Hi, I’m Phil LaBelle, the bishop of the Diocese of Olympia, and this is the fifth in a series of videos on Zimzum discipleship.
My first Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain with my family, we walked along the French Way, beginning in the Pyrenees on the French border. It’s about 500 miles across, and one of the traditions is for pilgrims to carry a stone or some other item with them that they put down at the Iron Cross, which is the highest point on the pilgrimage. It’s a very tall pole with the iron cross on it. It’s been there for centuries, and people put down something at the cross.
When I heard this tradition, I decided to pick up a malachite stone that had been polished, that was sitting on my desk. It was the perfect stone, tremendously smooth and wonderful color, and I used to rub it in my hands. And what I wanted to lay down at the foot of the cross was something that I held onto, which was perfectionism. I wanted that stone to help me see that I could lay down those times when I felt imperfect, when I felt like I wasn’t good enough.
I’m reminded of St. Paul’s words when he says, when he hears from God that, “My strength is proficient for you and I’m gonna boast in my weaknesses so that the power of Christ might dwell in me, because whenever I’m weak, I’m strong.” That idea that we can be made perfect in imperfection, and weakness is so strange to our culture. Recently there have been a number of studies about adolescents and their achievements. In one of them, a study came out about in 2020 where a number of parents responded about their adolescent children, how they’re growing more and more anxious as they seek to be perfect in their lives. As a pastor, I’ve heard similar concerns from both parents about their children, but also about themselves. Too many people will believe that God will only love them if they succeed, and far too often, I’ve seen that when people are at their lowest, it’s when they stop attending church because they feel like they can’t be perfect enough.
Belden Lane discusses this in his book, Backpacking With The Saints. He talks about a backpacking trip that he took once where he had set out to get to the top of a mountain, but due to complications in his ability because of some weather that had been going on, he decided to turn around. He was well short of his goal, and then later that evening back at the campsite, he ran into this group of Boy Scouts. Some of them were just in middle school. All of them summited that peak. He was devastated. He writes, “The most important mountain in one’s life offers no pride of accomplishment, only the unwelcome gifts of inadequacy and incompletion. Whether you face a physical inability to make it to the end of the trail, a failure in meeting the expectation of others, or a realization that you betrayed someone that you love, whatever it is, you learn over time that it isn’t the end. Every failure is an invitation to growth. Mistakes are occasions for grace, opportunities to choose a different path. They make forgiveness possible. Only in the absence of success can you know yourself to be loved without cause.” And then he goes on to write, “To our amazement, we find that the place that we screw up the most is the place where God loves us the most.”
Nothing is closer to the heart of the gospel than this. And yet far too often, we transfer the expectations of our culture onto the way of Jesus. We think that God just barely puts up with our failings, that it would be far better for us to achieve perfection in our lives both spiritually and professionally. We imagine that God is up there in heaven, looking down on us, keeping track of every misstep, showing displeasure by another grim machine or waving a finger at us. And yet, if Belden Lane is right, those places that we screw up is where God loves us the most.
Richard Rohr suggests something similar in his book, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. In it he writes this: “I would like to describe how this message of falling down and moving up is in fact the most counterintuitive message in most of the world’s religions, including, and most especially, Christianity. We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. That might just be the central message of how spiritual growth happens, yet nothing in us wants to believe it. I actually think it is the only workable meaning of any remaining notion of original sin. There seems to have been a fly in the ointment from the beginning, but the key is recognizing and dealing with the fly, rather than the need to throw out the whole ointment.” He goes on to say, “If there’s such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, and especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness so that only the humble and earnest will find it. A perfect person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection, rather than one who thinks he or she is totally above and beyond it. It becomes sort of obvious once you say it out loud. In fact, I would say that the demand for perfect is the greatest enemy of the good. Perfection is a mathematical or divine concept, but goodness is a beautiful human concept that includes us all.” He says that we grow spiritually more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.
My Camino experience didn’t end as I had expected. A week after I put that malachite stone down at the Iron Cross, just three days from the end, as we were coming into Palas de Rei to stop for the afternoon, well, my wife Melissa’s foot slipped off an uneven step outside the local church. She twisted her ankle badly and she cried out in pain. I was tired and hot and hungry, a lethal combination, and when I realized Melissa couldn’t just shake this off and get back up, well, sadly, I became less charitable with her, even though she had done nothing wrong. After we went to the local hospital, it became clear that our Camino was done. We did end up sending our 16 to 17-year-old kids on with some other adults that we had befriended on the way, but Melissa and I needed to take a cab that lasts 65 miles or so.
At first, all I could think about was not finishing this Camino. Even though we had walked so far, all of it was for naught. But that missed the point of why I had carried that small piece of malachite to the Iron Cross. You see, I didn’t need to finish the Camino for it to be perfect. The Camino I most needed, certainly one that was imperfect, was to show Melissa care as she recovered from her ankle injury. As Belden Lane puts it, “Mistakes are occasions and opportunities to choose a different path.” They make forgiveness possible, and through it, we can know ourselves loved without cause. I experienced a lot of forgiveness from Melissa that way and how I responded to the whole incident. When I came to see that, that Camino was far more perfect than I could ever have imagined.
One of my favorite spiritual practices is the daily examine, this Ignatian practice which is detailed in this book, Sleeping With Bread: Holding What Gives You Life, it invites us to consider at the end of the day, the previous 24 hours, we’re invited to ask two questions. “For what moment today am I most grateful, and for what moment today am I least grateful?” Dennis, Sheila, and Matthew Lynn describe how asking these questions, or variations of it, well, it can help us to explore the consolation and desolation of life, to see those places where God’s goodness and love exist. There are times, of course, where we need to seek forgiveness, to admit our need, either from God or from others, to find reconciliation. But when we do that and admit that we’re less than perfect, well, that’s when grace abounds.
I think of those last few days in Santiago when we waited for our kids to arrive, and I had a chance to make meals for Melissa in our Airbnb, send out postcards to friends, discover places for us to explore nearby that wouldn’t require much walking for her. That daily practice, asking those two questions of where we experience God’s love and where we felt furthest from that love, well, that has an opportunity to change our perspectives. It can help us to see that even in the midst of our weakest times, times when we feel like we’ve been failures, that we can feel most supported, that even in our weaknesses, we can experience the strength of Christ’s. And in that way, imperfection can indeed be a gift and we can grow spiritually.
So I strongly commend the examine to you as your next spiritual practice in this series of taking some time, intentionally making space, those minutes at the end of the day because they can truly bring you into the light of God. I hope you too come to see that our imperfections can be in fact moments of experiencing profound goodness and grace, and that we might all know of God’s grace, remaining with us. These days ahead, when it feels like you might be less than perfect, I hope you remember that you are deeply loved and that God is always with you.
Until next time, may God’s spirit continue to grow in you and through you, leading you on your way.
