Carmen’s Chatter

Blessed are the poor in spirit. —Jesus, Matthew 5:3, Sermon on the Mount

Failure is not a fun topic. The word comes from an Old French word faillir, for “to be lacking, miss, not succeed.” At least in our Western culture, “being lacking, missing something, and not succeeding” are not cool.

A lot of money is cool. A silver Mercedes is cool. A summer home is cool. A successful business is cool.

And why not? But the love of success to the exclusion of remaining open to learning is like the love of money to the exclusion of all else—both can limit my soul.

Fortunately, I’ve never had to worry about a lot of money or a lot of success, but I have had to worry about perfectionism, which on the surface looks like the opposite of failure, but is to my mind (or has become to my mind) synonymous with “being lacking, missing, not succeeding”; for how can a person learn if he or she does not feel free to ever make a mistake?

That surely shows a lack of awareness, a missing the point of being alive, and a failing.

I used to be a perfectionist, and in some ways, once a perfectionist, always a perfectionist. You could say I am a recovering perfectionist then. But I have at least unmasked perfectionism for the ongoing failure of learning that it is.

I wish when I had been a teenager that someone had told me what the etymology of perfect is (not that it probably would have helped my stubborn self that much, but still).

Perfect comes from the Latin prefix per- for “thoroughly” and facere for “to make or do.” So literally perfect means “to do [something] thoroughly.” It does not mean to not make a mistake.

To do something perfectly means to do it over and over until you get it right or to do it over and over until you get it at least more nearly close to excellent than if you had done it only twice.

I know from watching my mother sew that to sew thoroughly requires much concentration and—even with her talent and experience—much ripping out of seams and re-sewing. So to do anything thoroughly is a revisionary process.

Perfect, then, means doing something often because you want to do it well. It does not mean doing something right the first time, necessarily, or even the second or third time, or even, I would dare say, the 1,000th time.

I am so conscientious (I prefer that word to “OCD”) that I have no trouble with this concept when it comes to writing. I always love to say that “writing is revising” and that “good writing isn’t written—it’s rewritten.”

But I say that with a gut-felt appreciation of its being true in my life as a writer. I have to revise countlessly. Once an elementary school student asked me, “How many times do you revise a book?”

I said, “As many times as I kiss my children in a year’s time.” In other words, too many times to count.

I can handle the psychic pain of writing and its necessary revising. It can be stressful and is always hard, but it has its deep inner rewards; and also writing is just me struggling with my self.

Where I have trouble with “doing things thoroughly” is more often in relationships, if you know what I mean. Pain often makes it hard for me to patiently redo what I must redo if I am going to love those I love.

So I’ve had to accept lately that failure to communicate or to get along helps me identify where I need to grow up, especially in my relationships with those I love most. By “grow up,” I mean places in my soul where I need to “redo” my love for my self so that I can love those I love better.

I always love those I love, but sometimes I show it well and other times I totally blow it.

A dear friend sent me something recently about the refining (redoing) process of our souls that reminded me of a passage from the fourth-century Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina. Gregory was the younger brother of Bishop Basil of Caesarea and Macrina the Younger. Here’s what Gregory said about how his sister, Macrina, had handled hardships of soul:

As gold is heated in many furnaces, one after another, so that any impurity not separated out in the first furnace can be separated out in the second, and so on, until all remaining impurities are removed in the final smelting, I watched my younger sister, the nun Macrina, as her soul was refined by grief. She knew many earthly losses until her heart became absolutely pure. Like the best athletes, she persevered. She never let difficulties break her spirit. Macrina worked at her faith.

I would hope that I would work at my relationship with my soul and also at my relationships with the ones I love in this persevering way, until they are purified into something only quite joyful and loving and caring.

But often I am afraid that I forget, at least, that part of the process of smelting is that hot fire, and that’s how “being lacking, missing, not succeeding” feels to me often. It is uncomfortable and searing.

If I could only remember that what I call “failure” is part of the revisionary process of love, of doing anything thoroughly. And what is love but the most “thorough” act we can do.

I’m asking God to teach me how to just hang in there and accept it all, including the necessary heart-felt pain of the smelting.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 5:04 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.