“The Perfect Life”
A sermon by the Rev. John Gibbons
The First Parish, Unitarian Universalist, in Bedford, Massachusetts
5 November 2006
Readings
from the Preface of “The Perfect Life” by William Ellery Channing
As for God, His way is perfect. God is my strength and power : and He maketh my way perfect. —2 Samuel xxii. 31, 33.
Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright : for the end of that man is peace. –Psalm xxxvii. 37.
I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way. O when wilt Thou come unto me? I will walk within my house with a perfect heart. –Psalm ci. 2.
I have seen an end of all perfection : but Thy commandment is exceeding broad. –Psalm exix. 96.
Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect. –Matthew v. 48.
Perfect in one. –John xvii. 23.
from “The Perfect Life” by William Ellery Channing
This spirit of Universal Humanity is the very soul of our religion. As yet its heavenly power is scarcely felt. Therefore it is that so few of the blessings of Christianity appear in Christendom. Alas, we lack humanity. We talk of it, we profess it, but we contradict its essential principles in character and in life. We rear partition walls of distinction between ourselves and fellow-beings. We exaggerate petty differences. We hedge ourselves round with conventional usages. Nor can we, if we would, without severe struggle, break through these obstructions to universal love. Our habits, our established modes of thought and action, the manners and fashions of society, all hem us in. Unconsciously and perpetually we violate man’s highest right, the right to be regarded and treated as a Child of God. Man’s noblest Relationship is practically denied. The grand light, in which this tie ought to be viewed, has hardly even dawned upon us. What a regeneration it will be throughout all society, when men learn fully to believe in their Spiritual Relationship to One Heavenly Father! We hold this truth in words. Who feels its vitalizing power? When brought home as a reality in social life, it will transform the world. Then will the New Heaven and the New Earth be created. Then will our race become a peaceful and blessed Family, a Temple of true Filial Worshippers. All other reforms of society are superficial. Until men’s eyes shall be purged to discern in one another, even in the most degraded and fallen, a ray of the Divinity, a reflexion of God’s image, a moral and a spiritual nature within which God works, and to which He proffers heavenly grace and immortal life; until they shall thus recognize and reverence the Eternal Father in all His human Children, the true bond of Communion will be wanting, between man and man, and between man and God. Till then, under all forms of law and courtesy will lurk distrust and discord, infusing pride, jealousy and hate into the individual heart, into domestic life, into the intercourse of neighbourhoods, into the policy of nations, and turning this fair earth into the likeness of hell. But a Better Day is coming. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. A purer Christianity, however slowly, is to take the place of that which bears but its name. Cannot we become the heralds of this Better Day? Let our hearts bid it welcome! Let our lives reveal its beauty and its power.
from the writings of Forrester Church
The Imperfectionist
The reason I’ve been able to produce
so much is that I’m not a perfectionist
– I’m an imperfectionist.
I’m confident that everything I say
can be improved upon by others,
and that’s my great strength,
because I know that it won’t be improved upon by others
unless I take the first step.
When we only do things which please us,
or don’t frighten us,
after a while fewer and fewer things please us.
Over time, our circle of options diminishes
until we are prisoners in gardens of our own making.
The more decisions you make in your life,
the more times you act,
the more certain it is that you will be wrong.
To be fulfilled we need to recognize,
all of us,
that the world doesn’t owe us a living
– rather we owe the world a living.
And in the brief time that is given us,
we must somehow learn to give ourselves away.
Sermon
You know that I rarely read a book. Some people think that ministers frequently curl up with stacks of good books – and perhaps some do – but I rarely read a book, at least not cover-to-cover. I read for this story or that quote but an entire book, rarely – unfortunately. And so it was a real pleasure last summer to read – all the way to the end – an entire thick excellent book, The Peabody Sisters, Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism. This is the true story of Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody who, in the early 19th century, lived fascinating lives – in Salem, Boston and Billerica, among other places – thoroughly intertwined with the personalities, politics and intellectual issues of their day – with fresh-thinking Unitarians like Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Ellery Channing and many many others always in the thick of it.
Theirs was the heyday of Boston Unitarianism and the Peabody sisters were in a remarkable circle of minds-on-fire Transcendentalists who affected everything: science, government, education, art, literature and religion. Accomplished women in their own right, Sophia was a painter and went on to marry the author Nathaniel Hawthorne; Mary was a passionate reformer who married the educator and founder of our public school system Horace Mann; and Elizabeth, who did not marry but whose intellect surpassed and influenced most of the learned men, was a writer, educator, publisher, scholar, convener of conversations and the founder of the first kindergartens in America.
