I am not a perfectionist. Thanks be to God. That must be some kind of special torment. Now, I am often accused of being a perfectionist, but just because I have high standards for myself doesn’t mean I am a perfectionist. I believe in excellence. I believe in discipline. I am grateful to have experienced the joys of being on winning teams. I had strict coaches and directors. There was a gold standard. I took that very seriously as an adolescent. But perfectionist? No, I leave far too many ideas on the cutting room floor. I finish things when deadlines matter and call them “good enough, I guess” because that’s what you do when you must move on. Sometimes I must move on because there is too much on my plate, but it’s not because I’m an overachiever it’s because there’s so much to do. I don’t get that one either. People say I’m an overachiever, but don’t you have to actually achieve to be an over-achiever?
Ok, so apparently, these are all signs of a person struggling with the toxicity of perfectionism. To tell you the truth, I want to be a perfectionist about that too. How could I not have known? Why did I not see the signs? How did I delude myself into thinking I was constantly failing and thus because I was not in fact perfect, I could not be a perfectionist?!
The toxicity of perfectionism….
That’s the thing about poison. Like a slow carbon monoxide poisoning, it is only when the symptoms become catastrophic does one know that something is terribly wrong (if you notice at all). The purpose of healthy religion is to invite us to WAKE UP! Sometimes it is a loud, earth-shattering sonic boom kind of awakening, and sometimes, it is a slow and gentle caress until our eyes flutter open to the light. But, the invitation is always to see in a new way, to notice freedom and to live fully into it.
If you haven’t read the last entry by Josh, he does a masterful deep dive into the lie of spiritual perfectionism that many of us have spent years trying to attain – the more we try, the more we fear failure and the more shame we have in our failing. This is the cycle, and the spiral is both vicious and isolating, all the while we sit shoulder to shoulder in religious settings experiencing the same thing yet feeling more and more disconnected. The anti-Gospel of Fear and Shame breeds depression and isolation as Josh referred to last week, but it also breeds a dangerous chilling effect – the effect of being silenced.
“We don’t talk about Bruno no, no, no!”
(Note: if you haven’t seen Encanto yet, this is from a song in the movie Encanto about a family member no one talks, except for when they are talking about why they don’t talk about him and his estrangement which is initially for unclear reasons, but we presume he must have done something terrible. Spoiler alert: He didn’t. But that’s what shame does.)
When we talk about all that healthy religion provides, the call to wake up, to see, to be connected, to accept that we are loved just as we are, we have to talk about what unhealthy religion looks like.
When Religion Becomes Evil, it evokes fear and shame intentionally for the purpose of garnering compliance. When there are questions asked of leadership there is shunning and isolation, sometimes even public defamation with said shunning because absolute power corrupts absolutely. And love, the unending love of God that the Hebrew Scriptures call חסד (Heshed/Chesed), that the English language cannot find a suitable translation for, so we call it loving-kindness, mercy, eternal love, or unconditional love. Yet, somehow that uncontainable, undefinable love comes with an asterisk. It may be masked as an asterisk from a holy text, but make no mistake, it is a mechanism of control. This is a sign you no longer have a religious leader but a magician wielding the power of illusion for those to blindly follow the rules of “fitting in” with the purity codes of the community. Uniformity is always conflated in these contexts with unity, and the ones who just want to feel love and belonging end up only finding more fear and shame.
How could anyone be foolish enough to fall into such a toxic trap? Like poison, its vapors can be sweet at first. Like poison, it can even be undetectable until the damage is catastrophic. But, for the spiritual perfectionist, for the pleaser, the peacekeeper, the finally found a home-don’t rock the boat sleeper, the chilling effect of being silenced, feeling silenced, or choosing silence can quickly turn from sweet to frigid.
It seems that most people, though sadly asleep, are comfortable in this space. Others find community in small pockets until they are ready to leave. If you hear echoes of domestic abuse, it’s because there is a name for this phenomenon that is very similar, spiritual abuse, and it’s the dark depths of the anti-Gospel of Fear and Shame. This system of purity, imitation, and magic is ripe for clergy abuse, and the recipe for cover-up is already laid out. We’d be remiss to talk about unhealthy religion and what it can manifest if we didn’t mention the clergy abuse scandals that are still being unearthed today in the Southern Baptist Convention and Catholic Church, for example.
Why, then, bother with religion at all? Is it not inherently constructed in such a way that power and privilege will prey on the weak-minded and inevitably exploit people to whatever ends those in power desire?
I’m not sure I could have a serious conversation about religion without pondering the latter possibility. But then come the miracles.
Hold on. Stay with me.
Miracles are not (of necessity as the nature of being a miracle) supernatural. Miracles are simply those moments when something profoundly compassionate happens that is for no reason at all and usually counter-cultural, in the sense of going against cultural norms. From a Christian perspective, the Church is actually a miracle. It makes no logical sense, but at its best, it is counter-cultural and can be profoundly compassionate. Right? I mean, how does a rag-tag group of followers of a victim of state execution, survive not only that Roman emperor’s occupation but even crueler emperors to follow, the destruction of the Temple, martyrdom, plagues, and yet continue to spread across the world (pre-conquests)?
Eventually, of course, the religion was institutionalized, for better or worse, under Constantine. Then, schism after schism is to follow in the wake of power struggles and the solidification of an institutional identity. So this is the in-fighting, which is to say, when they aren’t at risk of extinction at the hands of an empire, they are at risk of falling apart because of their own splintering and intra-religious conflict. Yet, somehow, this messy religion has managed to carry with it sacred texts and creeds for generations.
Let’s go back to Encanto. It’s when we try to control and understand that which was never meant to be controlled or completely understood that we find ourselves in a pickle. This is a family trying its best to live up to a perfectionist system they created. Maybe Abuela started it, but no one has questioned it, not even Bruno, who shuns himself into isolation. Abuela herself is only trying to protect a gift she thinks needs protecting, but it is far too big and glorious for that. Our tendency as humans is to believe that gifts we don’t understand like חסד need conditions because we cannot fathom a gift-giver that wants nothing in return. We allow religion to become a toxic system of merit and measuring who is in and who is out based on the false notions bound up in purity, imitation and magic. The miracle is the community. The miracle is connection. The miracle is unending, unconditional love. No asterisk. Religion, at its best, is a continual revelation of this miracle.
Great analysis to this end here: Family and Communal Trauma in Disney’s ‘Encanto’ || LIVE The Good Doctors Diagnose
The problem with purity, imitation and magic is that there is far too much predictability for Mystery. It is clearly a closed-fist, closed-off, shut-down approach to the world. If purity seeks to be good enough so we can feel esteem and affection, imitation has us looking outside of ourselves for validation and security, and magic leaves us with the illusion of power by trying to control everything. Where is the Spirit of God in that?
Mystery asks for trust and trust (vulnerability) shines a spotlight on fear and shame that melts them at their core. Conversely, as long as we run to purity, imitation and magic, we are susceptible to the lies of the stealthy poison of unhealthy religion and religious leaders. We must wake up. We must look at ourselves and see the cracks in the house. We speak truth to each other and ourselves in love. This is healthy religion that unbinds fear and shame through the movement of Mystery and Spirit in our lives.