Let me say upfront that I am a raging perfectionist. In some ways this is a good thing; I continually challenge myself to do better and be better. However my perfectionism gets dicey when I become unrealistically uptight and demanding of myself and others. Today we had a family brunch at our house to honor our grandson Zach. Everyone was having a fine time eating bagels, drinking coffee, and visiting while I was getting progressively uptight because I was still getting my two crustless quiches ready to go into the oven and the hour had passed when I'd expected to have them finished and cooking. Please understand - I love cooking and baking - but I had a self-imposed clock ticking in my head. Voice harsh with strain, I finally asked my husband to help me break up the pre-cooked bacon in one quiche pan. Everyone watched attentively as I worked on one quiche and Paul worked - much more slowly - on the other.
"Hurry up!" I finally snapped at him. "Your bacon pieces are too small!"
"I've never done this before!" he retorted, exasperated.
There was some quiet mirth.
"Come on, Mom!" My one son-in-law teased. "I like small pieces of bacon in my quiche!" There was a loud chorus of agreement. I relented and apologized to my long-suffering husband.
"I'm so sorry!" I finally wailed. "You must all be so hungry, waiting for the quiche!"
"We're eating BAGELS, Mom!" one person said. Another chimed in "You'd better plan on apologizing SIX MORE TIMES before Dad's satisfied."
Of course, someone was happy to point out later (with a twinkle in their eye) that everyone had started eating Dad's quiche first - they remembered which pan he'd worked on - because everybody liked smaller bacon pieces. My family has a wonderful way of demolishing perfectionism in everyone!
One of the reasons we can tend to be perfectionistic is that we have an exaggerated idea of what ordinary holiness is. When you're young and hear about or read about spiritual "giants," you presume they were perfect. Not so. And how can we think this, if we look carefully at the spiritual giants of Scripture?
Recently my sister Donna lent me a novelized version of King David's life. King David succeeded magnificently in uniting all the feuding tribes of his people into an army capable of defeating their enemies, and also in recognizing the political and tactically strategic advantage of having Jerusalem as the capital city. God told David that one from his house would save God's people - and that person was Jesus.
Yet in many other ways, power destroyed David. He became an egotistical moral monster. He manipulated people for his own ends. In spite of having numerous wives and concubines, he still seduced his friend's wife (mid-life crisis??), then had him put in the front lines of battle to perish so his friend wouldn't find out that David had gotten his friend's wife pregnant. When one of his sons raped his half-sister, David didn't treat the case with justice, favoring his son (the future King, he hoped,) over his daughter. Yet the novel - and Scripture - continually say "And God was with David." Why? Because numerous times David's conscience got the better of him, he faced up to the wrong he'd done, and repented. You see, God is not a perfectionist about us. God accepts, very realistically, that our pattern is falling and rising. God knows how limited and fragile we are, and walks beside us, gradually leading us forward and inward - to Him.
When we think of saintly people, we automatically presume that they possess all the virtues. But St. Thomas Aquinas says "Certain saints are said not to possess certain virtues, in so far as they experience difficulty in the acts of those virtues, even though they have the habits of all the virtues." The Holy Spirit lives in us, and so we have the potential capability - or potential habits - of all the virtues, but our own psychological or temperamental weaknesses stand in the way of us possessing, or acting on, certain virtues as much as we'd like. St. Louise de Marillac was a chronic depressive. St. Jerome was grumpy and sharp-tongued. If we look at paintings of St. Thomas Aquinas himself, he was quite rotund and overweight - so who knows? He might have indulged in emotional over-eating, which would have damaged his health. Some of us are overly anxious; some of us are doubters or fearful; some of us might be hypochondriacs. Some of us fight addictions to alcohol, food, drugs, or illicit sex. I'm sure we could find a saint in the calendar who had exactly the same draw-backs that we have.
Which is why humility is such a great virtue to possess.
Humble people acknowledge what their psychological quirks and moral failings are to themselves.
Humble people are willing to accept that these built-in quirks and tendencies keep them from doing ANYTHING perfectly. So they don't expect more of themselves than they're capable of doing.
Åt the same time, a humble person can rejoice honestly in his/her growth in various virtues - love, faith, hope, courage, purity, for example, always giving glory to God for God's steadfast and merciful outpouring of grace.
Humble people pray, talking to God about all of the above, and learn to love themselves in the here-and-now even if they aren't perfect - because God loves them and forgives them. Which frees them up to love everyone else in the here-and-now regardless of their failings. If we admit that our own pattern is falling and rising, we are a lot freer in accepting that that is everyone else's daily pattern too.
Humble people pray, asking God to heal them of their imperfections which can be healed, of healing them of the ways in which they give in to illusions and delusions, the ways in which they sabotage the graces God wants to give them. They pray for the same graces for others, realizing that we are all in the same boat, a boat our failings seek to swamp as much as our virtues seek to row forward.
Humble people, above all, are merciful, merciful to themselves and merciful to others, because prayer helps them see with ever-greater clarity how merciful God is to them.
The Church is also called to be humble and merciful about its own failings as a human organization run by limited fragile people, and to be likewise humble and merciful in approaching the complicated individuals who belong to her. The Church rejoices because our merciful God says "I am with you until the end of the world."
Pope Francis sums this up by saying "In a word, we are called to show mercy because mercy was first shown to us....The Çhurch is not a tollhouse; it is the house of the Father, where there is a place for everyone, with all their problems."
In family life or in the life of a religious community, in the life of a parish or in the life of a world-wide Church, we are called to this constant discipline of self-forgiveness for not being "perfect" and forgiveness of others in the Name of God Who is Mercy. The humility of mercy is the balm which heals, the deep love which moves everyone into closer unity. Together we can pray with ever-dawning realism and patience, rejoicing and mercy "Lord Jesus Christ, be merciful to me, to us, who are sinners."