Is there anything more perfect than Michelangelo’s David? The exquisite proportions, the curve of the jawbone, the lifelike gaze, the chiseled abs (literally, because it’s marble). No wonder the shepherd boy claimed he was so marvelously made. Easy for him to say.
Meanwhile, most of us have a laundry list of parts we’d like to have rearranged. When I recently asked a roomful of men what they would change about their bodies, the responses were endlessly diverse: gap tooth, too short, balding, not enough facial hair. The bodies which have fallen to us by chance are not the ones we would have chosen. I’ve always had a sense that my neck was made two sizes too long. David may have been made marvelously, it feels like God phoned it in a little bit with the rest of us.
For those of us who lack David’s kind of natural beauty, we spend a pretty penny to present ourselves. This year, our beauty industry will exceed $100 billion as we touch up all the spots and blemishes that God apparently overlooked. Why exactly do we do this? It’s not just surface-level vanity. There is an obvious religious component. Plato wrote that measure and proportion are identified with not just beauty but also virtue. The Greeks believed that to be beautiful was to be godlike. As modern Christians, it seems we are not much the wiser. We may worship the one true God today, but being made in his image is not good enough for us. We want to be his mirror image. We want to be God. We want to be perfect.
Just ask Jamie Lee Curtis. Her career was well on the rise when she made a movie in 1985 with John Travolta called Perfect. The movie was, by all accounts, terrible. By the same accounts, however, she was as perfect a physical specimen as one could possibly be. All anyone could talk about was how she looked in a leotard. And yet, Curtis recently told a story on 60 Minutes about a cinematographer who criticized her eyes for looking baggy one morning and refused to shoot the scene that day. As soon as the movie finished, she got plastic surgery. She was 25. She is living proof that perfection is unattainable. She instantly regretted it and has since become a public advocate for affirming people’s God-given bodies.
Sadly, most of us are stuck between wanting to attain perfection and affirming ourselves. We can affirm ourselves all we want, but there is something in us that knows we are flawed. Not just surface-level imperfections, but deeply flawed, down to our very hearts. The book of Leviticus says that any sacrifice offered to the Lord “must be perfect so that there shall be no blemish in it.” Neither all the concealer nor all the affirmation in the world is enough to remove our inner blemishes. So what are we to do?
Psychology professor Gordon Flett, who has studied perfectionism his entire career, has a cure. What’s his silver-bullet solution for the impossible goal of perfection? Mattering to someone. Mattering is infinitely better than affirmation because rather than self-esteem from within, it is love from the outside. Mattering is about feeling essential and irreplaceable. In Leslie Jamison’s recent New Yorker article on perfectionism, Flett says, “Feelings of mattering are often rooted in having someone recognize our distinctiveness.” In other words, rather than uniform perfection, our flawed, messy, unrepeatable qualities are what make us distinctive to God.
When we matter to someone in this way, we are free to accept the rather goofy parts of our own flawed bodies. Our long necks and pimples, our bald spots and birthmarks. In a way, mattering to someone is a kind of imputed beauty. We become more beautiful to ourselves when we see ourselves through the eyes of our loving beholder. As the great Mavis Staples once sang, “There was a time I wished my hair was fine / And I can remember when I wished my lips were thin / Oh but now I wonder why should I be surprised / I like the things about me that I once despised.” Even my neck has a redeeming quality. Should I find myself in a foot race with someone and we are running “neck and neck,” I will have the clear advantage.
The hard reality is that we are only truly beautiful after we are broken. There’s an essay by Andre Dubus called “Broken Vessels.” One night in July of 1986, Dubus stopped on the side of a highway to help a motorist in distress and, while standing on the side of the road, was hit by a car. The accident cost him one of his legs and the use of his other leg, leaving him in a wheelchair. He talks about the loss he endured — the loss of running or walking, the end of his marriage that ended in the wake of the accident. But his loss is not without hope.
A year after the accident, Dubus is at physical therapy, moving across a long room full of machinery. Through tears, he says, “I’m not a man among men anymore, and I’m not a man among women either.” The assistants tell him that he’s fine. They try to affirm him but it doesn’t help. All the while, Mrs. T, the physical therapist, says nothing.” She backs ahead of him, watching his leg, his face, his body. He keeps crying while she works on his ankle and toes and calf with her gentle strong hands. And then Mrs. T looks up at him. This is Andre Dubus’ account:
Her voice has much peace whose resonance is her own pain she has moved through and beyond. “It’s in Jeremiah,” she said. “The potter is making a pot and it cracks. So he smashes it, and makes a new vessel. You can’t make a new vessel out of a broken one. It’s time to find the real you.”
Here, we find that God is less interested in the Michelangelos and far more interested in the broken vessels. Not a perfect, lifeless sculpture but a broken and contrite heart. Chances are, you will not find the real you until your perfect facade has been broken. Either way, the real you is already fully known and fully loved by your Creator. “Lord, you have searched me out and known me” — long neck and all.
