Here is my heart take what you want

Cause I have no use for it anyway

Well of all the stupid things I’ve ever said

This could be the worst may be the best

But those are the breaks

These are the bruises

And if I can’t give myself away I’m the only one who loses

And I don’t want to lose this

– Rich Mullins, “The Breaks”

 

I love this song called “The breaks” from Rich Mullins’s “Brother’s Keeper” album. But that line, “If I can’t give myself away, I’m the only one who loses” – I can’t entirely agree with it, since we each have been blessed in order to be a blessing. I know, I imagine Mullins was being a little tongue-in-cheek, but it’s a good jumping-off point for this conversation to say that if I can’t give myself away, I’m not the only one who loses; those for whom my heart was given to me also lose. If I bury my gifts, I do lose because “it is better to give than to receive”, and others lose because I’ve withheld some gift put in me that was meant for them.  There is a song that will go unheard if you and I don’t sing.

 

What keeps me from offering my gift? Today, I’m focusing on perfectionism. 

If I fail to give myself away because I can’t make a perfect offering, I think that the failure to give is a far greater failure than the failure to be perfect. I’m not sure that we are asked to be perfect, in the sense that we use that word today. Perfectionism in the modern idiom is a word informed or malformed by a mechanical imaginary. Doesn’t it conjure up connotations of machine-like precision? But you and I are not machines, we are persons. 

 

The word often translated as perfect in Scripture is “telos” which, maybe you can hear it, is where we get “telescope” from. “Telos” literally means “end” in greek. The “telos” or “end” of a coffee maker is to make coffee. The telos of an ear is to listen and hear, and so forth. The end for which a thing exists, the purpose it was made for is its telos.  Does that change the way you feel and think about perfection at all? For me it really helps, since, instead of associations like machine precision, mathematical exactitude, or academic performance, telos points toward connotations more along the lines of phrases like “coming home”, the Hebrew concept of “shalom”, “wholeness”, or even what Jesus calls his “easy yoke”.  Some versions of the bible translate telos as maturity. 

I wonder if, in agricultural terms, something like “ripeness” would be an appropriate way of imagining perfection?  We are much more akin to trees than we are machines. Jesus says we will be known by our fruit. Are the things we offer ripe? Rotten? Do they look ripe, but leave a bitter taste? Does a worm hide inside?  Or are they nourishing and life-giving, beautiful and true? 

If perfectionism hinders your heart, try replacing that word with more humane terminology. Machine precision isn’t what’s being asked of any of us. Rather, we have been commanded to responsibly tend the garden of our gifts in order that we might hand out little fruit baskets to the hungry so that they might “taste and see that the Lord is, in fact, good.” 

 

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke says, 

“To be an artist means: not to calculate and count, but to grow and ripen like a tree which does not force the flow of its sap and which stands confidently in the storms of spring without fearing that summer may not follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquility, as if eternity lay before them. It is a lesson I learn every day amid hardships I am thankful for: patience is everything!” 

 

We must, like Rilke says, be patient with ourselves. See the fruit tree wax and wane, endure cold and heat, spring up or lie fallow in seasons. God’s good Creation is a more accurate mirror to aid us as we seek to understand our own soul’s health. Machines represent, then, man-made models of so-called ‘health’, and when we build our paradigms, idioms, and inner reflections from the spare parts of industrialized language, something of our humanity gets mangled in the gears and crushed in the cogs.  

 

I remember hearing Eugene Peterson say he was trying his best to remove the term “dysfunction” from his vocabulary when referring to people. He said people aren’t functional or dysfunctional, machines are. To use machine language on people malforms the contours of our imaginations and changes the way we feel and think about people. We may begin to inhumanely impose unrealistic machine-like expectations on our loved-ones and ourselves. Owen Barfield argues in his writings that the language we use really does affect the way we see the world; begin by talking about people with inhumane words, and you’ll end by treating them inhumanely.  

You can spend some time thinking about the many ways our culture practices that sort of thing. Another example might be consumer terms applied to persons; are you my brother, sister, or friend? Or are you a demographic, consumer, end-user, or shopper? 

 

Maybe another set of terms can help us think about perfection in a way that relieves us of perfectionism. If there’s something I want to say and I struggle to find the right words in order for you to understand my meaning and enter fully into it, that’s really difficult to do, isn’t it? Guess what, it’s happening right now as I type this. There’s something I want to say that will set you free from slavery to perfectionism, and it’s very difficult to pull all my thoughts together into a life-giving articulation that you can receive and be nourished by. I’ve said it before, “the hardest thing to do is say what you mean”.  

This is a human struggle, and it’s very familiar and especially frustrating for artists. Every artist must learn to let go at some point of whatever piece of art they are trying to articulate into an artifact. They must, at some point, allow that there will always be some gap between what they wanted to say and what they managed to say. We do our best to close the gap, but it never quite closes. It’s part of what drives us to keep creating, because there’s always more to say and always more ways to say it. 

Jesus is the only instance I know of where anyone has ever said exactly what they meant to say. When “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” there was no gap between intention and articulation. Jesus says, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” He is “the image of the invisible God.” What began in the Father reaches its intended telos in Jesus. 

 

So, maybe what gives us the ultimate relief from perfectionism is trusting Jesus to fill in the gaps for us. He yokes himself to us so that our imperfect work, coupled with his grace, will reach its telos – it’s intended end. When we abide in the Vine, we are empowered to bear good fruit that the Holy Spirit promises will reach ripeness in God’s coming Kingdom. Right now, we see that Kingdom coming like we’re looking through a telescope, and we let God’s grace relieve us of perfectionism, because he will get us there. 

 

I hope that can give us courage to get on with the work of articulating God’s unspeakable beauty.  It is more than we can manage to say, yet in Christ we say it with the Word himself who takes our whispered offering and presents it full-voiced to his Father at the throne of grace. Jesus is always taking every offering of ours that falls short and carrying all the way to its end.  The important thing for us is not to give up and not to grow weary of doing good, even when the best we can do seems hardly good enough. In Christ, it is more than enough. 

 

 

Made Sweet

by Matthew Clark

 

Sweet Holy Word dallies the tongue, 

Rolling right round in its ripeness

On down to the inmost; 

Sounding the syllables, smoothing 

Mute stones – lapping lapidary  

Etching rich tones from the pit 

Of the fruit, risen from roots 

Peeks the peach-flesh made sweet. 

 

I am peach-fuzzed and tongue-tied 

Gap in my teeth, whistling out squeaks. 

Am I getting through? 

Is there one word which speaks? 

One word that might reach from the pit 

To the peaks? May the seed that falls dead 

Be received by the soil, and laid by in peace

To bespoke in the mouth of our sweet saving Word, 

“I planted this, amended, and made sweet.”