Sometimes, it’s just hard to measure up.I realize that it was simply impossible for a human being to be and remain good or pure. If, for instance, I wanted to be attentive in one direction, it could only be at the cost of neglecting another. If I gave my heart to one thing, it left another in the cold. No day and no hour go by without my being guilty of inadequacy. We never do enough, and what we do is never well enough done, except being inadequate, which we are good at because that is the way we are made.This is true of me and of everyone else. I am constantly catching myself feeling inadequate and falling short of my expectations. It sounds strange that we should be guilty where we can do nothing about it.
Henri Nouwen expressed similar feelings: There is a nagging sense that there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, and unrealized proposals. There is always something else that we should have remembered, done, or said. There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit. Thus, although we are very busy, we also have a lingering feeling of never really fulfilling our obligations. A gnawing sense of being unfulfilled underlies our filled lives.
Last week, I thanked a man who went out of his way to help me and he replied to pray for this “heathen.” In other words, he did not feel comfortable coming to church because he was acutely aware of his imperfections. What he didn’t realize was that people who come to church are acutely aware that we simply do not measure up to God’s expectations. Why is this?
At the end of the day, we cannot measure up and cannot not disappoint others and ourselves. The fault is not that we are not sincere or that we do not put out the effort. The fault is that we are human. We have limited resources, get tired, experience feelings we cannot control, have only 24 hours in our day, have too many demands on us, have wounds and weaknesses that shackle us, and thus know exactly what St. Paul meant when he said: Woe, to me, wretch that I am, the good I want to do, I cannot do; and the evil I want to avoid, I end up doing!
What I want you to realize is that despite our inability to measure up we need to be a people of hope with renewed energy in our lives. In case you did not realize it, to be human is to be inadequate. Only God is adequate and the rest of us can safely say to ourselves: Fear not you who are inadequate! For God who made us this way surely gives us the slack, the forgiveness, and the grace we need to work with this.
The key to be fully human is to accept our imperfections, our congenital inadequacy, which can bring us to a healthy humility and perhaps even to a healthy humor about it.
But it should bring us to something more: prayer, especially the Eucharist.
I try to celebrate Eucharist every day. I do this because I am a priest and part of the covenant a priest makes with the church at his ordination is to pray the priestly prayer of Jesus, the Eucharist and the Liturgy of the Hours, regularly for the world. But I do it too, more personally, for another reason: The older I get, the less confident, in some ways, I am becoming. I don't always know whether I'm following Christ properly or even know exactly what it means to follow Christ, and so I stake my faith on an invitation that Jesus left us on the night before he died: To break bread and drink wine in his memory and to trust that this, if all else is uncertain, is what we should be doing while we wait for him to return.
Immanuel watches over us as we reflect: "Do not be angry beyond measure, Lord; do not remember our sins forever. Oh, look on us, we pray, for we are all your people.” (Isaiah 64:9).
Lord, I pray for all my Sunshine Friends that they may realize that despite our imperfections our God reaches out to make us his children who shine like the stars.
