The Impossibility of Perfection: Abba Poemen 88

This Lent our companions are the Desert Fathers, the first generations of Christian monastics who fled into the desert in the fourth through six centuries. The first section of this series is all about dangers we should watch out for in the life of faith, particularly when it comes to our disciplines or sacred practices. Yesterday, we saw how a monk named Poemen correctly insisted that the body is not the enemy of spirituality. Today, we’ll look at another of his wise comments, this time on the impossibility of perfection.

The story is specifically about controlling one’s thoughts. This was an important concern for Christian monks because of the way Jesus radicalized the Law. He said that we shouldn’t be proud of ourselves because we haven’t killed a neighbour if we’ve been angry with them, or because we haven’t gone after someone else’s spouse if we have lusted after them. For Christians, our thoughts are as important as the actions that stem from them. Jesus did this as part of his battle against self-righteousness. But, as ever, humans are great at missing the point, and this teaching opened up a new field on which perfectionism can run amok. And so we come to today’s incident from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, in which a monk seeks advice about the possibility of controlling his thoughts:

A brother asked Abba Poemen, ‘Can a man keep all his thoughts in control, and not surrender one to the enemy?’ And the elder said to him, ‘There are some who receive ten and give one.’ (Abba Poemen 88)

There are few more dangerous things in life than perfectionism, and this is particularly true for the life of faith. Simply put, perfectionism robs us of joy and makes us focus on the wrong things, even to the point of stopping trying new things or having difficult conversations for fear of failing. But the life of faith is not about achievement; it’s about being present with God and others, truly showing up in all our relationships. As Sara Bareilles put it in her wonderful Christmas song: “Why so scared that you’ll mess it up? When perfection keeps you haunted All we need is your best my love, that’s all anyone ever wanted” (”Love is Christmas”).

Abba Poemen’s response to the monk wisely cuts perfectionism off at its root: Yes, we should always want to do better and grow in faith, but perfection itself is unattainable. If we are really mature, he says, we might only dwell on one bad thought in ten. And from the subtext of the way he words it, we might rightly gather that for many of us it will significantly higher, no matter our best efforts. (I’m often gratified to remember that an elite baseball player reaches base only 40% of the time; maybe we’d do well to think of our lives like that!) The thing we need to keep in mind is that our faith is not about scoring the highest. It’s not a competition. Jesus radicalized the Law in order to kick self-righteousness to the curb. It’s about humility. That’s the point.

It’s a bit like the idea I explored a couple years ago, that the most gracious thing we can do is to talk more about sin, not less. The fact is, in a world as complex as ours, it’s probably impossible to lead a fully ethical life, and for those of us who care deeply about wanting to do the right thing, that can easily lead to paralysis. But if we normalize sin and accept that sin is just going to happen despite our best efforts, we can move on to the more interesting question of how we might limit it and live lives that produce as much good fruit as possible.

And so, this Lent let’s take this to heart: Let’s not aim for perfection in whatever practice we’re undertaking, but simply to do our best, humbly accepting that perfection is impossible — and probably wouldn’t be spiritually healthy for us anyway.