As I thought about the answer to the questions I just posed, my mind considered many possibilities. I wrote and thought; wrote and crossed out and thought some more. Sometime I laughed at my efforts. The yellow pad was full of insertions and erasures and arrows and circles with arrows and more crossing out. Carets for insertions and indecipherable handwriting abounded. I remembered a sermon Dennis gave in which he shared how his sermon title had led him to write something he hadn’t meant to explore.
Sermon writing is a messy business. So is life- at least for me it is. As a youngster I sought perfection. If I made a mistake, I wouldn’t rest until I’d fixed it. I erased errors in schoolwork creating large holes in the paper. Then I would rewrite the entire assignment to ensure that it was perfect. When I became a parent, I tried to be what I considered a perfect mother. Every day I polished my first grader’s shoes until they shone and then watched as he kicked up the dirt at the bus stop making those perfectly shined shoes a mess. Yes, life is messy.
I began to realize that I needed to learn to deal with the messiness of life; I needed to learn to live with the messiness of imperfection. Or as G. Peter Fleck so pithily put it, I needed to embrace “the blessings of imperfection”. Even though I strove to be a perfect student, a perfect daughter, wife mother, teacher, friend, I finally realized that perfection was beyond me. In his book “The Medusa and The Snail” biologist Lewis Thomas observes that we humans are built to make mistakes, (we are) coded for error. A biologist to the rescue!
However, as Fulghum suggests, living life is harder to do than reading or writing about it. How then do we deal with misdeeds, mistakes, small and large? How do we journey to Ithaca and not fear the Lestrygonians, Cyclopes and the angry Poseidon; not carry them within our souls?
In the Lord’s Prayer we are told to ask the Divine one to forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. But if we don’t derive comfort or certainty that we’ve been forgiven, the unease we feel when dealing with a life that is sometimes filled with imperfection, what are we to do? Fleck observes that , “the opportunity to accept…failure as part of our human imperfection (and) our loving acceptance of our own failing self as we are now in the present can be an immensely creative, a redeeming act. An act that makes the future possible.” In other words we must accept our imperfections. We have to forgive ourselves for our inability to be perfect. Not only must we forgive ourselves, but we must like who we are…unique and imperfect. Plato taught that only the idea of something is perfect and its realization, its expression in material worldly terms, a mere shadow of that perfection. We are not an idea, not perfect, but we can accept ourselves as we are and as we are becoming.
As Robert Fulghum and I learned, to acknowledge something is not the same as living it. I know that perfection is an ideal which I can’t attain and I struggle with my attempts to embrace imperfection to forgive myself. I have always felt uncomfortable about revealing too much of my own story. It is a risky business; the pulpit is not a confessional- at least for me it isn’t. But I need to explain about why and how I attempted to be perfect and how I dealt with my need for perfection and the need to forgive myself.
I grew up in a home where there was no overt affection- no hugs, no spoken “I love you”. The first time my mother told me she loved me was in the last week of her life. My father never spoke those words to me. They were as good parents as they could be given their upbringing. My father was a good provider and my mother kept house and cooked for us. All four of us went to college with some financial help from our parents.
As a young person I always felt that I was different from the kids in the neighborhood .I was too bookish; I didn’t look like the teenagers in “Seventeen”, the teen magazine of my time. I asked too many questions in school and found out that you were expected to learn what was presented without digging deeper. To question was disrespectful of the teachers. In spite of this I enjoyed learning even though I kept my thoughts to myself.
College was my butterfly time; out of the chrysalis and validated in many ways. Thinking was encouraged; questions were explored. It was OK to be intelligent. And I met my best friend and the love of my life. He taught me to love and be loved, to hug and be hugged. But still I struggled with society’s expectations. It was the 50’s and there were models of perfection to attain. Could I be the perfect helpmate, the perfect lover, the perfect mother? Along came the women’s movement and “you can have it all”, a career and motherhood. So I went to graduate school. My husband, an Air Force Officer, supported me in my efforts and helped at home since I was working and going to school. Though he assured me that I was loved and valued, I was conflicted. I had difficulty forgiving myself for not being what the military culture of the 50’s and 60’s deemed a “perfect” wife.
It was only in a Unitarian Church that I finally began to learn to relax and accept who I was. I found meditation groups, discussion groups, and sermons by my first woman minister, Beverly Baumbaugh. Her sermons helped me to rid myself of the demons I had allowed to reside within me. Most of all it was the people in the church who made it possible for me to grapple with my demands on myself for perfection. It is this church which has made it possible for me to risk being me, to find acceptance. It is Unitarian/Universalism that has offered me so many opportunities for fulfillment and the pursuit of a meaningful life. Most of all I’ve learned to laugh at myself, to enjoy each day and many kinds of people. In this world where many voices still tell us that there is only one way to dress or look, to live, to be successful, I choose to risk being myself, my authentic self. It is in this church that I have been able to risk failure and imperfection. It is here where people accept me that I can forgive myself my trespasses.
This is my imperfect sermon, my love letter to this church and to all of you.
Ithaca has given us a beautiful voyage. May the way be long, full of adventure, pleasure, joy and the beauty of imperfection.