Imperfect Perfectionism

My husband plays the tuba badly.

No, wretchedly. Execrably. With unforgettable inexpertise.

After my husband played "When Irish Eyes are Smiling" at my older daughter's wedding, as a way of welcoming our son-in-law's Irish family, his father created an award for Jack that read, in part "for a performance which demonstrated an originality so stark that it stunned the audience, rendering them incapable of meaningful response." This did not hurt my husband's feelings. He knows the impact his music has. This is a man for whom practice means playing all the notes, right or wrong, at least twice. His tuba, purchased at a yard sale for $100, looks as if it's been run over by a truck. His entire repertory consists of five songs which run the gamut from "Happy Birthday" to "So Long, It's Been Good To Know You.”

Still, the phone rings and people ask him to do a gig at some special event, an occurrence which happens more frequently than I might hope. He doesn't get nervous or decide to polish up his technique a bit. He glows. He basks. He’s unabashedly delighted. And delightful.

At his first note, audiences burst into hysterical laughter, and the more earnestly my husband attempts to render a recognizable melody, the harder they laugh, until they leap to their feet, choking and cheering. I understand why he's in demand. What has been harder for me to accept is how my husband can be perfectly capable of enjoying his tuba solos without ever aiming at competence.

This is not the way I was brought up. Whether it was swimming, tennis or ballroom dancing, my mother made sure I began with lessons. The pleasure in doing a thing, I was taught, was in doing it well, and so my whole life has been about mastery, whether I was skiing, sewing, or cooking. I never enjoyed trial and error. I wanted to do things as they should be done. I disliked looking awkward or amateurish. And to my way of thinking, mistakes took the pleasure out of things. If I felt I’d end up doing something badly. I politely refused to begin.

That seemed a perfectly sensible way to operate, until I started dancing for exercise three months ago. At the beginning, I gave myself time to learn the steps, but I’m no longer a novice. What’s happened now is that newcomers are catching on while I’m still struggling. I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that these complex patterns of movement we do may never come to feel like my second nature.

You know what? I don’t care.

I can't believe it myself. I feel like stopping people on the street and informing them, "You don't have to be good at something to love it." I want to tell my daughters, "Forget about having to meet your own high standards before you can have a wonderful time.” I’ve learned that it's possible for me to tune in to how good it feels to move without having to submit my performance to my superego for approval.

Oh, what bliss it is to slip my pleasure right by that little inner overachiever! I admit I was puzzled by why frequent repetition didn't lock the order of moves into my brain, but in reading Howard Gardner's book, Frames, of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, I have come to have a new respect for what he calls bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, the ability to use one's body in highly differentiated ways. In general, we respect those who rate high in language, logic and math, but Gardner contends that there are other equally important forms of intelligence having to do with movement, music, spatial ability and personal and interpersonal skills.

These forms of intelligence are like packages under the tree, wondrous gifts given to our species by a generous creator. By opening only those at which we have been trained to excel, we diminish the ways in which we can express ourselves in the world. The culture colludes, teaching us reading, writing and arithmetic at an early age and leaving us to discover our other talent in a hit-and-miss fashion.

Hit, as in I hit over the head.

In high school, I was shamed in Glee Club, instructed just to pretend to sing at concerts. I taught myself a few simple songs on the guitar and played them for my children only as long as I could count on their lack of discrimination. Then I stuck the guitar in the closet. I was so convinced of my lack of grace that after I tried out for cheerleading and actually made the squad, I never showed up for a single practice.

But my husband and I are proof of how rewarding it can be to sing or dance, to play a musical instrument or a sport, to study a foreign language, or calculus, or anything that doesn't come easily. All you have to do first is free yourself from the prison of excellence.

As Nike says, 'Just do it.'

Oops, add one more word, 'Badly.'

Sermon

The word perfect comes from the Latin per and facere, meaning to make through, to completion. A perfect thing is a completed thing.

But perfectionism takes this sense of "perfect" and takes it a fatal step further, seeking to make a perfect thing something which is not only complete, but which cannot be bettered. It adds to the original sense of completeness, wholeness, the added element of competition, of bettering, of being the absolute best.

Consider. Lao Tzu, Buddha considered each moment perfect in that it held the exact completeness of everything that presently is. Paradoxically, of course, even in this perfect view things can be better - what else is the whole idea of the path about, if not a journeying in this direction? - but things as they are are all night, whole, complete already in their mind's eye. But not so in ours. And there is a reason for this. And the reason is the pervasive milieu surrounding us flavored by the concept of original sin.

With the concept of original sin as a foundation of much of Western, and hence our own thought, nothing we ever do is quite good enough. Any moment is, by definition, starting out way over on the negative side, needing to be bettered to get back even to neutral zero, let alone moved over towards the positive good. Never mind that Matthew Fox and others have eloquently pointed out that the concept of original sin is not original in Christianity or, certainly, in Judaism. It came in later, via Paul and even later emphatically by Augustine, and it has colored our cultural world profoundly. This is an ironic legacy from the teacher who embraced the beauty of the cultural outcasts of his time. Jesus did not preach original sin, just as the Judaism in which he lived knew nothing of it. Life is a blessing. Yes, sure enough, we humans find ingenious ways of messing it up, but we begin with blessing - at least in original Judaism and original Christianity, if we take that as what Jesus preached.