If the Peabody sisters were bright stars orbiting the sky, the sun and the hub of this Unitarian universe was William Ellery Channing, the preacher at the Federal Street Church in Boston (this was in the North End and was the predecessor to the Arlington Street Church that today stands across from the Public Garden).
“Elizabeth never forgot…her first sight of the small, pale man who arrived ‘dressed in a traveler’s great coat,’ strode immediately to the pulpit, and, ‘lifting up his large, remarkable eyes, with the expression of seeing something,’ began to recite a prayer. Elizabeth was ‘thrilled as never before’ by the spectacle of a man ‘communing with God, face to face.’
I too sometimes see things while I’m preaching but it’s likely to be Jack Mendelsohn dozing in his pew.
You know that Jack (our minister emeritus and himself a former minister at Arlington Street) wrote a Channing biography he called The Reluctant Radical, and in our Unitarian universe there simply still is no parallel to the world-shaking influence that was wielded by “the small pale man” Channing – not even Jack.
My sermon this morning was inspired by reading the lines I put at the top of your order of service: “Channing…told his Boston congregation that ‘perfection’ was man’s proper goal, an end toward which all could strive. It was a radical statement, directly rebutting the orthodox Calvinist notion that all humanity was born ‘depraved’ and that ‘grace’ was meted out to a handful of the ‘elect’ by a spiteful God. ‘Do you ask in what this perfection consists?’ Channing had persisted. ‘I answer in knowledge, in love, and in activity.’ No one could have stated more concisely the aims that would propel Elizabeth (Peabody) into adulthood.”
It seems to me that knowledge, love and activity remain central to religious living – when I read the book I made a note of that and thought to myself, “There’s a sermon in this” – and I will return to this later.
But I knew for sure that I had to preach this sermon when, on Bedford Day in September, there was a booth selling a motley pile of used books and among them I discovered this: a collection of William Ellery Channing’s writings titled, The Perfect Life. It was mine for a dollar bill.
Now, Channing is known first and foremost as a social reformer, an abolitionist, and among the first Americans to claim the free-thinking label Unitarian. Here, there and everywhere through his writings, however, he talks about perfection – enough to fill a book. And the truth is that most of the time I read Channing, I skip over what he has to say about perfection because, well, I just don’t know what he’s talking about – nor do I much understand what the biblical admonitions to perfection are about. Channing, like the biblical writers, was serious, no doubt; but it’s hard for me to take the notion of perfection seriously.
We are much more at ease with imperfectionism because, well, there’s a lot of it going around and there is something suspicious about perfection.
Take this story, for example: The mulla, the Sufi teacher Nasrudin was sitting in a tea shop when a friend came excitedly to speak with him. “I’m about to get married, Mulla,” his friend said, “and I’m very excited. Mulla, have you ever thought of marriage yourself?” Nasrudin replied, “I did think of getting married. In my youth in fact I very much wanted to do so. I waited to find for myself the perfect wife. I traveled looking for her, first to Damascus. There I met a beautiful woman who was gracious, kind, and deeply spiritual, but she had no worldly knowledge. I traveled further went to Isphahan. There I met a woman who was both spiritual and worldly, beautiful in many ways, but we did not communicate well. Finally I went to Cairo and there after much searching I found her. She was spiritually deep, graceful, and beautiful in every respect, at home in the world and at home in the realms beyond it. I felt I had found the perfect wife.” His friend questioned further, “Then did you marry her, Mulla?” “Alas,” said Nasrudin as he shook his head, “She was, unfortunately, waiting for the perfect husband.”
This, of course, is reminiscent of my advice that you should look for the perfect church and when you find it you should join it…and at that moment, you should also know that it is less perfect than you had hoped it would be.
Or there is the minister who preaches a great – perhaps a perfect sermon. After church, feeling good about himself, he asks his wife, “How many great preachers do you think there are in this town?” She replies, “One fewer than you think.”
A news report last week described a military parade in Pyongyang and spoke of the “eerie perfectionism” of the North Koreans.”
There is something about perfection that makes us suspicious.
Of course, perfectionism can be a problem. I am fond of quoting T.S. Eliot, “Some dream of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.” The perfect can be an enemy of the good.
