Repositioning Perfection
Susan McCaslin
© 2008
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 on 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, partly because of my mother’s mental illness, I tended to take on a lot
of household responsibility and was overly conscientious at school, so some people
called me “little miss perfect.” I knew at the time I was far from perfect in any sense of
the word, especially in the sense of “flawless,” and so this moniker confused me and
didn’t make me feel any better about myself. As commonly understood, when we say
someone is “perfect,” we mean that they approximate an ideal we all know no one can
really emulate. This negative kind of “perfectionism” is at the root of a deep malaise in
western culture, tied to the myth of infinite perfection of the material world and of our
status within it. It is linked to a sense that a human endeavour toward progress can act on
the world for its ultimate improvement. Yet there is in the gospel text from Matthew a
use of the word “perfect” that, if interpreted rightly, might salvage this concept so often
resonant in the Bible: “The law of God is perfect, converting [turning] the soul”; or
today’s passage from Matthew: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is
perfect.” But how can Jesus’ encouragement be heard as anything but an insistence on
the impossible?
I’d like to talk first about modern “perfectionism” and the sense that accompanies it of
never measuring up, often leading to self-criticism. After a little etymological research, I
found that it was not until 1656 that the word was defined in the theological sense as “the
notion that moral perfection may be attained in earthly existence.” And it was not until
1934 that “a perfectionist” was used to indicate “one only satisfied with the highest
standards.” If we take Jesus’ words seriously in Matthew, some might think 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 express anger.
And there are other forms of perfectionism in our culture that affect our youth in dire
ways. Young girls, and increasingly boys, ingest images of unhealthy thinness or
extreme “buffness” inundating them in the media and find themselves struggling with
anorexia and “anorexia athletica.” Moms and Dads become workaholics, communicating
with each other mostly through email in the quest for “perfect” careers. Many of us,
despite our regimented lifestyles, are burdened with a sense of always falling short, or
constantly “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.”
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The link between perfectionism and consumerism is that 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 elusive gadget or lifestyle that will grant us happiness. Advertisers study
how to play on this desire for self-improvement, on our endless dissatisfaction with our
imperfect selves.
It is easy to see how in the realm of material things, the quest for perfectionism is futile,
but what about art, athletics, morality, areas in which perfectionism seems appropriate?
If we don’t strive for excellence, would people have created great works of art? Would
Michelangelo have lain on his back for years inscribing breathlessness into the hand of
Adam on the Sistine roof? 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?
A 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 for pushing for fame,
approval, applause. 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. A recent case in point is athletes in the Tour de France who, because of
society’s adulation, found they could not achieve the perfect performance without
resorting to steroids and even blood transfusions to give themselves an edge. Here, a
failure to accept the limits of the human body ruins the sport.
Perhaps the kind of perfectionism that spoils both art and life is that which rejects the
transitory and limited. Great artists know, as Wallace Stevens hints, “The imperfect is
our paradise.” Leonard Cohen gets it right when he sings, “There is a crack in everything;
that’s how the light gets in.” In fact, however much we affirm what Stevens calls the
“blessed rage for order,” the universe as we know it is not a neat and tidy place.
Greatness involves an opening to that which masters us and subsumes our little orderings
in the grand Chaos. We are opened to a needful disturbance. In other words, God’s
kitchen is a fecund mess that ends in a festive banquet. The vastness of star-strewn space
suggests a cosmic order, but not a rigid, fathomable one. This is why poets, artists, city
planners, architects, and ecologists, open themselves to something larger than their
original intent. In the creative process, our plots and plans may go askew as newness
invades. Perhaps Heaven is not a topiary garden but a rain forest with falling trees,
rotting nurse logs, and the mysterious activity of microbes.
What is deeply wrong with a perfectionism that resists this fertile chaos is that out of fear
it wants to evade the essential breaking open of ourselves in order to fend off that which
is wiser and deeper. The ego likes to keep to the past, make safe little orderings that have
worked before; while the Holy Spirit says, “Behold, I destroy your blunders and pasty
efforts and blow them to smithereens to make all things new.”
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To enter such a process of kenosis or letting go requires courage because one never
knows what will have to be sacrificed. Sometimes what a writer thinks are the finest bits
have to go. Sometimes they seem like “clearings of the throat” that must be resigned to
the waste bin. Perhaps those Tibetan monks who make sand-mandalas are closer to the
truth of art than those who are too much focused on product. After days of painstaking
labour, they consign the work of their hands to the sea.
In the passage from Matthew and throughout the Bible, the word “perfection” has richer
connotations. In fact, there are so many entries for the word in my concordance than I
gave up counting. No wonder Christians have been stereotyped as nice little hypocritical
perfectionists. Yet in Aramaic, the language Jesus used, the word “perfect” (“gmar”) is
closer to “ripe,” “fully-flavoured,” “fully flowered,” that is, 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 older Hebrew word for perfect, “taman,” means something close to
“mature,” “whole,” “complete.”
