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2. The Path to Perfection Is the Road to Destruction
- Augsburg Fortress Publishers
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53 2 the path to perfection is the road to destruction “First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.” Matthew 7:5 Some years back, my father underwent a number of consecutive cardiac surgeries, all in the aftermath of barely surviving a massive heart attack. His brave surgeons risked much in taking on his case, as many others had turned him down because his health was precarious and surviving surgery seemed extremely unlikely. Known for their skill and experience, his surgeons operated anyway, and he survived for roughly another ten years. Our family was beyond grateful for his physicians’ heroism and care, yet we found ourselves wanting more. We worried about how “normal” his life would be and whether the doctors could help him further. Very simply, his lead surgeon replied, “The path to perfection is the road to the destruction.” I have never forgotten that statement, because it struck a chord deep in my being. All my life, I have been involved in an on-again, off-again relationship with the ideal of perfection . It has been a catch-me-if-you-can relationship, in 54 • clothing which the desire for perfection was somehow more addictive than the object of perfection itself. Though obviously I never have achieved perfection in any aspect of my life, the elusiveness of perfection has been a driving force throughout the opera of my every day. For years, I was convinced that perfection equals a good life and that anything less than being perfect is a result of not trying hard enough and/or of my human failing. For me, being less than perfect amounted to the same as being sinful. Even though, time and time again, my neat formula for happiness was proven wrong, I still believed it to be true. When I was in middle school, I worked on a science project that involved constructing a model of human teeth. I worked really hard on this project, which was eventually to be part of a community science fair. Each day after school, I would open the refrigerator, where I stored my clay models, and would shape them ever so slightly, attempting to improve on the project. One evening, I pushed too hard, and the teeth literally fell apart. Looking back, I can confirm that the path to perfection is indeed the road to destruction. Recently, my son, at a mere six years old, demonstrated that he had a better understanding than me of the dangers of wanting and needing to be perfect. When my four-year-old daughter was playing with her friend, my son overheard the other young girl criticize his sister for not coloring inside the lines. I could hardly hold in my overwhelming pride when he interrupted their conversation , arguing, “Perfection is impossible; people color in all different ways.” He even added, in his righteous tone, that their “need for perfection is a problem.” I see my son applying that understanding to the way his sister idolizes princesses. For my son, princesses are not real, because [3.230.76.153] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:57 GMT) the path to perfection is the road to destruction • 55 they are perfect. For my son, the qualities that define reality , meaning creaturely existence, are finitude, imperfection , and limits. Several weeks later, however, my pride in my young sage gave way to sadness and guilt when he came home from school upset because he couldn’t run the fastest. What had happened to his appreciation for human limits? When did he begin seeing imperfection as sinful, instead of a fact of his being part of what we call the human race? Had I passed on this distorted sense of what it means to be human? In the face of all these confusing queries, it was my turn to teach him that the path to perfection is the road to destruction. Even though we should try to improve our skills or qualities, at a certain point we may hit our limit, and that is OK. We have done our best. This chapter explores the connections between our struggles with the idea of perfection and our lived stories about what we wear and why we wear it. My aim is to underscore moments in our everyday practices of dress in which we conflate imperfection with being sinful, as well as moments in which we ignore the...