Forget your perfect offering

In his song, “Anthem” Leonard Cohen sings, “Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

For many of us, perfectionism is an ongoing struggle. I would like to think that being a person with a disability forces me to relate to what’s true: an imperfect body carrying, being the home of, a loved and loving being. The fact is that for many years, I struggled with something else beneath the surface. I worked harder and smarter. I tried to be clever enough and charming enough to make up for the fact that some of my vulnerability shows from the outside, from the moment people encounter me. It was almost as though I were hoping that if I could just be perfect enough, people wouldn’t notice my disability. During this time, I kept the cane I use for walking support out of any pictures of me. I was hiding it.

Guess what. It didn’t work. I didn’t achieve perfection as camouflage. I made myself tired and stressed. In spiritual community, perfection is often seen as a goal of the deeper life. When people apply perfection to the disabled body, people with disabilities receive messages that once they change, they will be full participants in Beloved Community. Even though these messages are meant as comforting, they reinforce the idea that able bodies are good and disabled bodies bad.

According to Nancy Eisland, “[t]he doctrine of perfection is implicitly connected with being physically whole[.]”  People attempting to comfort Eisland with regard to her disability told her: “In heaven this won’t be a problem.” But being disabled “is a part of who I am,” said Eiesland. “What these statements are saying to people with disabilities is that you can’t be who you are and be a part of eternity.”

Church practice that focuses on participation with people with disabilities instead of focusing on elimination of disability is helpful to inform the present. In the present people have the opportunity to include those around them, both with and without disabilities, in meaningful, connected church life. The message that perfection of the body, if it were even possible, reflects spiritual wholeness obscures an important gift to the church that disabled body brings.

The disabled body is prophetic. It calls Beloved Community to account for the times in the past when the Good News was only offered to people who had able bodies, who could look, move, communicate and understand in specific ways. The disabled body calls the church to a new future, in which people with varying abilities are welcomed, included, and celebrated, not based on a measurement of how much they can do or how close they come to perfection, but rather on the basis of their own inherent worth and dignity, on their matchless worth to the Beloved.

There’s no quick happy ending. Realizing my place as lover and loved of God doesn’t heal the wounds of judgments I’ve received as less than perfect or alleviate the weight of pressure I’ve put on myself. It does, however, create a space of freedom. I am free to be myself, to offer the light I bring, to lift up the light of others. It’s good to let the secret out: I am not perfect. I know your secret: neither are you.