The Quest for Perfection: Jerrying My World

Jesus' statement in Matthew 5:48 scares a lot of folks, and gives the impression that life-with-God is virtually impossible . . . or at least, impossible to live well.

"Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

Mostly, the verse has been read as an injunction to moral perfection . . . that there is no sin in God; therefore, there should be no sin in the human. At least that was my interpretation of the verse for a long, long time.

I remember sitting in spiritual direction many years ago with my Roman Catholic spiritual director, a Sister wise in the ways of the Spirit. I was struggling with my humanity, with my sinfulness and my propensity to stumble and fall in the same ways time after time after time. I felt like I was in a rut that I couldn't get out of. And frankly, I felt like a spiritual -- and moral -- failure, all because I could not get through these things. After all, I was supposed to be perfect as a God-follower, because God is perfect.

That Sister did not chastise me. She simply reminded me in a couple of different ways that the position of "God" was filled already, and that my vocation was to be human, not God.

That afternoon almost 20 years ago really was a turning point for me, almost a new beginning. It signaled for me a movement into discovering how to live my own life fully, the one life God has given me and for which God has created me. To be sure, the journey since then has been filled with bumps and false starts, but I have sought through these years to discern the shape of Jerry's life, and what it means to live into the fullness for which God creates and sustains me.

Truly, the word translated "perfect" in the New Testament literally means "whole," or "complete." So the passage is not about moral perfection; rather, it is about living our lives fully or wholly. God is perfectly or completely God. God is the fullness of God, not lacking anything of what it means to be God. Just so, the invitation to each human is to be fully himself or herself as fully as God is God. We are each invited to live our unique, personal fullness on behalf of God and the world.

The early Church, in the centuries just after Jesus, believed, "The glory of God is the human person fully alive." In other words, when a person lives his or her life fully (or "perfectly"), God is glorified.

Maybe I could say it this way: God gods perfectly. God gods completely. God is wholly God.

In the same way, I am invited -- encouraged! -- to jerry my world, to jerry as fully as possible the world in which I live. Can Jerry jerry completely? That is the question for me.

And you? You are invited to brenda your world . . . to richard your world . . . to debra your world . . . to gregg your world . . . to annie your world. Whoever you are, wherever you live, this is the invitation God extends to you . . . not to live as someone else lives, or to measure up to some other external measure for life, but to live fully the one life that God has given you. We are invited, in the Spirit of God, to live a whole life in relationship to self, others and the created world.

God gods perfectly. May you "jerry" -- or whatever your name -- in the same way.

Singing a New Song

God put a new song in my mouth,
a song of praise to our God.
(Ps. 40:3)

Sing to the Lord a new song,
sing to the Lord, all the whole earth.
(Ps. 96:1)

Sing to the Lord a new song,
for the Lord has done marvelous things.
(Ps. 98:1)


"A new song" . . . the phrase shows up frequently in the Hebrew Psalms. I've long been willing to pray and sing the words, but I haven't always known what I was saying.

Is it simply a unique way of putting together some chords and lyrics, cutting and pasting chord patterns and some rhyming words? Is that "singing a new song"?

When does a "new song" become an "old song." I mean, it's new the first time through, right?

Then it's almost new . . . then sorta new . . . then kinda new.

I'm fond of a version of Psalm 40 put to music by Bono, the Edge, and the rest of U2. It's a great song, and my friend Peter Johns does a wonderful version of it for our weekly Contemplative Worship. The song's chorus goes like this:

I will sing, sing a new song
I will sing, sing a new song
How long to sing this song?
How long to sing this song?
How long, how long, how long,
How long to sing this song?

By the time you sing that chorus three or four times in the course of the song, you get to the end and want to sing a "used-to-be-new song to the Lord."

If a "new song" is just a metaphor, a clever device aimed at getting us to think outside the ruts of our lives, outside the places where we are stuck, where we are stale and dragging through sameness, then it works with me for awhile. It gives some temporary hope that when the world seems small and closed-in, the narrow field of possibilities really is larger than I had thought. There are doors of possibility I haven't seen, or haven't acknowledged. These doors that I haven't seen or stepped into may be the "new song" of my life.

So as a metaphor, it may work in the short term for getting me to open up a bit to the God-shaped possibilities for life.

I want to suggest a meaning for "new song" more basic and fundamental. I think the new song I am to sing is my life, my unique life, one-off-a-kind, lived as only I can live it.

My new song is the unique way I am connected to God, and it is the unique way I am connected to you, to others, and to the world.

My one-of-a-kind life is the new song I have to sing . . . and your one-of-a-kind life is the new song you have to sing.

It is a new song because it has never been sung before. No one else has ever lived your life. No one else has ever faced the exact set of challenges you face, has celebrated the specific joys you celebrate, has been connected to God in just the way you are, or has lived among the specific set of people you have.

If nothing else, your family and friends and neighbors and co-workers -- the whole web of relationships you have -- make your life entirely unique.

You are not invited to live your life the way I live my life. . . or the way anyone else lives their life. You are invited to the fullness of your unique life, as I am invited to my unique life. I sing my song, you sing your song.

