In Praise of Imperfection

 

IN PRAISE OF IMPERFECTION

 

The word is all important. The Kabala teaches that the word for every single thing existed before its manifestation. As St John says, ‘In the beginning was the word.’ All creation came from it and all creation will return to it, for everything that is, is one. In our everyday lives too, the word is all powerful. According to the psalms it ‘cuts more finely than any double edged sword’, or as in a familiar English phrase, ‘the pen is mightier than the sword.’ Because not only is the word the blue print for all that is, it is the means of connection for a divided humanity. Which is why it is vitally important we are not lazy about the words we use, but always do our best to choose the words which most accurately and truthfully express our thought or emotion. And yet the word should never be set in stone. It’s a living thing and we must let it live to do its job.

            I recently starting reading a brilliant novelist called Elizabeth Taylor - no not the film star, the novelist. Her use of language is stunning. But as I thought about that and about her work, I realised that her characters are each and every one alone. Each is centred on his or her own core, relating to others only at the level of their outer shell, while the words, the brilliant phrases are as if frozen, like beautifully cut glass, sufficient unto themselves. But the thing about writing is that it’s an interactive business between author and reader. The reader enters into the world the author provides and begins to live in it along with the characters, empathising with some, horrified perhaps by others. And the words, the language melts into out consciousness, changing us as it enters us, and changing its meaning according to who we are and where we are at that particular moment in time. And it’s not a one way ticket. We can look at the words and find in them meaning the author never intended at all. Writing and reading are related and are a living activity. Which is why, however stunning they may be, there are times when I want to take Elizabeth Taylor’s perfect phrases and smash them to pieces.

            Loneliness is a terrible thing especially in a world where everything and everyone is at root so connected. Take the recent earthquake in Haiti. It seems beyond our understanding. It’s too much to take in. So many dead, and for those who survive a changed world where nothing they took for granted exists any more. Recently, at a local church celebration for all the dead of the previous year, each deceased member of the community was represented by a candle placed on the altar by a loved one. The number of candles was impressive. There had not been a major catastrophe. There had been no cataclysmic event. But noiselessly, invisibly all those people had left us and everyone in that church was as much a survivor as those devastated people of Haiti. We are all survivors. We pass through life and our sense of security found in little things is pure illusion.

            Sometimes when my husband celebrates a funeral I go along to help. And it’s heart-breaking to see how the bereaved survivors clutch on to familiar words. But recently, sitting there in the cold church I was taken back to years ago on a freezing cold night in Lancashire. I was sitting in a bus shelter, not sure where I’d come from, where I was going or even why. And then a bus came along and everyone waiting started talking at once, hailing it as if it were a lifeboat. The bus was actually the Lord’s Prayer, those familiar words which the congregation was saying like it was clutching at straws.

            They used to call the spiritual path ‘the path of perfection’. Many thought and maybe still think this means the path of individual perfection. But it doesn’t and it can’t. Each of our paths is unique, each of us unique, none of us perfect. But until we reach out of our selves beyond our own uniqueness to one another and to God, recognizing that we are all one, we will remain alone, unfulfilled, like pieces of cut glass. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. We have to break through our shells, acknowledge our imperfection, and be glad to find the qualities we lack in the other while our qualities are recognised in return. Because only when love allows this breakthrough can we recognise ourselves in the other and truly forgive. And then, at last we are no longer alone. I’ve called this piece in praise of imperfection because it’s only by accepting our own and one another’s imperfection that can we become the perfect ‘one’ which, at root is the fulfillment we all long for.