Perfection

Someone died this week. She was one of those perfectly coiffed, melodious voiced Relief Society women, nearly always in a skirt suit, always with the perfect thing to say and do, or so it would seem. I know her life wasn't actually perfect. She was a normal, good woman with the regular set of disappointments that life brings. She was near my mother's age and I suppose her death could warn me of my own mother's potential frailty, her looming mortality. And it does, vaguely, in a mathematical way. But she was so very unlike my mother, that it is very difficult to draw connections in a meaningful way. I always felt like my mother wanted to be exactly that sort of perfectly coiffed Relief Society woman, ever attempting, but unable to manage it for sheer humanity's sake. Perhaps I bristle at the apparent perfection in weird defense of my mother's self esteem, taken down too many pegs in her failed attempts at perfection. Perhaps I just have a different, more stubborn reaction to the concept, having found myself so completely and frequently unable to mask my own imperfections.

I spent my own formative, self-conscious youth years in a ward and stake unusually populated with perfect Relief Society women. We attended church in a rambling old building built in the 1950s with a large, fully appointed kitchen. The proper Virginia women, wives of statesmen and businessmen--the very oldest of the good old boys--stocked the kitchen with silver serving pieces and all the necessary accoutrements of entertaining and hosting in the South. They did so, legend has it, by saving those Betty Crocker points found on cereal boxes and cake mixes, amassing enough to acquire the necessary items without spending personal money or ward and stake budget funds. Being surrounded with what was decorous and appropriate, having a fully developed sense of what was and was not done, has been helpful in gauging socially appropriate behavior for myself, but it has also seemingly inured me to the allure of such supposed perfection, falling outside it as we did, as I do.

So perfection rubs me raw. I don't trust it. But we're supposed to seek after it, commanded in the scriptures to "be ye therefore perfect." And in contemplating the scriptural admonition to be perfect against the rankling silver service, Relief Society, perfection, I have come to the following conclusion: Perfectionism says I have to make everything perfect. And in failing that, I am unworthy. Perfectionism is turning inward and failing. God says to be perfect, but what He means is to be perfected. Accept His gift, the Atonement, in all its unknowable completeness, for ourselves, for others. Being perfected is turning heavenward and living. Sufficiency is tied to trust. God constantly tells us He has enough. We are enough. His grace is enough. What does it take for me to believe Him? To stop hearing old voices tied to seemingly perfect biddies pointing out imperfections and instead get better at listening to the voice that will allow me refinement, bring me to God's perfection?

I am sad for the loss of Sister Relief Society. She was beloved. Her husband was one of the most real and genuinely lovely men I know and I know he loves her. But maybe her departure can help me to think better on perfection and on my own stubbornness and work toward that trust in sufficiency and trust in the Atonement and worry less, much less, about apparent perfection and far more about being genuine and lovely. Hopefully.