So, was Channing just being naïve and innocently idealistic in advocating for perfection as a human goal? Not really: Channing was, in fact, trying to offer a healing antidote to the Calvinist theology of his time, a theology that emphasized sin, depravity and damnation – the idea that we are – in Jonathan Edward’s famous words, “sinners in the hands of an angry God.” Channing was not saying that we necessarily would become perfect; he was saying that – instead of assuming that we’re no good and won’t amount to much anyway – there really is something good, perfect and ideal, toward which we can aspire, strive and move.
We really don’t hear much hellfire and brimstone theology these days; most of what is said from most pulpits is bland sweet-nothing pablum that wouldn’t hurt a fly and makes nary a difference to anybody.
But there is a place where sin, depravity and damnation are still all-too-frequently a red-hot poker and that place is…within us, in the deep dark cellar of our innermost feelings about ourselves, a place that for too many of us too much of the time is a dank place of shame, regret and self-loathing.
A lot of what I do in the ministry is listen to people, it is an enormous privilege; and yet it can also make me so sad to hear how hard people can be on themselves, so full of regret and negative opinions of oneself, so merciless in self-judgment.
Of course none of us is perfect. We actually do things that are hurtful, insensitive, mean, unethical, illegal even. Confession can be good for the soul; it’s good to be self-aware and pay attention when we fall short. But what too often happens is almost worse – all too often I hear people judging themselves more harshly than would the most rabid of hellfire and brimstone preachers. We can be cruel, unrelenting and recriminating in our judgments of ourselves.
I ask you to think honestly about the way you talk to yourself inside, especially in those times of frustration, ineptness and failure. Now maybe this kind of negative self-talk isn’t ever an issue for you – and you’re wondering who I might possibly be talking about. Fine, this sermon may not be for you. But I know many people who are truly harder on themselves than they would ever be on anyone else, and so I ask you to think about the way you talk to yourself. What do you say? How does it feel? Let us spend just a few moments reflecting in silence.
When we berate ourselves, would you think it was all right to talk to anyone else that way? And even if you have lost your temper with someone you care about, even if you’ve yelled at your kids or berated a co-worker, slammed a door or sulked for a while or given someone the cold shoulder, how long did that last? Weeks? Months? Years? I doubt it.
I think that what Channing believed is that there really is a tender, precious, vulnerable and perfect center to our very being and, as human beings, we are capable of change.
When we do something we regret, we shouldn’t ignore it. Acknowledge it and make amends. Too often, however, it seems to me that we skip over that part and go straight to beating up on ourselves, sometimes for the rest of our lives.
So the next time you find yourself on your own case, being harsh and heartless, just pause and ask yourself a couple of questions: First, how would I feel, what would I think, if I heard a parent treating his or her beautiful little child like this in the supermarket?
And, second, what in my life is broken and who do I really need to talk with? Take stock of what’s really wrong, what really bothers you, and reflect on what steps you could take toward putting things right.
We are not perfect; our lives are not perfect; but we are capable of moving – however slowly – in the direction of perfection.
There was another great Unitarian minister named A. Powell Davies, minister at the All Souls Church in Washington, D.C. after the Second World War who wrote these words:
When religion tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves, on the face of it the command is good, but when we come to look into it we are struck with a shocking sense of irony. Because our trouble is that we do love our neighbors as ourselves—we love them in just the same way. For all too often, we do not love ourselves, we hate ourselves. We hate, that is, our true selves.
Sometimes, we hate them so much that we are entirely unwilling to look at them—to see ourselves as we are. But deep within the subtleties of our souls, we know ourselves as we really are. And what we know, we hate. We hate our inferiorities, our instabilities, our cowardice; and we hate the fact that we are not as talented, not as beautiful, not as graceful, not as gifted as other people. We hate ourselves for not being more than we are and we transfer this hatred to the world around us. “Why should other people have so much and we so little?” we ask. We do not stop to inquire whether these other people—most of them—really have so much; we just hate ourselves for what we lack. (“Where the Trouble Begins,” October 3, 1948)
Occasionally I also have read to you from the writings of Marianne Williamson who said, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
So…the first step for us is to come to accept ourselves – warts and all – and perhaps even to love ourselves. Not just those parts of ourselves that are extraordinary or polished, not just those parts of ourselves that we enjoy revealing to others, but also those parts of ourselves we try to keep hidden, from ourselves as well as others.
