6 – 20 – 17 Be Ye Perfect

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“So be ye perfect, just as your Heavenly Father is perfect.”

A tall order to say the least. Quite impossible to be sure. But I think this is the idea. I think part of what Jesus is trying to communicate in this command is not only that he understands how difficult our task is, but that he wants us to understand that it is not possible for us to achieve it on our own.

Many people are capable of pure, perfect acts. A moment of divine unselfishness that will likely sing in the memory of the person they helped as an example of Christ on earth. To string two together, without stopping to think about how good of a person I am? Now that’s quite a bit more difficult. Once we get into the span of ten minutes, one hour, the prospect becomes quite hopeless. To think of living a perfect day is quite laughable.

That’s one thing I always thought was interesting about striving for moral perfection. We truly do have the ability, just not the endurance. It’s as though Jesus is the greatest marathoner of all time, but he’s running at our sprint pace. It takes us an enormous amount of effort to do for just a short time what Jesus has been doing for all eternity. And in Him doing it for all eternity, given that he’s never been not doing it, we can think of this running not as what Jesus is doing, but what Jesus does. It simply is his nature to never stop striving, never take breaks or shortcuts, never succumb to desires through weakness.

As anyone who’s ever done cardio must know, the only way to be able to run faster for longer is to run as fast as you can for as long as you can. Sometimes these things sound overly simple, well this is no exception. Just as a runner must have proper nutrition we must give our minds good things to digest like the Mass, good books, and conversations with interesting people. But this is to assist us, it is not the main activity. The main activity is simply doing the right thing, over and over and over. When our patience is wearing thin, when we have a thousand excuses to be rude, and especially when we think no one is looking we must, every moment, rededicate ourselves to the path.

I think Jesus very intentionally spoke of his teachings as “the Way” or “the Path” as it is a very apt analogy for our faith life. Not only is the life a journey, not a state or a checklist to achieve, but we are also strengthened by the journey. Indeed, we could not face what comes later in the path without having gone through what’s come earlier, so that there’s no sense in asking God for a lighter burden, we should always ask for broader shoulders as the old couplet goes.

It’s quite easy to see if the sports analogy is continued. Put a fourteen-year-old future-NFL player on the field and the only thing he’s likely to achieve is a serious injury. Though many things he went through to get to that point, the training and other minor injuries, were likely painful he would be in a much worse position had he accomplished his dreams without going through the requisite path. We also see this in celebrities who cannot handle fame, or elected leaders who underestimated the difficulty of governing.

While I’m on the topic of paths, I had a thought the other day while flying back from New York to Detroit. I’ll probably never know which river I was looking at so I’ll probably never know, but the point is that I couldn’t tell looking out the airplane window which way the river was flowing. Smaller branches converged to a larger river, or did the larger river split into a delta? Was the river emptying into a lake or overflowing from it, still making its way to the ocean? I certainly couldn’t tell what was salt or fresh water so a large enough lake could fool me into thinking it was the ocean.

I think this runs quite parallel to our own lives. Observers from outside may be able to see the course of our life, but they don’t know which direction we’re flowing, how deep the water is. Whether it is roaring like the Colorado in Spring or trickling like a seasonal waterway come the middle Summer. Furthermore, in the moment, we can see nothing. Trapped in our ever-present life we know which direction we’re flowing but not what it leads to. And unless we use our memory we can’t remember where we came from, what we are, what the shape of our meander has been.

I think Christ wants us to live in the moment. This is why he says not to worry about tomorrow, as today has sufficient evil. But to not worry does not mean not to plan. To chart a course is very different from the kind of planning some people think about. God does not grant us the luxury of putting our lives on a calendar, and he laughs at any attempts to masters of our own universe. But we are like captains of ships on the sea. Obviously we know we won’t go exactly where we planned to, the wind and waves will blow us off course, our rudder may be slightly defective, but to say we won’t get where we aim and so we shouldn’t even plan is ludicrous. For if we don’t aim at anything we’ll go nowhere. So where is our aiming point, even if we are aware we shall not reach it?

“So be ye perfect, just as your Heavenly Father is perfect.”