What was your profession? How many children did you have? Can you even remember who you thought you might be married to?
Okay, now come back to the present with me.
Am I the minister, even the kind of minister, you though you’d be listening to most Sunday mornings?
For many years I was in a one on one race with this guy named Joe Cherry.
And I have to tell you, that year after year, I was loosing this race.
This other guy, this other Joe Cherry, graduated from high school on time, and then he went to the University of Michigan for music. He majored in musical performance, and he was really good, too. Just after graduation, he married his high school sweetheart. Together they went to grad school, where he furthered his training, and then after graduating, he got a job in a major symphony, playing of course, Principal First Chair. He and his wife shortly thereafter had their first of two children. Their first child had their mother’s blue eyes. The second kid, would of course, have green eyes like Joe’s.
Joe is a pillar of his community. He and his wife go to church regularly and he was made a deacon of his church around his 35th birthday. His wife, a good churchwoman from birth was of course a Deacon, too, and often chaired the women’s auxiliary group.
By today, Joe’s children are in college, he’s been playing in ever larger orchestras and he’s got a pretty sweet life.
Of course, this other Joe Cherry isn’t real. He’s the me I imagined I was going to be when I was 16 or 17, or maybe 18.
He is the perfect Joe Cherry.
The one who never made gigantic mistakes, only little ones that were easily fixed. The kind of sitcom problems that get resolved in 27 minutes, just before the theme music starts and the credits roll.
As I said, for many years, I was in a hard, sprint like race with this Joe Cherry, and the funny thing is that I never once won. His stride would be longer, more graceful than mine, and always unbroken. He never seemed to trip, and the farther he got ahead of me, the more I was sure I was a failure.
I have some good news, though, to report.
I know that that Joe Cherry isn’t real.
Every once in a while though, I catch either a glimpse of that guy out of the corner of my eye, or I feel a creeping competitiveness with him, a troublesome stirring up in my subconscious.
I had one of those moments recently when my financial planning software informed me that in order for me to retire at 65, I would need to put double my monthly take home pay into my retirement account every month until I retired.
And, honestly, I caught myself saying (to myself of course) if only I had found my way into my path sooner. If only I hadn’t wasted all those years in search of who I am…
If only….
If only…
If only.
If only I were that other Joe Cherry who had married Melissa. I bet he’s going to retire at 65 and live a grand old life thereafter.
In Romy and Michell’s High School Reunion, starring Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino, the two girls, who never gave much thought to the direction they were taking in life after high school; they attend their 10th high school reunion.
It’s at this point that they begin to take stock in the way they’ve lived their lives, and begin to worry that are not going to match the successes of their classmates. So they pretend that they invented Post-It notes.
Things go awry, of course, and in this movie at least, all turns out okay, and our heroes get to leave their reunion with triumph because it’s Hollywood.
Though the premise is kind of dumb, and the soundtrack is somewhat better, the question is one worth considering.
Who is our perfect self, and why have we failed to be them?
It is perfectly okay not to be the fictional version of you. The one who never makes mistakes, the one who is never tired and in your tiredness is short with your children and other loved ones.
Part of the question, of course, also lies in what others tell us we need to be… to be perfect.
Depending on the translation, Voltaire is credited with coining the phrase “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
There are a lot of variations on this theme, many of the deriving directly from translation, but the ideas all swarm around the idea that to seek perfection prevents something.
Obviously to completely eschew perfection also prevents good, but there must be some middle ground.
There is value in striving to be the best one can be. To produce the best product one can, whether that product be a quilt, a cake or a photograph, for example, is a laudable goal.
How terrible would it be if every person who ever put pen to paper cared little or nothing about the poetry they produced? Or if composers cared little for nuance when writing music?
But if an artist was unable to accept imperfection in their work, if there was always just that one more flower petal that must be perfected, or that ripple in the water as produced in an oil painting… then the artist would rob, literally rob, the rest of the world the joy and pleasure of their art.
What if we compromised? Maybe 90% close to perfection?
I want to share with you the legend of the “Humility Bock” in quilting.
There are stories, folk tales, about how Amish quilters intentionally include an error in every quilt they make, because it is their theology that only God is perfect, and for a human being to produce something that was itself a perfection would be an affront to God himself.
In order to save you from a rabbit hole of quilting history, let me just report to you that many quilt historians have looked into this little aphorism.
