When the Homily is about Immunology

Perfection

It's out there, ya know? I can see it, and furthermore I can see what it might be like if I were to "possess" it (or to be fully possessed by it - HIM), impossible though it may seem. In my mind sometimes I imagine my life unifed to perfection and I can envision my actions, my responses, and my thinking. Like phrases that sit on the tip of your tongue and yet cannot quite be spoken...or a dream in which despite your legs' motion you gain no ground.

It is a smile, when you want to scream in anger. It is silence when you have every "right" to defend yourself. It is understanding and accepting what many today cannot discern to be the difference between needs and wants. It is worrying more about the reality of who you are, than the perceptions others have of you. It is in so many simple things, that I would seem trite in mentioning them...to shallow for some, to "everyday", to mundane...but in my ever increasing agedness and in my ever increasing love for simple joys, I have come to believe that the real "trite" things in this world are only those absurdities (lamentably often highly valued)that lead us away from perfection. I believe that beautiful things said poorly and simply are far and away better than ugly things said poetically and subtly.

And so perfection may be found in happily changing lanes to let an overly anxious speeding driver go on his or her way - despite their gestures, or in letting others onto the bus before you, or in letting your coworkers listen to whatever THEY like on the radio, or in being anonymous, or in tickling your child into hysterics after they have been emotionally downtrodden by a classmate, or in writing a silly blogpost because something resonated in your heart while looking at old pictures in a photo album.

The old joke about rug burns on Orthodox Christians' foreheads is made real next week. May perfection also be found in a prostration? Orthodox aerobics, I've heard it called - for body and soul...the ongoing quest for perfection: to smile when you would normally scream. A fitting analogy, for when St. Andrew's Canon is finished with me I could scream for the pain in my thighs, but usually feel the paradoxical sense of bright sadness (a grieving smile?).

Have mercy on me O God....have mercy on me.