So Be Perfect

I don't think anything could have made Jesus's point that His and God's ways are not the same as the world's ways as the final phrase of today's gospel:  "So be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

The Old Testament reading talks about the law and how it sets the Israelites apart from the rest of the world.  Jesus tackles it directly with Love Thy Enemy, and a less quoted but almost more lovely sentiment:

For He makes His sun rise on the bad and the good 

and causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust. 

So true.  So important to remember.  The world is here for everyone, not only those we deem worthy of it.  God deemed them worthy.  That is meant to be enough for us.

But the final verse: Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.

I just: are you kidding me?

I spend a good deal of my day each and every day trying to help students push past their perfectionism.  Trying to break them of the idea that there's a right, correct answer I'm trying to trick them into giving rather than truly asking them to form an opinion -- whatever it is.

Didn't I attend a workshop on Monday talking about how physically and mentally damaging the perfectionist obsession is in our culture?

Didn't I make myself crazy many times growing up because I couldn't accept the idea that everyone sins sometimes.  Every individual sin is avoidable, thus all sins are unavoidable.  It makes no sense to say you can never slip up.

Or so I thought at the time and turned my guilt meter up to obsessive levels for a few years.

Turns out that's what God wanted all the while.  Or rather, He wanted me continually improving, not just saying that sometimes we mess up and since everybody does, we don't actually need to change.  Because God's ways are not our ways.  The saints know this better than anyone.  That's why they're always convinced that they're not good enough when they look, to us, like just short of heavenly perfection.

There's a line in The Sound of Music that won't leave my head tonight that promises to resolve this (perhaps a little too neatly).  Max Dettweiler is talking about his job recruiting acts for the Kaltzburg Festival and being told not to overworry himself because he always does a good job.  His response:

And do you know why?  Because my motto is: never start looking for the people you wind up getting.

We shoot for nothing less than perfection, because we are bound to fail at what we try for.  The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.  We don't aim for mediocrity or even mere exceptionalism.  We aim for never directly harming another person, loving everyone, forming no grudges, even passing things.

We aim for a lot of things I've been particularly bad at this week and things I'll be particularly bad about in the coming week, which will be different, no doubt.  We fight to be perfect.  Anything else is aiming too low.