Imperfect But Happy

I recently told a friend that I have an imper­fect but happy life. The two actu­ally seem to go together. In fact, it might be a bal­anced equa­tion. Rec­og­niz­ing one side of it may cre­ate the other. Per­fec­tion­ists are a mis­er­able lot. They can never rest. At the other end of the scale is under­achiev­ing, which car­ries a sense of shame. Giv­ing it your best but rec­og­niz­ing your short­com­ings seems to be the best way of going about it all. There is noth­ing to prove and momen­tary per­fec­tion, like a flower, soon wilts and falls away. It would be very hard to be an Olympic cham­pion past his or her prime. From then on, the eyes of the heart would look back, for­ever long­ing for a glory once achieved — now lost to time.
In my book, there are no “glory days” that haunt me. I hap­pily fill the trash can of life expe­ri­ences to make room for new ones. In the man­ner of the Lord, I hope to spir­i­tu­ally peak at death. That way there is no chance of hav­ing to live in the shadow of some per­fect moment. For all of the the­ol­ogy attached to the cru­ci­fix­ion, the style point of Jesus’ death is usu­ally missed. He left us an exam­ple of cross­ing the fin­ish line with for­give­ness, care for oth­ers, and cast­ing our des­tiny into the hands of Mys­tery. Then, hav­ing lived faith­fully in an appar­ently imper­fect world, there is res­ur­rec­tion.
Jesus was seen by many as a very flawed per­son. The reli­gious lead­ers of his day con­sid­ered him a sin­ner wor­thy of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. The sec­u­lar rulers con­sid­ered him rel­a­tively inno­cent but expend­able. He just was not taken all that seri­ously. All in all, I won­der how many of my own imper­fec­tions are actu­ally per­fec­tions that I do not under­stand or have come to eval­u­ate through the eyes of the same sorts of crit­ics that haunted Jesus. Have I lost per­spec­tive in a world drown­ing in its judg­men­tal obses­sions? Is my hap­pi­ness a trait of humil­ity rather than result of my imag­ined (and eas­ily dis­torted) eval­u­a­tions?
Philoso­pher Baruch Spin­oza said that if you look at all of life as a whole — from an all-embracing per­spec­tive — you would see that all we con­sider to be flaws are actu­ally part of one great per­fec­tion. Our mis­eries are from our lack of per­spec­tive. We just need to see it all from a moun­tain high enough to see it all.