Often we use the word to indicate a quality, but in these older contexts it is an action, a
dynamic process to which we surrender. We know we cannot bring about this maturity
by ourselves, but have to enter a larger stream in order to be part of that which is
constantly recreating itself and moving toward balance and integration. Perfection could
be redefined, then, as opening to the flow of the whole—which is the flow of divine love.
Let us return, then, to what Jesus might have had in mind when he said to his disciples
that they needed to love their enemies: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is
perfect.” God, who loves “perfectly,” apparently is able to integrate “the enemy” into the
field of awareness one calls oneself. Let’s try translating the phrase this way instead: “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 feels 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 are 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, us and them. 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 whom he called
in Aramaic “daddy” or “the Friend.” And such an act of identification with the universal
Compassion is not impossible, if in our deepest interiors we all dwell in God and God
dwells in us, if in point of fact, the center of our consciousness and the Godhead intersect.
Jesus’ statement, then, is that of a mystic, or one who has experienced directly this sort of
oneness and begun to live out of it in a constant way.
Perhaps in the end being called to perfection requires some striving but much more
letting go. There are common usages of the word “perfect” that seem “perfectly” fitting.
A dog lolling on a lawn, for instance, is perfect because he is completely at one with the
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moment and is not being anything other than himself. The birds of the air and the lilies
of the field are perfect, as Jesus observed, because they naturally let life ripple through
and complete them. When the French say a meal is “parfait,” they mean it is completely
satisfying and right. Perhaps another way of putting it is that if you want to enter the
cosmic dance where all is in the process of increasing the amount of love in the universe,
anywhere you are along the way to the end can be “right” and in harmony.
It is helpful to look at Jesus, then, not as one who was “perfect” in the static sense, but as
one who, like us, was birthed through a process of transformation. To make Jesus of
Nazareth into the flawless only Son of God diminishes him. In fact, the belief that Jesus
was the “perfect” lamb who died for our sins is wrongheaded because it denies the love
and compassion of God and our direct access to the fountains of mercy. The doctrine of
atonement implies that God cannot forgive sinful humans except through a blood
sacrifice. The harmful notion of Christian perfectionism I have been delineating is deeply
rooted in this doctrine (developed in the 11th century by Bishop Anselm) of Jesus as the
“perfect” sacrifice (Marcus Borg, Jesus, 268).
Though some might say that we can relax into our imperfection because Jesus has done
everything for us on the cross, in fact, the notion of God requiring a perfect sacrifice
complicates the problem. If Jesus’ “perfection” rests on his union with God, then why
would a loving God construct a universe in which the law requires him to sacrifice this
union with his only son in order to forgive humanity? The teaching of Jesus, on the
contrary, is clearly that we need to forgive as we are forgiven and that God’s compassion
and love are boundless and unconditional.
Atonement doctrine is a devolution because it returns us to the primitive image of a God
who regresses not just to animal, but human sacrifice. In this view of the world, the
purity of the victim is connected with the efficacy of the sacrifice. The Christian tradition
has had an irrational ambiguity around perfectionism: imitate Christ, try to be perfect
like him, but don’t try too hard because you can never be like him; but this is good news
because the perfect are torn to pieces anyway. In our own culture, a similar phenomenon
is evident in the public’s adulation of film stars. We admire them for their perfect bodies,
clothes, lifestyles, and charisma, but we love to tear them down. There is a certain
ambiguity toward what we perceive as perfection: we love it and we hate it; we want it,
but fear we can’t have it, so destroy it.
I’d like to add one last thought about the movement toward what has been called our
“perfecting in the glory,” because for humans, unlike dogs and birds who have not so
radically separated themselves from the ground of being, there needs to be something
more intentional about the pursuit of wholeness. When Jesus tells the rich young ruler
that if he wants to be “perfect” and inherit eternal consciousness, he needs to give away
everything he has and follow him, something much more than “perfectionism” is at stake.
Anyone who intentionally desires a spiritual path realizes that there are stages of
development along the way. The top of the mountain isn’t the only “perfect” place to be:
there is also the beauty and rightness in hiking along the whole of the path.
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Jesus himself encouraged the practice of “entering into one’s closet.” He recommended
regular and frequent times of accessing sheer silence through practices like prayer and
contemplation. In the end, the ongoing work of the Cosmic Christ is to bring about a
raising of consciousness in which body, mind, feelings and spirit are in balance with the
great Spirit that moves the sun and the stars, and out of this global consciousness may
issue social justice and equality—the kingdom of heaven on earth. Yet this process does
not require “perfectionism,” but a simple opening of the heart to greater oneness with the
hidden wholeness that already lies deep within us.
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