Well, the holidays are past, and congratulations: everything was perfect. That was the best ham anyone had ever had, your presents were just what their recipients had long been yearning for, and when the family gathered, everyone got along in unrelenting harmony.

 But maybe this year the holidays were a disaster again. They wouldn’t say so, but you could tell that everybody hated your presents and the ham, and as to the family, it’s a wonder there won’t be charges brought.

 Or, as is probably more nearly, more often the case, things were neither perfect nor a disaster, but pretty nice, all things considered, or not so great but okay -- not all one might have hoped for, but good enough.

 A lot of life is like that. True, some things are truly awful, and now and then, some things are truly splendid. But mostly what we have hopes of achieving, of being, of experiencing, of expecting of others, is something good enough – good enough to bring a smile, calm an anguish, kindle a hope, foster justice or lighten despair -- good enough to satisfy the soul not over-expectant.

 Ah, but there’s the quandary: what can and should we expect, of the world, of others, of ourselves? At my graduation from high school, the valedictorian, a friend of mine, gave the address. It was about Excellence. It was no doubt an excellent address; after all, I still remember its subject, several years later. Excellence. She was for it.

 Most of us are, and well we might be. In the words of our first Responsive Reading [544, by Kathleen McTigue], "whatever justice and wholeness might bloom in our world this year, we are the hearts and minds, the hands and feet, the embodiment of all the best visions of our people." But that we and others set our sights on high achievement, justice will not prosper nor oppression be lessened this year nor the next, ladders will not be lowered to lift people out of pits of poverty, nor will our values of freedom, tolerance, reason, and love advance in our land or abroad.

 You know, there are those who contend that a minister has only a few sermons to give, and maybe only one, which she or he repeats in varying forms throughout a career. Someone who knows me well said that one was mine: the well being of the planet is up to us. Within the parameters of heredity, history, and chance, it’s up to us to make goodness live.

 And I do believe that; but I think as often as I have preached that sermon in its many forms, I have preached variations of this morning’s message of anti-perfectionism, one that lies closer to home: that in our day to day lives, in our never-ending efforts to live our lives well, with purpose, love, and awareness, try as we do, we don’t do it perfectly, any of us, and mostly that’s okay. We’ll try to do better next time, and maybe we will, but maybe we won’t, and it will still be okay. It has to be.

 As Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote, "It ought to be with a sense of relief, not a sense of compromise and reluctance, that we come to the conclusion that we are not and never will be perfect. We are not settling for mediocrity. We are understanding our humanity, realizing that as human beings, the situations we face are so complex that no one could possibly be expected to get them right all the time." [How Good Do We Have To Be? 54]

 For a while now, like most members of the clergy and probably other public speakers as well,  I can’t help wondering how often some of you are wondering if what I’m saying represents an oblique attempt at commenting on the shenanigans in Washington, either those of the President or anyone else’s. Wonder not: that is not what this sermon is about in my own mind at all, neither in its call for excellence and goodness, nor in its call for greater patience and forgiveness as regards our imperfections – although of course you are free to apply either message as you see fit.

Myself, I don’t see constitutional grounds for removing the guy from office, but that’s not why I made a note on the First of July to preach this sermon. No, actually it was while I was watching a tennis match on TV between Jana Navatni and Venus Williams. Martina Navratalova, one-time champion and now an announcer, said that one player was getting in trouble by thinking she had to make a better shot than she had to.

Which is to say, she was trying to play too well. She was trying to making harder shots than was needed to win points, and as a consequence, she was losing those points. She was trying for the perfect shots, which is hard to achieve, when all she needed to make was a shot that was good enough.

 Boy, did that sound like something I recognized, in the way some people deal with life off the court, too, me included. I put it down to think about and preach about, a sermon I started out calling, "It’s Good Enough. It’s Fine."

In the meantime, over the holidays, I was watching a football game on TV when an announcer made the same point about a quarterback, that he was trying to make great passes, really hard ones, perfectly delivered, and failing more often than he would if were satisfied to make just a good pass. Then yesterday, the announcer said of our heroic Natick neighbor Doug Flutie, "Doug’s trying to do too much" – striving for excellence when what he needed to be was just good enough.

And one of you, whose son was getting married, told me of a good bit of advice she had been given, regarding the role of the mother of the groom, when any idea is presented by her prospective daughter-in-law. It is to deliver these words: "That’s fine, dear." And in almost every case, it really is. Maybe it’s not what one would have selected oneself. But it’s good enough, it’s fine. As I said before, it’s a matter of expectations – expectations and their control. A one-time colleague of mine [David M. Maynard] wrote,

 "Recently I heard a wonderful aphorism: ‘Expectations are pre-meditated resentments.’

 "Think about it," he went on. "Much of my growing up was based around expectations. My dreams of recognition, money, love, Christmas presents, friendships, job opportunities, grades, and exciting adventures abounded. While I usually reconciled to the realities of people, places, resources and time, most often there would be a negative edge. ‘Why could it not be the way I imagined? What is wrong that my dreams don’t come true?’ And so forth. The problem was not in the reality – it was in my expectations. Premeditated resentments!"

