God doesn’t expect perfection

After reading Colleen Carroll Campbell’s My Sisters the Saints a few years ago, I was excited to learn she’d written another book. Not surprisingly, I found the same down-to-earth, personable writer who could clearly speak of the human experience in a way both relatable and entertaining.

The Heart of Perfection is Campbell’s second memoir that, much like the first, weaves stories of her life with scripture and the lives of the saints. Some saints were new to me such as St. Jane de Chantal, a mother, widow, and later a religious sister who also happened to be a friend of St. Francis de Sales. Others I was more familiar with such as St. Benedict of Nursia, St. Alphonsus Liguori, and St. Ignatius of Loyola, but she breathes such life and drama into their lives, I felt like I was meeting them for the first time.

The stories from Campbell’s writing focus on both perfectionism in work and family and “spiritual perfectionism—an obsession with flawlessness rooted in the belief that we can earn God’s love.” The idea perhaps stems from an oversimplified understanding of the scripture verse “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48).

While we should strive for perfection, God’s love is not contingent on our effort, nor does God’s love diminish when we fall short. Campbell speaks to the healthy and holy balance between obsessing over our salvation as if it’s something we can achieve purely by our effort and the opposite temptation: assuming that we are decent enough folks and in the end God’s mercy and justice will work in our favor.

One saint Campbell highlights who spoke clearly of that balance is St. Benedict. Around year 500, he founded a monastery that later influenced western monasticism. He also formulated “the rule,” a series of guidelines for holy and ordered living not just for monks but countless religious and lay people ever since.

“While we tend to consider hard-working the guy who skips family dinners and Sunday church to put in more time at the office,” said Campbell. “Benedict would consider him lazy. Anyone who can’t shut up and sit still long enough to pray, read, and study God’s Word is ‘slothful,’ Benedict says, and he should do extra manual labor to curb his addiction to ‘idleness.’”
That’s not to say St. Benedict didn’t value hard work and the persistence it takes to master a skill. Quite the contrary. He was simply attentive to the temptation that work “can easily slide from God-centered mission to self-centered escape” if we aren’t careful.

“For Benedict and his followers,” said Campbell, “a successful life is one that leads to union with God. It’s a whole-life project that demands our complete commitment and engages every aspect of our personality and identity. Work can be a means of pursuing it, but eternity is its end. And while external accomplishments can signal our progress toward that end, our willingness to accept limits on those achievements for love of God’s is often a better marker.”

The Heart of Perfection is great for the self-proclaimed perfectionist, workaholic, those who feel the relentless anxiety to “get ahead,” and those who feel their pious efforts will never be enough to win God’s favor. The saints featured in this book were themselves recovering perfectionists, either in their work or spiritual lives, only to realize that no level of status, amount of money, or number of pages of scripture read, or rosaries prayed could ever satisfy their true longing for Jesus and his own perfect will for them.
 
Kristina Lahr is the assistant editor of New Earth.