence of religion,
May ours be a religion which like sunshine goes everywhere.
May its temple be all space,
May its shrine be the good heart
May its ritual be works of love
And it profession of faith, divine living.
Amen.
