Perfect?

One of the authors I love best is Kathleen Norris. She is poet, Christian contemplative, Benedictine oblate, farmer, preacher, and all around fascinating voice. Her path is an interesting, twisty one. She was raised on mainstream Protestantism and, like many of my generation, fell into "unbelief" in her twenties. Finding her way back to church late in life, she has chronicled that journey with some amazing honesty and absolutely stunning writing. I have come to value her books, "Cloister Walk," and "Amazing Grace" as treasuries of jewel words that nourish my heart and my spirit.

"Amazing Grace" takes the scary vocabulary of church, scripture, and liturgy and tries to reclaim it by delving deep into its roots and meaning. Although I don't live in the religious world that Norris writes about, I find her work with language enthralling. There are riches to be gathered in her singing phrases.

One of the essays that seems particularly pertinent to my life has to do with Perfectionism. She writes that, "Perfectionism is a marked characteristic of contemporary American culture, a serious psychological affliction that makes people too timid to take necessary risks and causes them to suffer when, although they've done the best they can, their efforts fall short of some imaginary, and usually unattainable, standard...The word that has been translated as 'perfect' in the New Testament does not actually mean, 'to set forth after an impossible goal,' but rather is taken from a Latin word meaning 'complete, entire, or full-grown.' Nowadays it would most likely mean 'mature.' ... To mature is to lose our adolescent self-consciousness so as to be able to make a gift of ourselves"

Now it seems to me that this is a definition of perfection that those of us who aspire to the slave path can use. To be perfected in this sense is obtainable and worth pursuing -- seeking after maturity, growth, and completion so that one might be able to make a gift of the self. Is this not what it is that we are about?

For me, when I struggle to attach a value to my older female selfhood in a realm that seems overrun with the oh-so-gloriously nubile, it is comforting to apprehend that there may be some worth in maturity that might even be characterized as "perfection."

I know that I have many times been told that I am "brave" to have pursued this life in the face of great obstacles, and at some cost. Perhaps it is only the maturing that allows such risk taking; an understanding that comes with that loss of "adolescent self-consciousness" and permits the wider vision of a certain age.

I've written before that my work causes me to weekly attend worship at the Catholic school where I teach. Although it is not my faith tradition, I can appreciate the ritual in some of its particulars. At this season of the year (Lent) there is a hymn that gets sung regularly, with a lyric that goes, "We offer you our failings. We offer you attempts: the gifts not fully given, the dreams not fully dreamt. " I like the notion that there is something almost sinful in not giving our gifts with our whole hearts, and not living out our dreams with our full lives. I have spent plenty of time being frightened and uncertain of this path. I am not always graceful or even particularly happy in my choices about all of this. Still, I have chosen openly and honestly with my whole heart and all my being. I have made the gift with perfect intent.

There have been times along the way, when I have, with just a bit of wicked orneriness, referred to some of the denizens of this corner of the Blogosphere as "The Sweaterset Crowd." They are the ones who are generally squicked by my life and my angst and my sometimes messy fussing. They are quick to opine that my way is not their way, and then equally quick to judge me and mine while claiming to offer comfort and "support." I've generally found them trite, shallow, and annoyingly self-absorbed. Perhaps it is this bit of interpretive language that I lacked, and which would have allowed me to rest easier in the face of those fresh-faced young-uns knowing how far from "perfection" they might yet be...

swan