And the song I sing is always a "new song," always different and fresh, because each day my life is different. Each day I am presented with new possibilities and new challenges and new ways of being in the world for God. So on and on into the future, the song my life sings is ever-new.

You don't have to find the pre-ordained notes to the score God has written. As God lives within you, inhabits you, energizes you, you are the score. Your moment-by-moment life is the pattern of notes, the harmony to the song you are given to sing and to be.

I hope you can sense, then, that your new song is not something to figure out, to wrestle with and struggle over as you try to come to whatever your song is. Usually we think about the "will of God" as something difficult to find, something that takes great effort to discern. Rather, in this view, your new song is something to live, something to be. It is your everyday, ordinary life lived with God for the good of the world.

Your very life is a new song, non-repeatable, creative, expansive and uniquely your own.

Don't try to sing someone else's song. Sing your song. Live your life.

Several days ago, this is how I imaged my new song in the language of Psalm 96:1 - 2:

I sing to you a new song,
the only song I can sing,
the song of my life,
played out for you in my own tune,
the tune no one else can play.

I sing my song to you before the whole world;
I sing my life to you and it mirrors your Name;
my song, a testimony to your goodness and generosity
toward me every single moment of every single day.

Fruit That Feeds the Hungry

John 15:12 - 17

"My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because servants do not know their master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit — fruit that will last — and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other."


The Gospel reading for today begins and ends in "love." What stirred me, though, came in the middle of the paragraph . . . the initiative of Jesus in choosing me (because I generally think that what happens in my life comes as a result of my choices, my initiative, my influence) and then the “appointment” upon me to “bear fruit.”

“Fruit” comes at the end of the tree, literally the produce of the tree’s essence. The fruit that hangs at the end of the tree only reflects what is within the tree, what begins in the roots and is real through the trunk. The fruit that appears at the end of a branch is always consistent with what is happening in the roots and within the trunk of the tree.

Further, at the right time, the tree drops the fruit or it is picked. It does the tree no use to hold onto fruit. In fact, to do so would do great harm to the health of the tree. The tree, rather, lets go of the fruit, trusting that with a healthy root system, with bark in place, with a trunk sturdy to bear the tree’s weight, more fruit will come.

I tend to think of the fruit that grows at the outer limbs of my life as my creativity, my giftedness, and all the ways I spend myself in the world. That takes a number of forms for me, as yours does for you. Always, though, the fruit expresses what is within the root system and trunk. So the fruit is not the only thing going on. In fact, in order to be fruitful it’s more important to tend to the roots, to nourish the unseen parts of the tree than to obsess with what is seen.

It’s a metaphor that helps me understand who I am and how I am invited to express my being in the world. For the unseen, interior, more soulful, rooted aspect of my existence is my essence, my true “name.” In another analogy, it contains the song I’m to sing in the world. The fruit at the end of the branch, then, is the tangible expression of that essence in the world. In short, it is what I do or what I produce.

In the John 15 passage, I hear the invitation of Jesus to bear fruit in the world, that is, to feed the world with my unique fruitfulness. It’s not as easy as it sounds . . . for I recognize in myself a tendency to want my fruit to look like someone else’s fruit.

I see some tremendous good being done in the world and I want to be a part of that. I want to do it just that way! I want to join my life to that train, to that person, to that ministry, to that movement.

I’m afraid traditional expressions of Christianity don’t do us many favors here. We’re accustomed to hearing or reading that there are certain things we should all do as Christians, the non-negotiables of Christian life that are for all of us. It’s a kind of one-size-fits-all contemporary Christianity. There are certain things that real Christians do, and of course, certain things that those who are not Christians ("unreal Christians"??) do!

Really, though, I think that’s part of the naiveté of the religious people of Jesus’ time, and partially why he pushed back so hard against them. They insisted on laws that everyone followed and a lock-step, mindless adherence to a system for the sake of adherence to the system. The end result was a monochromatic religion in which the personal creation of each human was distilled away.

How do I – and how do you – find my uniqueness and the particular way that I’m invited to live out my vocation and spend the fruit of my life in the world?

In one of his early books, Frederick Buechner wrote that vocation or calling is that place where your deepest love/passion meets the hunger of the world. That’s still a helpful way for me to think about calling.

So I consider what I love, what passions run wild in my soul. That’s the essence of my root system, the base of my “tree.”

Then I consider what the world around me is hungry for. What do the people around me need? What is the cry of my life-world? Do I have any fruit on my tree to offer this hunger?

There are some hungers around me that I can acknowledge, but if I try to feed them I will only do more harm than good. The fruit I have may not satisfy every hunger. I have to know my limitations, what I actually have so that I’m not trying to give fruit I do not actually have to give. I cannot give someone else's fruit. I cannot do all things. I cannot give what I do not have. I cannot be all things to all people.

But there are some cries that I hear regularly, and they are cries for which I have some fruit, borne of my unique tree. It is this fruit Jesus invites me to offer . . . the fruit I have, not the fruit I don’t have.

For me this is the intersection at which I’m invited to live out the one-of-a-kind life that God has appointed to me.

Giving Away

The Gospel passage given for prayer and reflection today is John 6:52 - 57.

