In a Navajo rug there is always an imperfection woven into the corner. And interestingly enough, it’s where "the Spirit moves in and out of the rug." The pattern is perfect and then there’s one part of it that clearly looks like a mistake. The Semitic mind, the Eastern mind (which, by the way, Jesus would have been much closer to) understands perfection in precisely that way.
Perfection is not the elimination of imperfection. That’s our Western either/or, need-to-control thinking. Perfection, rather, is the ability to incorporate imperfection! There’s no other way to live: You either incorporate imperfection, or you fall into denial. That’s how the Spirit moves in or out of our lives.
Richard Rohr, from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 228
I love this - somehow temperamentally I've always felt this way. I like buildings with lichened roofs and spalled brickwork, faces with the etchings of long thought and deep feeling. I like the feel of a played-in fingerboard, and I much prefer old clothes! I find it very easy to accept the idea that the Spirit moves in and out through such things; even through the bits of my life that I'm tempted to regret, to think of as loss and damage...
2 comments:
That one's a keeper! How true that, in Eastern cultures, perfection comes with incorporating imperfection. It is, at least in Japanese, considered to bring with it a poignancy, a gut-level and natural at-right-ness with the world. After living in Japan, I absolutely detest Western flower arrangements that are so symmetrical and boring. I have a lovely Bizen vase that, for all the world, looks like a lopsided lump of mud. I hope to find some bare branches to put in it for Lent.
I love this quote. I used it on my blog too. Imagine what the world would be like if we all stopped holding ourselves to the western standard of perfection. How much more freedom we would have to act and create in the world? How much more satisfaction and happiness?
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