perfecting peace

"The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself. "

Anna Quindlen

Psalm 139 is a poem, a song, and a prayer of perfection in being rather than doing. I'm aware that I think far too deeply about doing things perfectly and think far too little about being perfect. 

I used to read this psalm as a kind of self evaluation aimed at creating a certain kind of religiously imposed humility and sense of guilt. Then I began to see a promise instead of problems and it slowly transformed into a prayer of gratitude about not needing to work my way towards perfection but to lay back into the perfection that God both provides for me and also envisions when He sees me. 

The idea that God sees me and that I can't hide from Him used to feel threatening, causing me to remind myself that I couldn't get away with anything. Now it reminds me I can't lose myself in self-loathing or self-delusion, for God sees through both distance and deceit to perceive the real me. The Creature He created and whom He thinks of as very Good. 

I'm awake early this morning, as I have been so often lately. In the stillness of the pre-dawn poetry of silence I find myself drawn to what God perceives when He looks at me and then I try to sketch that image out in the possible deeds of this unfolding day. 

I'm growing to love these moments of vulnerable transparency with my Creator. They are a sure way of perfecting peace in troubled living. 

I was also dabbling my feet in another poet this morning. Yeats was one of my countrymen who could see clearly the inhumanity of humanity while retaining a sense of wonder about our potential if we allow ourselves to be redeemed. 

So I'm perfecting peace this morning, even as I peruse the inhumanity of my humanity. 

How can one be both totally depraved yet perfect? I'm justly wrong, yet perfectly righted? 

I am perfecting peace in the juxtaposition of the paradox that is being human.  

What have you been doing?