This is Jesus, giving himself away as food and drink, spiritual sustenance for others. This "giving away" is consistent with the life of God in him. It is the nature of love to give itself away.

This, too, is the life to which we are invited.

John 3:16 is a cornerstone passage for many Christians. For some it is the first verse of scripture they ever memorized. You may be able to quote it easily:

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

I've most often heard this verse quoted with reference to the death of Jesus, that God gave Jesus to die as a substitute for us ("substitutionary atonement" is the 2-bit word for the doctrine that arose in the Western Church). John 3:16 has been used so frequently for the death of Jesus that we might have difficulty pulling it out of that understanding and setting it into another context.

Rather than reading "death" into this statement, hear it simply as an expression of the nature of God. Hear these Jesus-words as a statement, a proclamation of the generosity and love of God. This is God's nature, Jesus seemed to say, to be loving and to express that love in generosity. God is a Self-spender, so to speak, generously giving Self away.

And Jesus participated in that God-spending. As God gave away God's Self to the world, so Jesus gave himself away.

So my question may be: "What self do I have to give away?"

My first thought is that the self I most often give away is my false self, my ego-self, my illusory self that is constructed of all the images and appearances that I want to project to the world. I give away my self which originates in the musts and oughts and shoulds that govern my life.

If this is the only self I have to give away -- or at least the only self I know about -- then I am giving something to the world that is toxic, unhealthy and illusion.

The gift of Jesus, the great gift he shared with all people, was that he freely gave away not what was false and illusory, but his own fullness, truth and authenticity. He gave away what it meant to be God. He was fully himself, fully human, fully who God created him to be, yet he did not cling to that and milk it for all it was worth. (Read Paul's words in Phil 2:1 - 11 for a commentary on the self-giving of Jesus.)

Typically this isn't my way of doing life. If I find something good or if I come into something that enhances my well-being, I want to hold onto it and keep it close. I want to hoard it for myself.

There is something about the human person becoming whole and complete, though, that demands to be given away, to be shared with others in generosity. It is not the generosity that has to be prompted or provoked or persuaded. It is the generosity that flows from our most authentic selves. It is loving and giving for the sake of generosity and mercy.

Because there is something within us -- I'll call it soul -- which intuits that the more we spend and give away, the more we will be replenished. The giving away of true self means that we always have more true self to give away.

To live this way simply witnesses to the life of Christ within us.

Overheard: Merton and Bly on Moving toward Our Purpose

Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one's own -- be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid. . . .

The world is made up of the people who are fully alive in it and can enter into a living and fruitful relationship with each other in it. The world is therefore more real in proportion as the people in it are able to be more fully and more humanly alive: that is to say, better able to make a lucid and conscious use of their freedom. Basically, this freedom must consist first of all in the capacity to choose their own lives, to find themselves on the deepest possible level.

[Thomas Merton, Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation, ed. by Jonathan Montaldo (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2008), 37.]


Every man and every woman on this planet is on the road from the Law to the Legends. Surely every person reading this book is. The Legends stand for the moist, the swampish, the wild, the untamed. The Legends are watery, when compared to the dryness of the Law. It takes twenty years to understand the Laws, and then a whole lifetime to get from there to the Legends.

The Law stands for the commandments we need in order to stay alive, the rule that says which side of the road we drive on, the law of gravity. We need to learn the axiom that we cannot take water into our lungs and keep breathing; the dictate that keeps us from murdering each other over a slight rebuke; the canon against self-slaughter; the postulates that encourage prudence, politeness, and appropriateness; the precepts that help us control our madness. . . .

We are each on the way from the Law to the Legends, from dogma to the Midrash, from the overly obedient man to wildness. . . . The closer a person comes to the Legends, then the closer he or she comes to depth, moistness, spontaneity, and shagginess.

[Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1990), 140-41.]

A Day for Ignatius

I find it helpful to pause from time to time and reflect on the road I have taken to get where I am today. I recall the people, events, books, and personal movements that have shaped me. Most always these reflections turn up different names, events, and titles.

There are a couple of names, however, for which I consistently give thanks. If I think of them as stepping stones that have brought me to the place where I stand today, they are always present as the solid ground underneath me.

One of those stepping stones for me is Ignatius of Loyola. Ignatius lived five centuries ago in Spain. He wasn't trained in theology or spirituality. He came to a deep and life-changing relationship with God not through formal training, but "through the back door," through his prayerful consideration of the struggles of his own life-experience. The spiritual insights he gained from his own journey with God became a compilation of spiritual exercises still relevant today.

I am indebted to Ignatius in many ways. They are too numerous to name here. Among the most meaningful, however, I consider my desire to live into the original purpose for which I was created. I also attribute my determination to live with a radical inner freedom to his influence on my life. I'm grateful that Ignatius does more than speak of the possibility of a life given to God; by his own life, he shows that such a life can be reality.

Today, July 31, is the feast day of Ignatius of Loyola. The Church around the world has remembered him, spoken his name at the Eucharistic Table, and given thanks for him today. I have joined the chorus. Though he lived long, long ago, he continues to mentor me. So I give thanks.