Our friend Jack Mendelsohn once said, “A minister is someone who sees the world as it is and as it should be, and is able to love them both.” This, I believe, is the challenge not only to ministers but to all of us: to see and love not only the world but ourselves and those around us as well. Imagine truly being able to see ourselves fully as we are and also as we might be, and being able to love them both.
I do believe that it is next to impossible to truly love others unless we love ourselves first. Both as we are and as we might be. This is tough to do. My hope is that this church is one of the places where we learn better how to do this.
A. Powell Davies wrote a book titled The Temptation to be Good. I suppose he could have titled it The Temptation to be Perfect but people might not have taken it so seriously and it might not have sold so well.
Usually we think of the temptation to be bad, but Davies believed we are equally tempted to be good and that too often we hesitate and resist the temptation. Davies knew the horrors of war – much of his theology was shaped by the experience and the aftermath of war – and yet he did not lose his faith in humanity.
He believed that humanity was capable of being good, even great – very nearly perfect, in Channing’s terminology – if we could only overcome the obstacles we put in our own way. He challenged humanity to break through the obstacles and release the unlimited potential within us to make the world the good place it could be. Davies understood that we need guidance in how to do that.
He tells a story that makes this simple point. “It is related
of a certain traveler,” he writes, “somewhere in northern Vermont, that after
driving in uncertainty for a while, he became convinced that he was on the
wrong road, and so, at the first village, came to a halt. Calling one of the
villagers to the car window, he said, ‘Friend, I need help. I’m lost.’
The villager looked at him for a moment. ‘Do you know where you are?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said the traveler. ‘I saw the name of the village as I entered.’
The man nodded his head. ‘Do you know where you want to go?’
‘Yes,’ the traveler replied, and named his destination.
The villager looked away for a moment, ruminating ‘You’re not lost,’ he said at
last, ‘you just need directions.”
We are not lost; you are not lost. We simply need directions. That is the point.
And it’s here, I think, that I want to end – by returning to the beginning where Channing said of the perfect life, ‘Do you ask in what this perfection consists?’ He persisted. ‘I answer in knowledge, in love, and in activity.’ Remember that Elizabeth Peabody took those words as directions that propelled her entire life.
I believe that those too can be our directions: that we should advance toward knowledge, love and activity.
A couple of weeks ago, I was stopped by a parishioner after discussion and she said that she was inspired by the ideas, ideals and sermons that she heard here but she wondered, well, how do we get from here to there? What tools can we provide? Do we just say pretty words and offer no method to put them into action? How may we be equipped to accomplish our noble aims?
Maybe this is a longer story than I care to begin at the end of this sermon, but too often we think of religion as some set of rituals, beliefs or practices that will take us to some other realm of reality. Here we say there is not other realm, there is only this. Our religion is what we do with this, our everyday ordinary day-in day-out lives. Our first hymn asked, “Where is our paradise?” And it answered, “In aspiration’s sight, wherein we hope to see ten thousand years of right.” That’s a fancy way of saying that our paradise is what we hope for – that we vow not to be constrained by what we cannot do but liberated by what we can do. We shall not be diminished by our fears but we will be ennobled by our hopes.
The perfect life. We are not lost: we just need directions. Knowledge, love, activity. Pay attention to the words of our last hymn:
Come, thou font of every blessing, tune our hearts to sing thy grace. Streams of mercy never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise. While the hope of life’s perfection fills our hearts with joy and love, teach us ever to be faithful, may we still thy goodness prove.
Amen.
Closing Words
There is a place in the world where children have enough to eat.
We shall not rest until that place is every place.
There are homes on earth where children live with gentle hands
and healing hearts and a safe place to lay their heads at night.
We shall not rest until this home is home to every child.
There is still a glade somewhere with sparkling water, leaping fish, noisy frogs and sly,
long-legged birds.
We shall not rest until the beauties and balance of this glade
are everywhere restored.
There is a gathering where people give voice to their imaginations, hold each other in
sorrow, and witness with their very, only lives
to the truths of equality and mutual embrace.
We shall not rest until that gathering is our congregation.
May we be blessed with your restless, longing heart, O Love,
that holds us in its grip and will not let us forget.
May we be blessed with certain knowledge that the keenest joy comes from life lived at
the very center of the struggle.
May we be blessed with the freedom and the passion
to walk in your ways, O Love, to do our work, and to knit
our restless hearts together.
Amen.
--Rev. Mary Harrington