Bobbie Aug, who has taught pre-1940 Old Order Amish-style quiltmaking, said she once spent a week with an Old Order Amish family. The Amish quilters she asked about the "humility block" were aghast. To them "an intentional error is saying just the opposite - that their work is perfect and that they would have to be purposeful in order to make mistakes."
After 20 years of research among the Amish in Missouri, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania, Bettina Havig has developed close connections with Amish quiltmakers; she's written two books on the subject. Ask an Amish quilter about the "humility block," she says, "and the answer will be 'I make enough mistakes without making them on purpose'." Havig dismisses the story as "just one more attempt to romanticize an aspect of quiltmaking." She notes that not only has she found no evidence supporting this tradition among the Amish; she hasn't found "any sort of quilt superstition" in that community.
Xenia Cord, a quilt historian who has taught folklore at Indiana University for more than two decades, also wondered about the concept of "intentional mistakes". "If intentionally making a design flaw in order to avoid the perfection that is relegated to God alone is done to keep the maker humble, isn't this in itself a kind of arrogance? (i.e., 'I'm so good that unless I mess up intentionally, I am perfect.') Where's the humility in that?" Cord also wryly wonders, "[I]s there a quilter among us who is so good that she makes NO errors in piecing, joining, appliqueing, or quilting (that can't be fudged or covered up)?" She hypothesized that "the whole 'intentional flaw' thing may be the observer's way of trying to explain why an unknown quilter, who has made something the observer can't make, would have left that piece upside down, or that heart slightly lopsided, or that line of quilting unfinished."
As a quilter myself, I can tell you that I, along with the Amish quilters quoted just a moment ago, have no need to intentionally include an error in my quilts. Plenty of them appear on their own accord!
We should be no less gentle with people than we are with quilts.
This morning’s words from the Global Scripture were those of Elizabeth Kubler Ross.
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
We know this intrinsically. Perhaps this is why we can identify so easily with protagonists in stories who struggle.
Who wants to read a book, or see a movie, or even tell a story if the hero has an easy time of it? Would Sophie’s Choice be compelling if the choice was easy? Who’d care?
This week, perhaps even this very afternoon, commit an error.
If you’re like me, it won’t take too long to happen.
But here’s what you might try differently. Rather than being glib about the error, or horrified by your mistake, why don’t you try noticing the mistake, and if it’s not too serious, let it go.
I’m not recommending that you go headlong into a land riddled with mistakes made from lack of caring, mind you.
And there is a difference between an honest mistake, an honest miss-step, and intentionally shoddy workmanship in one’s life.
One can live an honest and good life and still miss the mark.
In fact, that is the definition of sin: to miss the mark.
It’s up to you how to live your life and how to balance perfection in it.
But it would sure be a shame to not hug someone, because you were afraid you’d do it wrong; or to deny someone a cookie, because you don’t bake well.
And while not a crime in the legal sense, it’s also not good for you to berate yourself for mistakes made along the way.
I understand the pull of perfectionism. I spent hours writing and editing, and then re-editing and then some more editing this very sermon. I am not blind to the irony that this is sermon called “Releasing Perfection.”
But still I felt called to do my very best this morning.
While my very best is not perfection, often it is still pretty good.
If I hadn’t followed Voltaire’s wisdom, that perfect is the enemy of the good, I would’ve just stayed home this morning in an endless loop of editing. Eventually, one must accept that good is good, that it may miss the mark you hoped for, you aspired to, and that having missed that mark, you may have sinned.
As the Jewish Prophet Micah recorded: “What is required of you? To do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
If the word God doesn’t sit well with you in the quote from Micah, try this: What is required of you? To create justice, to love mercy and to walk with humility.
Our Universalist forebears knew that sin would happen. That good people would miss their mark, miss their goals, fail to live up to their highest aspirations, and they believed in a Loving God who would never punish them in Hell for merely being human. They called it “Salvation by grace.”
Our Unitarian ancestors embraced a theology that claimed, somewhat radically, that to be human was to be enough. We believed in what was commonly called “Salvation through character alone.”
Let these two ideas be your guide. The universe is full of love, and mistakes can be forgiven. Balance that with the knowledge that it is your character that both guides you and that you are guiding.
Don’t be a prison of perfection. Rather make mistakes, make art, make love, make life. And since you’re not likely to always hit your mark, to sin, go forth and sin boldly.
Releasing Perfection
© The Rev. Joseph M Cherry
March 2, 2014
Written for and Delivered to
The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County
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