I am not perfect!

How often I must remind myself and others of this? I am not perfect, I say when I make a mistake. I am not perfect, when I feel the burden to be perfect.

And how disappointed I get when one I idealise and idolise is found wanting. When they make a mistake and a dark side is revealed. When a movie or sports star or a politician is exposed. Why do I get so surprised and in my only little world and in proportion I commit the same wrong and do the same evil?

How I have realised that my obsession to have people act perfectly is a projection of my inability to accept the imperfect me. It’s like I want people to be perfect in a way that I cannot be. Why? Because if they are imperfect I panic, and why? Because it all of a sudden means that I have to focus on the things I hate about me or come to the realization that I am imperfect too. Maybe there’s more.

This gap between my ideal self, that is the image I would like to be and who I really am, is where the tension lies. We want to be the wise, cool, loving, generous, pure, kind, all understanding, good looking, beautiful, intelligent, interesting, deep, fun, charming and more because this way others accept us. The reality is we are not and cannot be all of these. We hide our imperfections and shadows, deny them and hate them in others so we do not have to face them. We all do this and we all think that this way we will be perfect! At least we think that!

Andre Louf the Cistercian Monk reminds us that God interferes in our life in this case by breaking and shattering our image of the ideal self. We need the ideal illusionary house to come down before we build the real one. It must be broken into pieces first. There is no other way.

The risk if we don’t do this is that we will always shadow box. We will also never be happy. We will hate and Judge in others what we really cannot accept in ourselves. The real God loves us not as some perfect beings or ideal beings. He doesn’t need us to be perfect to love us. He loves us as we are. That is hard to grasp!

This may come as a shock to many regular Church goers who feel that I need to be sin-free and perfect to be loved by God. Why? Because God is perfect he wants to love us when we’re perfect. Or because others want us to be perfect to accept us, we think God works this way. That is entirely untrue and anti-Gospel.

The Good news is what we need to be gentle with ourselves. The Good news is that Jesus “the parable of God himself,” or “God translated for us” as Schillebeeckx says, taught us that God loves us just as we are. Isn’t that what the incarnation, God becoming human in the midst of our messiness is all about? Jesus’ life is filled with what Louf terms “Grace in Weakness.” God’s Grace works in the midst of weakness.

Louf further reminds us that Holiness is not be found beyond sin when we are perfect or on the other side of the temptation fence when we overcome it but in the midst of weakness, temptation and sin. Grace IN weakness. “It is in our weakness that we are vulnerable to God’s love and power” says Louf. That’s hard to believe. I was stunned when I read this. I always thought that God’s grace is like a divine merit stamp and when I overcome sin I will get a stamp.

Yet the Good news that Jesus brought to us is that, he dined with the sinners and the outcasts not after they became perfect but in the midst of their imperfections.

Therefore we are left with a paradox. Am I to live as I am and who cares about my weaknesses. I tend to think that’s not what this is about. We are humans. We always need to improve yet let us firstly know ourselves as we are. We will need to grief what we thought we were and are not. We may loose mates on the way who don’t accept us as we are. This may take a while. This maybe earthquake-like for some. They may loose many masks but that is good. That is okay!

But this also means we can now move forward to accept ourselves as we are, broken, piece by piece but real and raw. We will be surprised how beautiful it is and freeing it is to know yourself as you are. A young woman taught me so much about the beauty in being open, transparent and honest. I never knew this before. I owe this to her.

In this real self, shattered as is it, there is plenty of room for God, for Grace. We simply don’t have it all together. There are cracks for grace to fill. Thank God!

And dare I quote Carl Rogers for those who are asking about change and improvement. He says that the “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” This is the power of grace accompanying us on the journey. Grace all the way with us! “My grace is all you need, for my power is made perfect when you are weak” (2 Cor 12:9) says Jesus to Paul. We will be transformed into better people by grace.

Here we will begin to accept others as they are. We will be more merciful, patient and loving. We become less shocked and judgmental. We will loosen our hardened hearts. We become compassionate. For as Henri Nouwen says that:

“Through compassion it is possible to recognize that the craving for love that people feel resides also in our own hearts, that the cruelty the world knows all too well is also rooted in our own impulses. Through compassion we also sense our hope for forgiveness in our friends’ eyes and our hatred in their bitter mouths. When they kill, we know that we could have done it; when they give life, we know that we can do the same. For a compassionate person nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying.”

Amen to that. All this is a journey that needs gentleness, a fruit of the Spirit. Ye3ne 3al hada!