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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 20, 2011
I’m going to talk about the devil this morning. We don’t do that too often in the Unitarian Universalist Church. I’m also going to talk about Martha Stewart, because the holidays are here and we are going to be decorating and being with family and cooking and buying presents and traveling and it’s just a lot to deal with.
I’m fascinated by Martha Stewart. She was the idol of perfection for many straight women and gay men, and then she went to jail. I think she went to jail, not because she was a bad criminal, but because she was a woman with money and she was mean and arrogant. That’s just an opinion. Even the way she went to jail was perfect, though. She said “Enough delays, let’s just do it and get it over with,” and she went and held her head up and did some good for the other inmates and endured merciless mocking, and then went back to work cooking perfect things with her little house arrest bracelet on.
Long years ago, before I had children, I asked for her gardening book for Christmas, and I devoured it. The photographs of peonies and tomatoes were luminous. Even pictures of her garden in the winter, under snow, showed patterns of stone walls, brick walkways, hand built trellises, a gazebo, and an herb garden in a knot pattern. Month by month she instructed me about what to do, from starting seedlings to painting concrete urns. She taught me to prune trees and to make a poached pear dessert with the pears that came from my….. well, I didn’t actually do that. All I had in my garden were tomatoes, beans, and zinnias. I was a long way from pear trees. I wondered how she did it all. I felt clumsy and inadequate until I learned she sleeps four hours a night and has a staff of helpers standing by to follow her every instruction. The helpers even get into the pictures in the book once in a while.
I’m not here to trash Martha, I just want to look at how she affects some of us. I don’t know if there is an equivalent perfectly manly person. The guys on the Home and Garden and Do It Yourself networks might be close. Norm, on the Yankee Workshop, can use a miter saw, a router and a lathe. He can reproduce a 17th century French cupboard from looking at its photograph, but he’s a little goofy looking, and the way he says “remember, always wear eye protection is almost motherly. It makes me feel good. Back to Martha. Martha is fit and lovely and competent in all areas of making a home beautiful. She can make it perfect. And she will even step back from something she’s cooked or dipped in gold and make into a wreath and she will say, “Ah, that’s just perfect.”
Can I tell you the number of times I’ve stepped back from something I made and said “perfect” ? Zero. There is something in many of us that wants to be perfect. Some are more controlled by it than others. There are those who have it a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10 and those who only have it a 3 or a 6. It can fluctuate depending on our state of mind, tiredness, bank account, weight loss or gain, stress at work… It comes from the fear we all carry of not being good enough– that there is something secretly wrong with us that is not wrong with anyone else, a deficit we must cover and adjust for in all our interactions. The fear of not being good enough, the shame of feeling that you are lacking an important competency others naturally have can drive us to try to control everything around us, to make everything just right.
Perfectionism can work its destructive power on any of us. Some of us don’t have it in the areas of housekeeping or cooking or woodworking, but it affects us when it comes to our personal appearance, or the written work we turn out, or the way we handle our money.
Perfectionism can have a positive side. Good effects of perfectionism include high quality work, reliability, and attention to detail. Bad effects include stress and anxiety, along with an unwillingness to take on something you aren’t already good at. You lose your ability to take risks, to say something in a group that might add to the mix, but you don’t want to sound stupid. Being wrong is out of the question. A mistake would mean humiliation of an unbearable magnitude. Perfectionism can also lead to procrastination. You start a job late so when it’s done, you can believe that it would have been perfect, only you didn’t have enough time. Perfectionism can also lead us to be more critical of others than we should be. We expect perfection from them too, and we become superior or enraged when they don’t do things just right. In all its aspects, perfectionism leads to more fear and less love. We as spiritual folk are trying to go the other way: more love, less fear. More love, less fear in every aspect of our lives.
Martha makes some people feel clumsy and incompetent because they are comparing their insides to her outsides. We know how unruly, unkind, inadequate we are because we see ourselves inside and out. Someone who looks like they are doing it all right — mostly we only see their outside. We don’t know what goes on with them in private, or internally. We compare our insides to their outsides, and we come up short.
Martha Stewart is not the problem here, it’s the devil. Let me explain. “Satan” in the Hebrew means “the accuser.” When I say it’s the devil who is the problem I’m talking about that voice inside most of us that whispers “You are not quite adequate. You’re a weak specimen, a broken reed, a slight disappointment to your mother and father. You have a shameful laziness, and you might be a touch stupid.” Do you know that accusing voice? That is the voice that fuels the fires of perfectionism. Some perfectionists look driven and capable. Others don’t. Lots of people who are perfectionists have given up. They act like they don’t care about things, like they will never be any good. They feel discouraged and depressed. They have grown up on maxims like “A thing worth doing is worth doing well.” This is true, of course. It is a good thing to try to do things well. It is also true that “A thing worth doing is worth doing badly.”
Let me tell you about my mama’s violin. She practiced her violin every morning of the world. I always woke up to scratchy scales and finger exercises. She never got any better, really, but she sat in the back row of the Main Line Symphony and had a great time playing the music. It was worth doing for her. And worth doing badly. All-or-nothing thinking is one of the ways perfectionism damages us. Either we look fine or we’re a total slob, an unmade bed of a human being. Either we played our instrument at the top of our form and caught fire with inspiration or we bombed. Our home is in perfect order or it’s a wreck, either we had a calm, kind, and imaginative time with our families over the holidays or it was a disaster. There is little in between for a perfectionist.
I used to have a cartoon in my office with Glinda the good witch of the North, lying on her psychiatrist’s couch, and she’s saying “It got to be too much — You give someone a heart, you give someone else a brain, and people start calling at all hours. Finally I realized, ‘I don’t have to be everything to everyone. ” I can just be the ‘good-enough witch.'” One way to counter perfectionism is to have as your goal to be a good enough parent, a good enough spouse, a good enough worker, a good enough crusader for social justice. Be more compassionate toward yourself and others, more friendly.
What I want to say here this morning is that “the devil” is the spirit of fear that drives us into rigidity and anxiety, which saps our good will and clouds our compassion. The spirit of Love is where our allegiance lies as good people, spiritual people, people who want to make the world better place. Love is always in dialogue with fear in our souls and bodies and minds. So when perfectionism is sharpening its claws in you, take some deep breaths, stop comparing your insides to other people’s outsides, remind yourself to be a good enough witch, and wonder — what would this whole situation be like if I had more love.
