Monday, March 20, 2017

Measuring Up

I awoke this morning to every obsessive-compulsive perfectionist preacher's nightmare -- the crystal-clear realization of how yesterday's sermon could have been different and, of course, better.  What different and, of course, better path I could have followed from the mid-point on.

Realizations like this are the terror of every OCP person.  I just happen to be a preacher, so for me this kind of regret-laden, anxiety-inducing thought focuses a lot on some of the sermons I have preached.  And ... some pastoral visits I have made.  And some calls I haven't made.  And maybe, too, some comments that slip out at meetings.  Or some look that crossed my face in a conversation.  And, I guess also sometimes, on something I've written and posted in a daily Lenten meditation blog.

As any OCP person knows, the list is endless.  We drive ourselves crazy with regret and anxiety that easily coalesce into a feeling of failure, guilt and shame.  We drive others around us crazy as well (if we don't drive them away, first) as we impose on them our own crazy-making judgement that there is one right way, things have to be perfect, we dare not make a mistake, and anything other than the one right way is a mistake.

I wonder -- if God were OCP, what waking up on the morning of the first seventh day would have been like?  

Earth was done.  Creation was complete.  Within the cosmos of God's fullness, a beautiful little globe had been set on its axis and in rotation around its sun.  Bit by bit habitability had been established, and stage by stage life had been brought to be -- in the sea and in the air, and on land -- plants and animals in successive, progressive development.  Until finally on the sixth day, in late afternoon or just before sundown, there emerged humankind -- God's image and likeness on Earth, open to God-consciousness, blessed by God to take good care now of what had been made.

If God were an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist, I imagine upon waking on the morning of the seventh day God's first thought would have been, "Oh Man!  What did I do?"  God would have had a crystal-clear realization of how differently that whole sixth day might have gone ... how differently the last part especially -- the emergence of humanity, might have been managed ... how maybe it might even have been better to have knocked off early, maybe around noon, and have stopped with the chimps and gorillas.

As it is, though, God doesn't seem to suffer OCP.  On the seventh day, even realizing all that the creation of humanity the day before would entail and lead to, God rested!  Rested somehow in faith and trust that in spite of the grave imperfection of what had just been done, in the words of Julian of Norwich, "all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

A good sabbath thought -- that "all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well" in spite of, and maybe even at times precisely because of the less-than-perfect, and other-than-the-imagined-one-right-thing, I too easily and too often regret and rue.