I think the tack the early Christian church made in understanding the death of Jesus helped set later history in the direction of a great emphasis on sin. What won out as the way of understanding Jesus’ death what what we know as “atonement theology,” which is based on the notion that God requires sacrifices to be pleased. Working off the older sacrificial scapegoat of the Passover, the church saw Jesus as the new sacrifice for the sins of the people, and since he was doing it for all time, he must therefore be God to be a big enough sacrifice. This view elevated Jesus but magnified the focus on our sins. In fact, the worse we are, the more Jesus is magnified. Thus was built into Western theology a tendency to magnify our sins.

The idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with us as the starting point of theological thinking is thus a developed religious invention. Augustine developed it as central to his theology and then Luther and Calvin refined it to new standards of, shall we say?, perfection, and thus bequeathed this tradition of thought to us in this country, the new world heirs of the old world Reformation theology. This theology holds that something is fundamentally wrong with us which must be made right. The present is tainted, and so must be bettered; the complete must be made better, made best. Yes, this view has given us the Protestant work ethic and a lot of good pursuit of excellence to escape from the prospect of hell, but it has also engendered a lot of private angst, a barrage of self-doubt, a pervasive inability to simply enjoy things as they are now. Much of our life is still mired in the notion that who we are is simply not good enough.

And we Unitarian Universalists are, in some ways perhaps, the worst of the lot. Sure, we, threw over the doctrine of original sin when we broke with Calvinist theology way back in the 18th and 19th centuries, but we kept a lot of its flavor. And we sautéed our budding emphasis on deeds, not creeds, in its sauce, elevating to our pantheon of heroes women and men who lived lives of absolute self sacrifice, people like Dorothea Dix and Susan B. Anthony, Theodore Parker, Clara Barton and William Ellery Channing. As we abandoned the notion that the embraced beliefs of a life define its ultimate worth and embraced the notion that the worth of a life is found in the actual works done, the actions performed, the life lived, we found it difficult to let go of the pervasive cultural flavor that there was something fundamentally wrong in ourselves which needed to be righted. We often sought, not the perfect, but the perfectionist.

I am a recovering perfectionist. Oh, I know those of you who have seen my office will doubt that, but it's true. I was the one who, as a kid or youth, given some task everybody else thought completed in five minutes, assumed I had at least three hours to complete it. (Of course, maybe I was just very slow.) I was the one going off to study Saturday nights in college when every sane person had decided it was time to have a good time. I was the one never satisfied with any paper handed in, any mark received. There was always the better to be achieved, the more to be done, the imperfect to be perfected.

And, I imagine, so, in your own way, were, and are, a lot of you. I try to remind you, as I try to remind myself, that all of our congregational activities here are a sharing, a giving, not a performance, that the requirement here is not to try to be more than you are but simply to be who you are. But that is difficult to conceive and believe because all around is perfectionism beckoning us to be more than we are, to do better than we are doing.

That is why the tuba playing of Linda Weltner's husband has had me jumping to my feet and cheering, even though I have never heard him play. I've been reading that award given him with joy: "for a spontaneous public performance which demonstrated an originality so stark that it stunned the audience, rendering them incapable of meaningful response."

I like this guy. I love his ability to enjoy that tuba and let that enjoyment shine, awful as his playing is. I need this. I suspect a lot of us need this - unapologetic awfulness. Because, let's face it, most, if not all - you see I do make allowance for you perfectionists here - of us have areas of our life in which we do awfully. That's why Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is so refreshing - we can do pretty well in a couple of areas and blow it extravagantly in several others and still not be completely stupid. We're just demonstrating the fact that there are multiple intelligences and that you or I have at least a couple of them.

But like Linda Weltner, I, like I suspect many of you, took the dancing and tennis and such lessons and felt we shouldn't do something unless we could do it well, thereby bypassing huge areas of our lives out of fear of some kind of failure whose dimensions were never exactly made clear. God forbid we should be judged not enough. God forbid we should flop, or fail, or goof, or miss. Striving for perfection, we missed living, because living is always in process, always messy and somewhat slapdash, always either superbly unfinished or exquisitely whole, complete, take the paradox as you like. But surely living is never where the perfectionist wants it to be. To the perfectionist it is never enough, can never be enough. Thank goodness there is another realm of existence, inhabited by execrable tuba players and other happy folk.

