Martha Stewart and the Pursuit of Perfection

Of all the commandments in the Bible, the one that can really take the wind out of one’s sails is “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Granted, each command from the Sermon on the Mount is a tall order. Tearing out your eye if it causes you to sin and loving your enemy both sound ridiculously extreme. But no other commandment has an anti-loophole defense system like “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” And yet, some of us are up for the challenge. When asked to jump, we simply want to know how high.

No one understands the standard of perfection like Martha Stewart. If you’ve seen the new documentary Martha, you’ll know the Queen of Homemaking’s modus operandi was “Living a life that’s perfectly perfect!” Rather than selling easy-bake convenience, Martha sold perfection. Hosting a big gathering at your home for Thanksgiving this year? Well, you might want to consider making two different kinds of turkey, one perfectly baked and one wrapped in puffed pastry (thanks for the tip, Martha!). In an interview with Larry King, she said, “I’m always trying to fill a void, something that doesn’t exist. Something that people need and want and don’t have.” She knew what she was doing, of course. With millions of women around the country trying to fill the void, Martha became the first female self-made billionaire. As the original influencer, Martha Stewart created a standard that was both inspiring and impossible.

It may be no surprise that her quest for perfection can be traced back to her extremely demanding earthly father, rather than her heavenly one. The second of six children, Martha grew up under the rule of a perfectionist. A failure at his own job, her father would stand over the children in the garden like a sergeant, correcting and criticizing them while they grew much of the family’s own produce. He would hit them with a yardstick or the end of a belt should they ever dig or sow the wrong way. “To this day, I despise gardening,” one of Martha’s brothers confesses. Martha, on the other hand, was the one trusted to iron his linen shirts. “He loved me, and it was very obvious that I was his favorite,” she gloats. Following his demands to a tee became her way of winning his favor.

For a while, she achieved perfection, at least professionally. Having been a model as a teenager, a successful stockbroker in her twenties, and an A-list caterer in her thirties, there was nothing she couldn’t do. Anything under her control was always going to look fabulous. One of her favorite sayings is “If you want to be happy for a year, get married. If you want to be happy for a decade, get a dog. If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, make a garden.” Of course, the difference between a spouse and a garden is that a garden can be controlled. As a fellow stockbroker recalls in the film, “Whatever Martha can control is going to be fine. Whatever she can’t control is going to drive her crazy.” Indeed, Martha had what it took to achieve perfection in the eyes of the world, but at the cost of her personal life.

Martha Stewart made the perfect pie crust on set, but behind the scenes her marriage and her sanity were crumbling. As her and her husband’s careers were both taking off, their relationship became a low priority. In a letter responding to his infidelity, she writes, “When you tell me this is no longer your home after all we did here together, why shouldn’t I say I’m going to burn it down? I have to go to San Francisco and talk about weddings and my wonderful life. I hope you are enjoying your freedom. And I hope my plane crashes.” In another letter, she writes, “I’m sitting on a plane right now, crying, and cannot believe myself. I should be vital, beautiful, and desirable. And here I am, a total wreck. I am 45 years old, worried and lonely and hopeless. The future is a total blur.” It’s painful to imagine this correspondence happening while filming episodes of Martha Stewart Living, Martha looking into the camera, sipping a glass of port, saying “The perfect ending to a perfect meal!” Clearly, her pursuit of perfection had its limits.

Several years later, Martha Stewart would be arrested for insider trading and spend five months in prison, the absolute antithesis of the life she modeled. Her infamous sentencing has been labeled a total sham, most people believing that her prosecutors had targeted her as a powerful woman and wanted to take her down for that reason. Whatever the case, it seems God may have been the one targeting her in her fall from grace.

The woman who was the symbol of success was now bunkmates with the lowest of the lowly. At that time, she was the most famous person in America. And yet, from her cell, she wrote, “I feel very inconsequential today as if no one would miss me if I ever came back to reality.” All the while, she was meeting with her cellmates, mentoring them, and giving advice about their business ideas. She introduced the inmates to cucumber sandwiches, fresh from the garden. For the first time in years, she had no illusions of perfection and began to make friends with people who could not advance her career. After her release, a colleague said, “She had lived before being worried about what people thought of her, and then the worst thing that could have happened happened. She’d been set free by going to prison.”

Fast forward years later and Martha Stewart has been resurrected. Albeit she is not exactly a new creation; she’s still Martha, insisting her landscaping team trim her boxwoods a certain way and swearing vengeance on her former prosecutors. But her public persona is not nearly as self-serious as before (ex: her co-host and bosom buddy is Snoop Dogg). Where the Old Martha was the paradigm of poise, the New Martha can laugh at one of her biggest professional failures. Nearly ten years after her prison time, she appeared on Justin Bieber’s roast on Comedy Central and absolutely stole the show, giving Bieber some tips to use should he ever end up in prison. “I’ve been in lockup, and you wouldn’t last a week. So pay attention,” she tells Bieber before walking through the process of making a shank from a pin-tail comb and a pack of gum. At the end of the documentary, she acknowledges a shift. While she still detests inefficiency and not paying attention to detail, she can actually accept that everything does not have to be perfect.

Martha’s prison sentence and subsequent comeback bring to mind Martin Luther’s “Sermon on Cross and Suffering,” preached at Coburg the Saturday before Easter in 1530:

Just as we cannot get along without eating and drinking so we cannot get along without affliction and suffering. Therefore we must necessarily be afflicted of the devil by persecution or else by a secret thorn which thrusts into the heart, as also St. Paul laments [cf. 2 Cor. 12:7]. Therefore, since it is better to have a cross than to be without one, nobody should dread or be afraid of it. After all, you have a good strong promise with which to comfort yourself. Besides, the gospel cannot come to the fore except through and in suffering.

Jesus may call us to be perfect like our heavenly Father, but not in the way we would have thought. We are presented blameless, not based on the perfection of our apple pie crust, manicured gardens, or meticulously curated morality, but by the perfection of Another. Though we strive for perfection like Icarus flying toward the sun, when our own self-made wings fail under the weight of our frailty, we fall not from grace but into grace. Only then are we made perfect before God. And that, in the words of Martha Stewart, is a good thing.