On Growing Towards Perfection: Journeying in the Direction we are Born For (Reprise)

 In thinking about Lent I remember a time when the commandment to "be ye perfect as your father in heaven is perfect" had come up for me. The first time was in an email to my director, referring to the use of the term "total commitment" in something I was reading in relation to our work together. I wondered what "total" meant in the context involved; I couldn't understand it as even conceivable, much less possible, and that, it sounded like, could jeopardize everything. She wrote back, pointing out the similarity of the word "perfect" in the NT and the difficulty of defining it. She then defined "total" contextually, in a less absolute (but no less personally demanding) way, a way which corresponded to the needs of the work being done and which, yet again, was a matter of "trusting the process" and the changes, healing, and growth it brings about. (This, of course, involved trusting the grace of God in all the ways it is ever mediated to me over time and that was especially true in this process!)

Other instances of meeting the word "perfection" had to do with Lent itself, with the God I was somehow supposed to come to image more perfectly and who was defined as perfect only in terms of static Greek categories: (omnipotence, omnipresence, immutability, etc.) --- categories that often seem at odds with the living God of the Old and New Testaments. Another had to do with consecrated life and the older usage regarding being called to "a state of perfection". Again, I thought, as I always do, that being called to perfection meant being fully human because I think being authentically and fully human is at least part of this call to perfection --- but somehow the word "perfection" continued to raise obstacles within and for me. It is a problem all by itself. I would bet I am not alone in this. In fact, I know I am not; one of the reasons women Religious rarely refer to "states of perfection" these days is because to do so seems elitist and divisive. It can also lead to needless or unwarranted anxiety over hypocrisy and failure.

So, I went back to the original text --- not something I do often enough these days --- and was reminded that the word translated as perfection is τελειος (teleios) --- from the Greek telos (τελος) which refers to the goal, end, or fulfillment of something. (Jesus is the telos or end/goal/fulfillment of the Law, for instance.) That was suggestive of being goal-directed or of having reached a goal (some have defined this call to perfection in terms of "maturity") but it still left me little further along in my thoughts and prayer. Then, while in Tahoe for a week, I was reading a book by William O'Malley on Parables, and not far into the book, O'Malley begins to discuss the difficult word "perfection". (God does indeed work in surprising and delightful ways!) O'Malley also notes that the Greek is teleios (τελειος) but in light of that word, he went on to define the call to perfection as the call to be "heading in the direction [we] are born for".  And that made "total" (!) sense to me. It is a refreshingly dynamic way of defining perfection (a way which is appropriate to the God who is "verb more than noun", who is Love-in-Act) in an unfinished and evolving universe; it also reduces anxiety or concerns about hypocrisy and elitism and is able to free folks from any unhealthy perfectionism. Perfection, in the sense Jesus and the New Testament used the word, is not about having reached, much less achieved a static state without flaws or frailties, but instead, it is about being true to the journey; it is about being on a pilgrimage to authenticity with, in, and towards life in God.

Last Sunday, we celebrated the Gospel story of Jesus' Transfiguration. We often use the term transfiguration in the sense of change or transformation, but when we think about the transfiguration of Jesus, the only thing that changed was the way Jesus appeared to others. Jesus was transfigured in their eyes but he himself remained who he was right along. The disciples saw him for who he really was, namely, a truly human being living fully with, in, and towards life in God. They rightly saw him as the glory of God, the revelation of the love and mercy which every human being is called and born to be. Whether they were aware of this or not, what James, Peter and John saw in Jesus was also an image of their own telos, the end or fulfillment of their own journeys to authenticity and maturity in, with, and through God. They saw an image of human perfection --- a man well on his way in his journey to fully reveal the glory of God in ordinary life situations. Jesus was heading towards Jerusalem with all that implied and involved; he was on his way to the Cross and the exhaustive revelation of a Divine power which would be perfected in weakness; he was on his way toward changing the very nature of reality by reconciling that same reality to God, destroying (Godless) death and by effectively giving creation a place in the very life of God. In other words, He was "perfect" (teleios) because he was "heading in the direction [he] was born for" and in no other direction.