“You don't have to be good at something to love it." That's what Linda Weltner learned from her spouse, turning a laughing, stomping, stunning happening into a serious moral. I, too, have done what only a preacher could - turned that hysterical tuba story into a serious talk. I apologize. My only defense is that perfectionism, even in recovery, is serious business and/or that preachers just can’t help themselves. So take her moral seriously - "you don't have to be good at something to love it." And that applies to life. This that we are all engaged in is not a performance. It is a love affair. And flops, floops, flips, awkwardnesses, goofs, gaffs, blunders, misses, muffs, and catastrophes are as natural to a love affair as lover meets beloved. It was Robert Fulghum who remarked that weddings are absolute setups for disasters, since collected there are a large number of highly anxious amateurs, all ready at a moment's notice to faint, stumble, topple, drop, forget, disappear, get lost, stain, rip, smear - you name it, it's happened. (A friend of mine comes from a family of fainters. At their family weddings, it is never a question of whether, but only of who, when, and how many will go down. There’s lots of betting on the side.) And we are, all, in this metaphor, highly anxious amateurs at the wedding of life, doing our best to get through and have a good time while doing it. As one Unitarian Universalist minister put it to his teenage children on his refrigerator: "Your mother and I are on a practice run through all of this. Please be forgiving."

Mary Daly, the irrepressible feminist theologian and re-definer of language recounts how she was taught an invaluable lesson by a flower. I quote: "Especially important was a communication from a clover blossom one summer day when I was about fourteen. It said, with utmost simplicity, 'I am.' It was an experience that I would later call 'an intuition of Be-ing, the Verb in which we all participate.' Such invitations to my adolescent spirit were somehow intimately connected with the call of books. It was an encounter that launched me on my quest to be a Radical Feminist philosopher." (New Yorker, 2/26 & 3/4, 1996, p.78.) As a young Catholic girl fighting the cultural milieu around her that there was something inferior about her, something not right, because she was female, Mary Daly met the clover blossom, perfect in its imperfection, and was released. Funny, but that's the same image that came to Ralph Waldo Emerson when he made his break with the orthodox Unitarianism of his upbringing - it was the authenticity and simplicity of the clover blossoms and the falling rain that persuaded him religion was greater than any hair-splitting doctrine preached from a pulpit. Clover blossoms don't worry whether they are better or the best. They just blossom. And, yes, Jesus looked to the lilies of the field when he wanted to talk about the natural splendor we are all clothed in.

I finally got this simple lesson, I hope, from a remarkable Sufi teacher. Pir Vilayat Khan had raced motorcycles with Lawrence of Arabia, at least until he killed his fiancée going out of control around a corner, had been thrown out of the Royal Air Force for flying upside down while chanting wazifas, the Arabic equivalent of mantras, had studied meditation in the Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sufi traditions. (His sister was the last remaining radio operator for the French underground in Paris as D Day approached, and her eventual capture made Pir Vilayat an avid Amnesty International supporter.) Every celebratory time there was, he would bring out his cello. True, he had studied it with Pablo Casals. True, he had studied music with the celebrated Madam Boulangier in Paris. But life had not allowed him practice time, and the difficult Bartok he attempted was, to my mind, way beyond him, as squawks and squeaks and stumbled fingerings multiplied. I was bemused and yet confused. Why did he insist on this public embarrassment?

It was at least three years before it occurred to me that Pir was pouring his heart out to us in his playing, that the performance was not nearly as important as the heart behind it. It was then that I realized why it was that he put up, year after year, with stumbling choirs attempting Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus." It was because, behind and within the discordant momentary singing, he heard the perfect song. That's why I never missed a chance to sing with him - because with Pir the Hallelujah Chorus was always real, was a fact, not a performance. And all my life I’d longed to be in such a choir. The Bach, the Beethoven, the Bartok, the Mozart was always there awaiting the heartfelt attempt, no matter the outcome. The love of it was far more important than the technical mastery of it. One could dance, sing purely out of love. And that lesson was sorely needed by the smug performance-minded perfectionist that I was then. I had to learn that Pir’s cello squawks were testimony to a life of service to needs other than practice. The imperfections were testimony to the perfection of a life, a lovely life, a needed life, a life which had foregone cello practice for the sake of the myriad human needs presented it. The squawks, I finally realized, were beautiful.

And so with you, my friends - your squeaks are beautiful if your hearts be true. It is your love, which after all is another word for joy, that, in the last analysis, will see you home. We really don’t have to be good at something to love doing it. And if we only attempt the things we are good at, we’ll miss most of life. There’s simply no other way to proceed into life’s fullness than by jumping in. Because we were not born into sin; we were born into glory, but a glory full of mistakes and seeming failures of all kinds. And our tuba player reminds us of this essential fact as he blasts out his outrageous, irrepeatable notes, shocking us into stunned awareness that it is the love of playing, as for us it is the love of living, that conquers all.

Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
9601 Cedar Lane, Bethesda, Maryland 20814-4099
Tel: 301-493-8300    Fax: 301-897-5713
e-mail: office@CedarLane.org
Sunday Services at 10 a.m.
© 1998-2008, Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Webminister