8. Perfect

Dear children,

Another invitation comes to us in the same form as the invitations to be holy and compassionate or merciful: You will be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect. This word perfect has the sense of completeness. And it's a completeness that includes what we might think of as imperfections. This invitation comes from the stories of Jesus that we have in the Greek New Testament. (Jesus is the Greekish pronunciation of Jehoshua - Yahweh saves - in Hebrew.)

I was thinking the other day about music and time that passes by during a performance when we are captivated by the music for its rhythm, or multiple interlocking voices, the grandeur of its sound. And I thought - this is a kind of stoppage of time. Though it has a beginning and an end, it is also making the voice of the composer in the past heard and it ties together our moments into a single shared experience.

Remarkable really - so I thought the commonplace phrase, Practice makes perfect. What is perfect in this context has the sense of flawless. To be rather than the sense of completion. My thought then is about the experience of performer and audience - how there is a presence of something more in the passage of time. In a sense, time is tied together: performance perfects the present. A great performance captures us and makes time stand still. This is the sense of completeness that is in the command. In music, it is very memorable. I still remember the first performance I heard of Gershwin's opera Porgie and Bess. One day maybe you will hear it. And of course you will remember the very well behaved 'perfect' children in The Sound of Music.

I am sure you can see that these letters of mine are going to take some teasing out to see if there is usefulness in them. At a minimum they have some historical usefulness. They reflect how I think about a whole bunch of things from God to human social attitudes and structures and science.

But ... I say, God is not 'a thing' that we can know it. And Science is what we think we know about things from our theories and experiments. Science is itself a great wonder and it strives for its own completeness. Science works by hypothesis and testing to see what can and cannot be repeated. Tests are successful even if they fail, because failure demonstrates that something is incomplete, that we have more to learn.

Science can then describe how things work, but it cannot describe or explain puzzle pieces such as we have looked so far: like safety, holiness, trust, truth, or others like courage, faithfulness, fear, discipline, persistence, respect, justice, love. For that we need mutual agreement on how we will live together. If that agreement is broken then all sorts of other things will break and have to be mended in some way.

I should eventually get to the agreement that God lays out in the 5th book of Moses, Deuteronomy (chapter 28). It is like a peace agreement after war with promises and penalties. And it is fun, but oversimplified. An answer to this almost military covenant is in the book of Job. People think of this long poem as if it is a horror story, but it is a setup for managing our expectations. It is an epic poem. The idea of punishment is removed from the discussion. It is not in the character of God to punish.

I think this is very important. There is no Hebrew word that is used consistently for punishment in the old English translations, and none where punish is used more often than other senses of the word. This not to say that actions do not have consequences and the consequences can be undesirable. 

People miss too that God can be grieved. God, in other words, can be saddened. But Heaven rejoices when someone says thank-you. People will tell you that God is all-knowing, all-powerful etc, but they are just repeating a formula by rote. You remember how I said that any sentence containing God is not fully known - as if we somehow had God under our control.

To review: so far I have sketched a beginning (letter 1) - to the earth, the heavens, and the stars, each one of them unique and differing from the others in brightness and complexity, and to the structures of life, (letter 2) our human situation, genes and cells, and microbes, the invisible half of the life on earth and in the waters much more than half.

And I wrote a brief intro to our responsibility in life (letter 3) as if we were working with hidden and uncertain puzzles. And I have begun to explore some language to talk about what is good and what is not good. I have done these things so that somehow we can find a place where we can stand and make suitable judgments - even if we are incomplete (as we all are).

I began that search for shared language with holiness (letter 4) - and wrote that it is like the table on which we could examine some hefty and complex puzzle pieces. Then I began with trust, (letter 5) and next with the idea of instruction, (letter 6) perhaps even instruction from God. And next with image (letter 7).

Such sketches attempt to describe, but description cannot fully catch the depth of things. We still need the whole web. So I will keep throwing out my threads into the wind of experience and examples to explore but I will hope to do it in the context of real life examples like these - in no particular sequence:

• war and violence in our lives and the lives of others and our failure to change old attitudes.
• the inequality between rich and poor everywhere and how we might approach caring for the weak.
• the protests we have seen in our country and whether we can answer the flaws in their approach.
• the breakup of families, and the character of human intimacy.
• the work of the poets and the ways that words are used and abused
• the music around us and the creation of beauty.
• the systems we build in real cooperation with each other and how difficult it is to learn how to do this flawlessly and to manage the processes, for example, the long learning process that produced the Webb telescope - and the resulting power that we have in our hands for extending our knowledge.

Then I think we may find some language to explore the good and the bad that you already face and are going to face, and the foundation you will need so that you be able to stand and thrive.

That is a tall order, and I will admit that some of my web segments may be weaker than others. I tell you the truth that I find this process very hard to do. I am heading towards some conclusions, but I am not at all sure how to express them. It's important to have discernment in yourselves and to draw your own conclusions.

Till the next letter ...