“Be perfect just like your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Last weekend I participated in a retreat
in which we used the Enneagram to
help illuminate our potential strengths and weaknesses
by studying the different personality types
and how they interact with each other.
It was really fascinating work that
helped us understand ourselves better
and how we interact with others.
Initially it was hard to read your own personality type
and accept the weaknesses about yourself.
For myself, I found this particularly hard
not because they were inaccurate,
but because they are so accurate!
It is hard to accept the negative truth about yourself.
But once one sits with the tool and the reality of the truth
then it becomes liberating on so many levels,
especially the deeper spiritual truths about ourselves
as all being created children of God with different personalities.
In summary if we want to grow as a person
then we need to accept our imperfections.
That all seems to fly in the face of the words from Jesus in today’s Gospel
calling us “to be perfect like your heavenly Father is perfect.”
But like all scripture, there is a context for the gospel today.
Jesus is teaching that the old way of following God
was too legalistic and too narrow.
An eye-for-eye; a tooth-for-a-tooth was retribution and not justice.
It was fair comparative to other systems of that time
that said if you take one of our lives, then we will take 10 of your lives!
But Jesus blows up the boundaries and tells them to perfect.
The word “perfect” here might be better translated as “whole.”
Be whole as your heavenly Father is whole.
It is not perfect as in “without imperfection.”
It is to be whole and be completely integral with who you are;
to be your complete self as the Father is completely himself.
And inside of that is justice.
Inside of that will be fairness,
once we are honest and true to ourselves.
Everyone was created by God
and by coming back to that understanding of who we are
and the wholeness of who we are,
then we will fulfill the commandments.
That sounds like great theology.
What does is actually and concretely mean?
Every one of us has weakness and brokenness
in some way, shape or form.
Some of them are very small and some are very large.
Sometimes we have done these things to ourselves
and sometimes they have been caused by others.
The way we deal with these wounds or imperfections
is often determined by our personality types
and how we interact with each other.
Whether we are young or old, we make mistakes.
We all know that but the older we get,
the more mistakes we make and
the more exposed we are to other people’s mistakes.
And we can become frustrated and maybe more broken.
What are we to do?
How can we perfect as Jesus calls us?
There is a Japanese artwork called “Kintsugi.”
Kintsugi takes simple pottery that is broken
and the broken pieces are put back together
using a golden dust made into lacquer and highlighting the brokenness.
Because no two pottery pieces break up the same way,
each kintsugi-repaired piece is completely unique and beautiful.
There is uniqueness to each pottery
because of the features of the brokenness.
This is closer to what Jesus was trying to get across to us
that we have to find a way to not just heal
but to integrate the woundedness and brokenness
of who we are into our being itself
and that way being perfect as being whole again.
Not to be perfect as without imperfections
but perfect in our wholeness.
When we do not allow ourselves to heal
then the brokenness remains brokenness.
When we do not allow other people’s wounds to heal,
their brokenness remains brokenness
and they are no longer whole.
There is a mutual responsibility to allow the Lord
to do the healing and the integrating as
God is the master Kintsugi artist.
We are not the ones who do the Kintsugi.
That is the Lord’s work.
But if we do not allow him to heal us
then we cannot become whole.
We cannot become fully integrated again.
How do we do that?
The first thing we have to do is
to be honest with ourselves with our own weaknesses;
our own brokenness; our own foibles;
or maybe it is our weirdness or our weakness.
In the language of the Enneagram retreat,
we accept our personality type and subtype
and sit with the tension of the good and not-so-good features.
We all need to simply acknowledge
that there is some brokenness inside myself.
Some of these are huge breaks and they have shattered us.
Some of them are small chips, little things out of our life.
Sometimes they have been caused by us to ourselves.
Sometimes they have been caused by others,
maybe not deliberately but still the same pain.
Sometimes it seems they were caused deliberately
and the pain is extraordinary.
If we could acknowledge that and
then allow the Lord to heal us
and to use this golden lacquer of his mercy and love
so that it will remain with us
but we become beautifully whole once more.
We become perfect because we are whole.
That can only happen if we present ourselves humbly
to the Lord as not perfect human beings,
but as broken people acknowledging our brokenness.
Once we allow that to happen for ourselves
then there is a chance that we will allow
it to happen for somebody else.
Unless we allow that to happen for ourselves,
allow Jesus and God to heal us,
we are not going to allow anyone else to heal
because we are going to operate from our brokenness.
We are going to insist on other people to be broken
just like we are broken.
Today, our work is to first simply acknowledge in humility
our own simple brokenness, small or large
and then to present ourselves to the Lord for healing.
And let him take that brokenness and
put his gold lacquer of love in and to heal us;
to make us beautiful and whole once again
and then we can reach out to allow
that same healing Kintsugi for others.
“Be perfect just like your heavenly Father is perfect.”
