The Glory of Imperfection

Straight A stu­dents are less likely to fin­ish col­lege. At some point, they usu­ally drop out over the fear of mak­ing a B. Heaven for­bid if they make a C. Med­ical stu­dents at the top of the class are a higher sui­cide risk. Per­fec­tion­ists live in fear of nor­malcy. A ball of lint here or there, a bro­ken trin­ket, or a spot on the floor can muster all sorts of demons from their dark side. Per­fec­tion­ists live in fear of their own human­ity and life on an “imper­fect” planet.

As the story goes, the only per­fect per­son was per­ceived by the imper­fect per­fec­tion­ists as ter­ri­bly imper­fect. The per­fec­tion­ist Phar­isees saw Jesus as a “sin­ner” in a num­ber of ways. Per­fec­tion­ism is not per­fec­tion. It is quite the oppo­site. It is a mal­ady of a rigid, fright­ened soul. Deep inside, it is very angry. What­ever the gap between what is and what a per­fec­tion­ist thinks things are sup­posed to be betrays the crevice to the abyss. Per­fec­tion­ists lack the abil­ity to doubt their own expec­ta­tions and ratio­nally adjust them.

I am not advo­cat­ing delib­er­ate medi­oc­rity, nor is this an excuse for liv­ing half-heartedly. The “per­fect” that the Apos­tle Paul talked about in his expo­si­tion on love has to do with mature love. What makes heaven a place to be is not its pearly gates but the lov­ing char­ac­ter of the beings present. Love is its own heaven. It is much bet­ter than the Eden of inno­cence. Mature love embraces the imper­fect as per­fect. It gives the ben­e­fit of the doubt with­out lying to itself. Love is a gift of the per­fect imper­fect (the­o­log­i­cal truth is always para­dox­i­cal).

Yes, some politi­cians are patho­log­i­cal liars. The church is a mess. Fam­ily is a soap opera that never ends. Insti­tu­tions are self­ish. Greed abounds. The human body peaks in the early thir­ties. Our mem­o­ries are not accu­rate. Peo­ple live out of their sec­ondary motives. There is class war­fare. Racism is a given any­where peo­ple exist. Nor­mal human dif­fer­ences are accen­tu­ated by a divi­sive media until every­thing looks patho­logic (Lord deliver us from talk shows…). Cloth­ing items fade and never look quite as good as the day you bought them. Words are but arrows point­ing to truths that can­not be fully expressed. Noth­ing is laser perfect…even the laser. Light bends slightly with grav­ity. There is noth­ing in nature that is absolutely per­fectly straight.

The glory of imper­fec­tion is that it is per­fect in its own imper­fect way. Look­ing through the eyes of sac­ri­fi­cial love ele­vates every­thing to a level of accep­tance. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder — and so is true perfection.