So many times, Jesus could have turned aside or away. There were so many times he could have chosen a different path, one which was good, fruitful, respectable, admirably religious, and apparently "law abiding" (in terms of the Torah) --- but which was not about heading in the direction he was born to head. But, as he did during his time in the desert, he chose to do what he was born (or baptized) to do. He entered the desert having heard from God that he was God's beloved Son who did indeed delight God. He grappled with what that meant both in personal and pastoral terms. And finally, he chose to respond to the deep call of God to be that person and live that identity in the ordinary and extraordinary things of life. This choice was one he renewed again and again throughout the course of his public life with every act of compassion and self-emptying. In the process, he renewed the course of his journey with, toward, and on behalf of God's sovereignty and the extension of that "Kingdom of God" to all God holds as precious. Jesus affirmed and reaffirmed a commitment to the same perfection we are each called to, namely, an authentic and God-centered humanity lived for others. And isn't this what Lent gives each of us the space and encouragement to do?

A few folks have emailed and suggested that by focusing on the work I have already been engaged in with my director I am failing to do what Lent really calls for. That, they believe, is inexcusable in a consecrated (canonical) hermit who lives this life in the Name of the Church! Apparently, they suggest, in outlining my plans for Lent, I have not made a sufficient commitment to additional prayer, penance, and almsgiving. But thus far, in this (in 2017) now-10-month-journey, I have called "inner work" what my director and I have been engaged in is a profound desert-time where I grapple with 1) my identity and 2) with God's call to be myself as fully and freely as possible. This is the call to be perfect as God (Him)self is perfect --- nothing less.

We are each involved in a journey towards authenticity and (simultaneously) communion with God. As with Jesus, it is a single journey where we may have to renounce what is usually recognized as "respectability" in order to embrace genuine holiness --- just as we may need to embrace brokenness to be reconciled to God, self, and others, or to live the joy and freedom of life in and of God. The question Lent asks and gives us space and time to answer with our lives is, "are you headed in the way you were born to be headed?" Are you headed in the way your heart has been shaped throughout your whole life by the Love-in-Act we call God? If not, if you are impelled and even compelled by something else, how will you change course? What paths do you need to leave behind? What ways of being? What obstacles to freedom, personal deficits, woundedness, etc., will you need to work through and let go of?  How, after all, will you embrace the call to be "perfect", the call to be "heading in the direction you were born to be heading"?

On Hypocrisy vs Imperfection: An indirect look at Loyalty Oaths

There are times when I struggle with eremitical life. Sometimes I just don't live it as well as I feel called to do. Sometimes I am not as generous, not as loving, not as faithful to my daily praxis and Rule as I am obligated to be by my profession. And yet I wear a habit which signals publicly that I am a hermit (for most it just says I am a nun) and I write about eremitical life here and elsewhere; I have even given interviews on the life as well a talk or two about it here and there --- and will likely do so again somewhere in the future. So, does this make me a hypocrite? Do I live a life of pretense while I show the face of fidelity to the world around me? I have certainly struggled with THAT piece of things as well!

But this year I also came to a bone deep, heart-level realization (I have been working on this for some time and, in a moment of profound healing, what I knew intellectually finally "clicked" in a deep-down way) that there is a profound difference between hypocrisy and imperfection. I am an imperfect hermit, an imperfect religious, an imperfect Christian who struggles to live fully the Gospel of God within the context of eremitical life, but I am not a hypocrite. As far as I can tell, struggle is part of my very vocation, just as it is, I think, with ANY really serious attempt to live out a divine call with integrity.

Similarly, I strive to believe what the Church teaches; as a theologian I work hard to wrap my mind and heart around every doctrine. I sometimes have struggled to give an assent of faith when that is required and I struggle to give "religious submission of mind and will" where that is required (which is a good thing since, among others, obsequium carries the senses of willingness to assent and struggle to assent). I struggle to believe that the episcopacy has a clear charism of truth in days when members of the episcopacy have made themselves incredible to me in any number of ways, and I struggle to see where Christ's church really is; I struggle, that is, to see where the Church that remains indefectible in the power of the Gospel of freedom really abides today in season and out.

