Mercifully Imperfect

Growing in my faith as a young person and wanting to serve God and others, one passage from Scripture that often stayed with me is the following excerpt from the Gospel of Matthew: "So be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matt 5:48; International Standard Version). Sincere in my desire to try to live up to the demands of the Gospel, I took this passage to mean that I literally had to be perfect - that I had to train, discipline and control myself to the extent that no one could ever find any fault in me. Most especially, I felt this meant that I would need to root out of myself what the church taught me were "disordered" feelings of attractions toward people of the same sex.

And so for many years I tried to do just that. I attempted to be perfect, serving God and others, hoping to please everyone to the greatest extent possible and trying to pretend that I was "normal" in my sexual attractions. However, about three years ago now I came to a point of rupture (grace is probably more accurate), when I simply could no longer uphold the illusion anymore. I was emotionally, spiritually, and even physically exhausted from the energy it was taking to try and be "perfect" and as I actually became physically ill I knew I could no longer sustain the effort. Something would have to give but I just wasn't sure what that could be.

Thanks be to God, it was at that point that I met several compassionate people who were able to help me realize that it's okay to be who I am. Being reminded that as a child of God I am created in God's image and likeness, I then realized that if that's really true and it is also true that my sexuality touches who I am to the very core of my being, it then follows logically that who I am at the core of my being (ie, someone for whom attraction toward intimacy of spirit, body, and soul with another man is a channel of creativity, vitality, and life-giving energy) is a reflection of God's image and therefore is good.

I think I understood this point logically and theoretically once I was reminded of it, but it took watching a movie (often for me a fruitful means of reflection) to finally understand it in a deeper way. The film is called Latter Days and just happened to be a movie some friends had rented and were watching when they invited me to join them. The film is the story of a Mormon missionary who also has a great deal of difficulty accepting himself until he finally awakens to the possibility of finding a love, both divine and human, that would accept him as he really is. Here is the film's trailer:



Sitting there, watching this film I felt a great deal of sympathy for the main characters and in a way knew that this too was my story being portrayed. Here was a story of others who, like me and in the words of one of the main characters, thought it would be better to be dead than to be gay but who in the end discover new life, hope, and purpose in finally accepting themselves.

In the end, I think the lesson I learned in my process of coming out to myself and finally accepting who I really am is that the perfection I was seeking was not at all what Jesus was talking about. As he says in a parallel passage from Luke's Gospel, "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful" (Luke 6:36; International Standard Version). In other words, to aspire as human beings to be "perfect" is to miss the point entirely. God doesn't want us to be "perfect" in the sense of having no flaws or conforming without question to every rule and expectation leveled at us. Rather, God wants us to discover mercy in our lives - to wake up to the fact that life, love, humanity, and perhaps even God in God's self are not "perfect" or static or inert but rather beautifully mysterious, ineffable and beyond our ability to fully comprehend or grasp.

I am convinced that it's only when we realize this essential truth that we've begun to really know how amazing God actually is. In truth, it's only when we realize that God transcends the narrow strictures we sometimes try to place around reality that we are set free to begin on the path of authentic perfection - that is, on the journey of forgiving ourselves for not being perfect, sharing that same grace with others and then transforming our world little by little through the same mercy-filled perfection that is the gift Jesus calls us to receive in the Gospel.

Peace and blessings,

Padre Chuck