On the dubiousness of perfection

I am a failure at living a life about social justice. Oh, I recycle, and turn lights off, write my congressman when I can, and boycott Nike, but when I think of a real social justice life, it would involve living simply, and not consuming so much, and being peaceful and meditating twice a day. I know people who actually do these things. And they are vegetarians, too. I barely have enough self-disicpline to stay on a diet for longer than two weeks, much less avoiding meat completely. Or doing anything else consistently for that matter.

Most spiritual people I know are orderly and disciplined and don't move a lot, whereas I move about once a year or whenever the carpet gets dirty, whichever comes first, which is often since I have two dogs. As someone who would have been daignosed ADHD as a kid, and actually was diagnosed as an adult, my life can get chaotically disordered and while I keep my house fairly neat, my checkbook is never balanced and my life is even less balanced.

What I do have that could be considered spiritual are friends and community and a willingness to be honest with myself and others, and maybe even a little bit of humility about never being anything close to perfect. In fact, I look at attempts to be perfect with great suspicion. Perefectionists are people who will never know the joy of finding the right person to do the right job for you, because they do not need anyone else. Perfectionists are tense and rehearse everything in their heads before they make a move, as though making a mistake would cancel out the right for them to take up space on the planet. Which boils down to their belief that you HAVE to be perfect to earn that right.

Forget God and God's unearned grace. These folks have earned their way into the kingdom through sheer, gritty self-determination. And they make me nervous with their perfectionistic glances and the judgment sitting right behind those glaring eyes. I ave not earned anything. I can get giddy with delight at being allowed to play in the kingdom's playground at all.

Perfectionists do not need support groups, either. Oh, they might show up in some of them, out of the pain caused by their perfectionism, but when it comes to actually relying on another person, it just isn't possible. So relying on God, whom we can't see, is an even trickier proposition.

But when I am at my spiritual best, which is relative to my spiritually worst times, I am able to see the scared kid underneath all that neatly ironed and well-groomed facade -- the scared kid who learned somewhere that if he didn't get it perfect, it was a complete failure, and he didn't deserve to be loved. And I am grateful for the mother who used to cuss at me and roll her eyes when I was a handful, but who never let me forget that she loved me. Like God does. Even when I am far from perfect.