Perfectionists Reject
“God does not demand that every man attain to what is theoretically highest and best. It is better to be a good street sweeper than a bad writer, better to be a good bartender than a bad doctor, and the repentant thief who died with Jesus on Calvary was far more perfect than the holy ones who had Him nailed to the cross.
And yet, abstractly speaking, what is more holy than the priesthood and less holy than the state of a criminal?
The dying thief had, perhaps, disobeyed the will of God in many things: but in the most important event of his life he listened and obeyed. The Pharisees had kept the law to the letter and had spent their lives in the pursuit of a most scrupulous perfection. But they were so intent upon perfection as an abstraction that when God manifested His will and His perfection in a concrete and definite way they had no choice but to reject it.”
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Dear Alex,
Highest and best. Theoretically. Pursuit of a most scrupulous perfection. The words of Thomas Merton whom I have not known until tonight from your selected passage.
To know this quote is to first know its origin in the man, Merton. Try to know him at minimum I tell myself. So I read and watched a brief video about him, never knowing him of course in any perfected scope. He was a deeply beloved Trappist monk writer poet. In hermitage living not to elude the world but to connect as one with it. An abstraction of Merton the individual, the voice in me.
Merton’s anatomy of characters lured me in retreat to a day of perfection many summers past. I had just moved with my family and dog from Las Vegas, having crossed canyon lake desert and springs, to settle on a small rural terrain foreign in landscape and culture to us.
One dreamy afternoon I drove my daughter to a ranch for horse-riding lesson. In the interlude of discovery on road, I felt in a gasp for candor the perfect paradox of toil and leisure, contentment and envy on this land stripped down its core and mine to speak the unspoken beauty and dread of change. On every turn of wheels our 50-minute serpentine coursing through loops and mounds of unpaved tracks whittled away the barren expanse till we inhaled dust and earth as life itself. No promenade of entertainment or shopping in high dynamic range and 4K resolution existed here in the countryside where cattle vineyards and hikers thrived alongside perennial poverty sprawled under bench bridge or sunshine.
At the ranch my daughter mounted her usual mare, a muscled majesty in cedar brown with graphite mane. I looked on and up to touch in vision the perfection of child and creature as one - a three-leg double in wonder, in bounce, in + out of balance of stature and strength in perfect asymmetry. All my life I had dreamed of this idyllic frame distilling life love liberty in a visibly truthful sermon. Paradise on pasture. Heaven in hay. Mother of 2 = Kid + Horse = Me. Where was I all these years to arrive here at last at max, highest and best, in epiphany? Forever I would stand to salute the perfection.
On meadow lane laced with orchards, horse + kid galloped as one in sync and rhyme. Horse began trotting faster. Kid pulled back the reins. The tug-of-war intensified. Coach from behind shouted critical instructions. Kid bounced up + out of saddle, floated in mid air and dove down from 7-8 feet high. Hooves stomped around fallen kid on dirt. Perfection trampled. At age 8 in miracle my daughter survived the incident with minor bruises.
So tonight when I reflect on your selected quote from Merton and this universal strife toggling toward around and away from perfection, I am reminded of this echo from Eugene Peterson's book, “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction”:
“We have been told the lie ever since we can remember: human beings are basically nice and good. Everyone is born equal and innocent and self-sufficient. The world is a pleasant, harmless place. We are born free. If we are in chains now, it is someone’s fault, and we can correct it with just a little more intelligence or effort or time… The lie (‘everything is OK’) covers up and perpetuates the deep wrong, disguises the violence, the war, the rapacity…
The lies are impeccably factual. They contain no errors. There are no distortions or falsified data. But they are lies all the same, because they claim to tell us who we are and omit everything about our origin in God and our destiny in God…
The usual biblical word describing the no we say to the world’s lies and the yes we say to God’s truth is repentance.”
Lies about perfection in our deceptively pleasant harmless world, my world. Ranch horse kid - could I have done more with a bit more wit or a few more seconds to have buried violence on that day?
What if the violence lives mostly within me? You may not see it and the world tells me I am OK. Factual frothing perfect living loving free-fall lies in stampede drive me down on my knees at Calvary.
Yours, Kate
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Dear Kate,
To talk about the illusion of perfection is to talk about true repentance, and these are topics for monks. How can they be relevant to the rest of us who subscribe to no moral ideals or even less an agreed-upon deity, the final Judge of all.
I say, not until a person gets a little bit more honest and hear every word that ever comes out of our mouth is a value statement, every product we browse online is to address a lacking in our life and thus to move ourselves closer to an ideal of some sort, however under-articulated or even subconscious the "perfection" might be, and every post we share on social media is a call to action to move away from something or someone, and as such towards someone or something else, however abstract the means and ends are.
We are moral creatures and always worshiping something. Whoever being offended by this last statement is already attesting to its truth: we don't react violently to words that we don't judge. If I make the same statement to my dog Sumi she'd probably yawn. We humans have a sense of what is beneath us, what is "subhuman" to commit or omit. To yawn away truth is to tell how far we've fallen from glory, our vocation to be truly "human."
Repentance means to change our mind, to turn away from our way and towards something else. That's why abstraction is our best defense against any call to change. As long as we stick to murky head-thoughts such as freedom and equality and progress we could stay unchallenged in our addictions and prejudices and indifference.
To say we've been "playing by the book" is the best way to cook the book. Merton talks about rejection, the reactive aspect of being unrepentant. The proactive aspect is we'll then take the book we cooked to suppress others, to impose our foul taste as universal good.
How can we get specific about our lacking without being crippled by the ugly details? How do we answer tangibly and wholeheartedly in the next breath we take to our longing for what is good and beautiful without turning into a moralist, a hypocrite? Repentance is not a flick of a switch. Perfecting is in the here-and-now but perfection a forever not-yet for as far as we can see.
The promise is we shall see.
The Christian good news, "Gospel," is that we have seen perfection in the life and sacrifice of Jesus. And he is not just a fleeting vision, a hearsay for some passerby. He simultaneously calls us out of ourselves and deeper into who we really are, so tangibly and wholeheartedly that he claims to have died for the fulfillment of our longings and now living with us and through us, on our way back home, beginning in the here and now, our every step big and small meaningful and significant. There is never any impersonal abstraction with Jesus.
Our living now is either giving witness in trust to that vision that's already playing out in our lives, or denying humanity, first of all our own, of the possibility of faith love and hope. Listen to the specifics of our own words and we shall hear where we stand.
Where we fall.
Yours, Alex
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