 How much can and should we expect -- of life, of others, or of ourselves? It makes a big difference in how we perceive our fortune. The platitudinous perception of a glass being either half empty or full is one that truly does make a difference in our sense of satisfaction. It is the difference between whether we feel the anguish of expectations confounded, or the joy that all and all, much of the time, things are good enough, things are fine.

 I pause a moment to bring to mind again the other of my two basic sermons, the one I’m not giving today, the one that says, we must remember that for most of our sisters and brothers, things are not fine, and barely or rarely even good enough; and it’s up to us to use our power to try to redress the imbalance.

 I do not think these two points are in conflict; I think they reinforce each other. I like to think we will only be the more generous, the more engaged with social service and societal change, when we are able to know at heart how blessed we are that things for us are often all we might hope, not perfect by far, but good enough, as they are not for so many.

 For let me try to be clear: "good enough" does not mean "done." As Kushner wrote, "Being human can never mean being perfect, but it should always mean struggling to be as good as we can and never letting our failures be a reason for giving up the struggle." [174]

I have a quirky story about that, involving the great contemporary American architect, Philip Johnson. Every year I tell it to the students who take my class on preaching at Harvard. It seems that Johnson was waiting to present his blueprints for a very important project in Manhattan. Seated next to him was the banker whose company was prepared to bankroll the project.

 To his horror, the banker saw that Johnson was making changes on the plans, erasing and adding, as if Johnson were discovering mistakes. The banker expressed his dismay, to which Johnson replied that no project ever achieved a final perfection. Indeed, he said, I feel like I am a child on the beach, whose mother calls him to leave, but who lingers as long as he can to find yet another shell.

 My colleague Roy Phillips takes the affirmation of the incomplete and unperfected even further: "There is an urge in many of us to get things just right. We want there to be no loose strands, no rough edges. Sometimes we have come pretty close to such perfection and have been surprised to feel our disappointment in the product. Something is missing. We have tamed the life out of it.

 "May Sarton witnessed to this when she complained about the lifeless quality of certain overwritten poems:
I know of poems that began in flaming
 that died later of detached skill and overtaming….
   ("Second Thoughts on the Abstract Gardens of Japan")

"Director Paul Brooks wrote about the problem in his book about theater, The Empty Space:
At the beginning of electronic music, some German studios claimed that they could make every sound that a natural instrument could make – only better. They then discovered that all their sounds were marked by a certain uniform sterility. So they analyzed the sounds made by clarinets, flutes, violins, and found that each note contained a remarkably high proportion of plain noise: actual scraping, or the mixture of heavy breathing with wind on wood: from a purist point of view this was just dirt, but the composers soon found themselves compelled to make synthetic dirt – to ‘humanize’ their compositions.

"As we mature we learn that vibrant life is always somewhat rough-edged. Its threads are untied. If something seems missing from our projects, our daily living, even our relationships, it may well be that they have had the wildness in them ‘over tamed.’"

Before I close, I have to say, all this applies to the church as well. If you come here expecting that all will be perfect or even nearly so, expecting some community of perfect peace and order, some agenda of events of every sort (in case you should happen to decide to attend), you can be assured of premeditated resentments, or disappointment at the least. The best we can offer – and it’s far from small – is a fellowship, a worship, a program of learning for those of all ages, that is generally good enough.

My colleague Clarke Wells once wrote, "The best we can hope for in this world, someone said, is to increase the odds of something human happening. We live in a permanently imperfect world -–with imperfect parents, imperfect marriages, imperfect children, imperfect jobs, imperfect countries, political systems, legal codes, languages, economies, you name it. Our residence east of Eden is no myth…. We live with incompletion, contradictions, prejudice….

"Nowhere is this more true than in the realm of religion. Religious persons, myself among them, have believed that a great holiness, nisus, directive, elan, light, bottoms our human condition. I think most people feel this at least a few times in their lives. And religions witness to it. But the pure water from the well of holiness is drawn up with broken crocks and dirty hands, and by the time it’s transmitted and served at the common table, it shares in the world’s pollution, connivance, and corruption.

"Yet, as with marriage or law or with language or economic systems or politics, we do what we can to approximate the holiness, justice, and excellence we envision. We do it with shabby equipment and broken instruments – including ourselves. So religion with its institutions, its creeds, community – with its buildings, hymns, arches, windows, prayers, readings, sermons, stories, myths, commitments. We aim to draw up, hold, and carry and show the reality of holiness from out of the depths of being.

"Though we do it imperfectly, we do it, in the darkness of our time, east of Eden, after the fall, year after year…."

Just so, as another year dawns, we "take the step forward together, onto new ground, planting our dreams well, faithfully, and in joy" [McTigue], knowing that much of the time, we shall not do it quite right, either here, or work, at the workplace, or at home. We will not always have all the patience, understanding, or caring we would want. Our harvest of charity and wisdom will be less ample than we would have it.

But listen: "You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting" [RR 490, Mary Oliver]. You do not have to be perfect, and won’t be, nor will I, though we can try to give it our best effort. Limited and human as we are, and as confused and selfish as we can be, at least on our good days we can muster our enthusiasm and courage, our dedication and love, as best we can.

It won’t be Eden, and it never was. But here, east of Worcester, it’s got to be good enough.
 
 
 
 

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