I struggle with that especially in these days of "loyalty oaths" which conflate matters of faith with others that are not, which blur the critical boundaries between internal and external forums and imply (or state explicitly) that some of us are incapable of ministering to fellow Catholics because we are not "Catholic" enough or are deemed hypocritical because we wrestle with many things in today's church including the fundamental offensiveness of loyalty oaths themselves. I struggle in these days when women religious are misrepresented, demeaned and punished while members of the hierarchy commit heinous criminal acts and are rewarded anyway; I struggle in these times when it has become acceptable for the self-righteous to be happy with, indeed, to sometimes slaver over the prospect of a "leaner, purer church" while others they call "brother" and "sister" are forced, in good conscience, to leave the church for ecclesial communities where they can be genuinely respected and nourished in their faith,

I am not, however, a hypocrite. I am a Christian, a Catholic Christian whose faith is imperfect just as was the faith of Peter, or Thomas, or Mary of Magdala, or James and his group, or the disciples on the road to Emmaus. I am a Catholic Christian as imperfect as any Catholic Christian ever was or is who is set on maturing in their faith. I am a Catholic Christian who recalls that some have sometimes translated the word "perfect" in the evangelical counsel "Be you perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect," as "whole" or "mature" or "fully alive" or "holy." And, like the Church herself --- the entire Pilgrim People of God --- I am therefore "always in need of reform," always called to conversion, always summoned to a fuller understanding and embrace of the faith Christ has entrusted to me and to the whole Church.

I have no doubt that some in the Church would like to simply stamp out or force me to abjure those dark, yet-to-be illuminated areas of my mind and heart that do not yet reflect the light of Christ or the power of the Holy Spirit. I am sure that some in the Church would say that because of these imperfections I am unworthy to minister, or to do theology, or to be a canonical hermit who lives out her life in the name of the Church. After all, I am an imperfect Catholic Christian who struggles in these and other ways as well. But perhaps these folks should reread the admonition that one deal with the beam in one's own eye before blindly and recklessly plucking at the splinter in another's. Perhaps they should reread the parables of patience, faith, and quiet growth --- where, admitting their own inability to do anything more, farmers (and indeed, Popes like John XXIII who once prayed, " Lord, I am going to bed, the Church is yours,") do indeed go to bed and trust that God is doing in the depths and darkness what only God can do.

You see, I was taught --- indeed the Holy Spirit taught me, Christ himself patiently taught me, the one I call Abba gently taught me over the space of many years --- that I am part of the Church where the imperfect are called to belong, to be, and to be made whole; it is the Church of wounded healers, the communion of those with troublesome thorns in their sides and lance holes in their hearts. I was taught, not least by the Church Council called Vatican II, that she desired my full and active participation in the "work of the people" --- a full and active participation that includes ministry to one another (EEM, cantor, lector, acolyte, sacristan, lay presider, chorister, musician, etc. --- I have done them all) as an integral part of my act of worship. This, Vatican II reminded me, was my privileged right and responsibility as baptized --- with training, yes --- but without additional public acts of faith or manifestations of conscience beyond my profession of the Church's creeds.

The lesson I learned at the level of heart this year was one the Church hierarchy could do well to remind themselves of. It is one that the self-righteous minority of orthodoxy police would do well to learn themselves. We are imperfect, all of us, but this does not mean we are hypocrites. I struggle as my own faith grows and matures, but I am called to do so and can only do so within the Communion of the Church, not outside it. Within my mind and heart grow weeds and wheat together. Only the truly foolhardy would try to uproot the weeds while thinking they will not also harm the tender wheat that grows there too. Only the pastorally naive would ask me to show the wheat and not expect there also to be weeds interspersed.

But, imperfect as my faith may be, what is there for anyone with eyes to see is a life which nourishes the faith of others nonetheless, a life which, through the grace of God, ministers in season and out, in weakness and in strength. Even I, the once-consummate perfectionist can see that! In any case, I am a Catholic not because my faith is perfect, but because with the grace of God and (his) People's assistance I struggle towards the day it will be; I am Catholic --- and an effective minister of the Gospel I have given my life to and for --- not in spite of my struggle but because of it! I am imperfect in all the ways any serious, faithful, Catholic Christian is imperfect -- and probably more as well. But I am not a hypocrite. I am surer about that today than ever.