by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, November 14, 2004
The first time I ever heard someone use the phrase, "I'm having a bad hair day" was when I was working as a chaplain in a San Francisco hospital as part of my training for ministry. There was a whole team of chaplains in training, student ministers from a lot of different faith traditions, and some of us became quite bonded with each other through what, on many days, felt like trial by fire.
One of the people who became a lasting friend for me was another seminarian named Debbie, and on one of those days when we managed to rendezvous for a quick lunch mid-day, she heaved a sigh and launched into a whole litany about the no good, rotten, very bad day she was having. It was full of failed connections, misunderstandings, spilled coffee and other petty failures, and she wrapped it all up by laughing at her own long and woeful list and telling me she was having "a really bad hair day".
Debbie was petite, blonde, and very smart and competent, and what she meant by the term had, of course, nothing at all to do with her hair. She meant she was having one of those days, so common to all of us, when all of the wheels of our lives that should be spinning merrily without a hitch seem instead to jerk and jam and screech as we try to keep rolling along.
Stories about "bad hair days" are sometimes pretty funny, because by the time we've got enough perspective to use the term at all, we've usually moved past our grumpiness and frustration enough to see the humor in what's happened, or in our own earnest and blundering responses. That's the saving grace hidden away in all our small failings: the ability to gain some insight, pick ourselves up, laugh with someone we trust, and carry on, hoping to learn from whatever it was that went wrong. Almost always, the thing that went wrong is a mixture of too much speediness and too little attention.
Author Geri Larkin tells a story about a friend of hers, Mary Jo, who had become prominent within charitable giving circles because of a foundation she'd started and her own generosity in launching it. She hated public speaking, but accepted when she was asked to give a speech at an enormous fundraising dinner, where each of six national women leaders had been asked to share their best wisdom with the gathering. They were all seated at a formal dinner table up at the front of the room, and Mary Jo, as the final speaker, sat at the far end. About half-way through the dinner she noticed her napkin had fallen off her lap, so she discreetly picked it up and tucked it into her waistband to keep it from falling again.
When her turn to speak finally came, Mary Jo stood up and began to walk toward the center of the stage where the podium was --except it turned out that instead of her cloth napkin, she had tucked the tablecloth into the waistband of her skirt. By the time she realized what she'd done, all of the glasses, carafes, plates, spoons and flower vases on the table had been dragged sideways and toppled into the laps of the other prominent speakers. Geri Larkin concludes, "Suffice it to say she never did share her wisdom" with that gathering.
I love stories like this, for two reasons. First, because I wasn't the one who made this particular blunder. Hearing the tale, in all its slap-stick absurdity, evokes in me an immediate measure of sympathy for the hapless Mary Jo, but an even stronger measure of relief that this happened to her, and not to me. If it had been me, I like to think I would eventually be able to laugh about it and tell the story. But I would really rather laugh about it and tell it as someone else's story. That way, I get to enjoy it without having to first pass through that awful sick feeling in the pit of the stomach we get when we've done something profoundly embarrassing in public.
But the second reason I love stories like this one is because they point to something really important about our lives, which is this: where we go wrong is just as important as where we go right. Or put another way, how we regard our bad hair days, our common or spectacular failings, will in large measure be how we regard our lives. Do we march off in a royal sulk, determined to pretend it never happened, or can we let it go with a bit of good humor and allow the experience to teach us how to pay a bit more attention next time?
I'm not at all sure that Jeri Larkin is right when she says that her friend who pulled off the tablecloth "never did share her wisdom" with that gathering. Maybe the most valuable lesson she could possibly have offered was the very public teaching that no matter how prominent, respected or evolved, none of us ever get to stop making mistakes. The mistakes are part of the bargain, in this life of ours.
In 1991 Francis T. Vincent gave a speech, as Commissioner of Baseball, in which he made the following statement: "Baseball…has taught most of us how to deal with failure. We learn at a very young age that failure is the norm in baseball and, precisely because we have failed, we hold in high regard those who fail less often - those who hit safely in one out of three chances and become star players. I also find it fascinating that baseball, alone in sport, considers errors to be part of the game, part of its rigorous truth."
You may have noticed that I don't often use sports metaphors in my sermons, and that's because on a scale for sports knowledge in which "100" is maximum ignorance of all sports and their rules, I would score a perfect 100% any day of the week. But I couldn't resist this particular statement about baseball because, whether or not it's completely true about that game, I know for a fact that it's completely true about our lives: "errors are part of the game" of life, "part of its rigorous truth".
We know this rigorous truth from the inside out, but most of us don't like it very much. Given a choice, we would much rather see the foibles and failings go to someone else, and keep the smooth sailing for ourselves. When we happen to be the ones to tuck the tablecloth into our waistband, we do all we can to slink away quietly and hope the word doesn't get out too widely, so we can maintain our dignity or self-image or whatever else it is we're trying so hard to hold onto.
To one degree or another, that's how we tend to regard all our failings: they are something we want to bury or set aside, something to keep secret. Like an irritating ad that keeps popping up on the computer screen when we're trying to read something important, we see our own mistakes as something separate from the true narrative of our lives. They interrupt the real story. They don't mesh with our plans. They block a clear view of what we like to think of as our "real" selves.
But if we step back a little from all the drama and the angst, it doesn't take a whole lot of thought to see that this attitude toward our failures is itself one of the biggest mistakes we can make. Because each time we reject or move away from who we are - warts and all - we also move away from the unfolding power of our lives. Every time we demand of ourselves that we be something we cannot be, we relinquish our hold on what really is.
We all carry images in mind of what it would mean to do things perfectly. The images rise with jarring regularity the minute we seem to have blown it, and then they follow us around as relentlessly as our own shadows. The thing is, these images of perfection are a form of shadow, and the more we focus in on them the more our real selves - vibrant and flawed - lose their luster. And the world is a little bit dimmer for it.
The writer Mark Salzman has some interesting things to say about our hunger for perfection and what it can cost us. When he was growing up, Salzman showed a great gift for playing the cello, which he loved. He intended to make the cello his life's vocation, and when he was still very young, at sixteen, he was accepted at Yale as a music major.
Just a couple of weeks before school was to begin he made a trip to Tanglewood to hear one of the world's great cellists, Yo-Yo Ma, and the experience changed his life. Salzman says, "I'll never forget how Yo-Yo walked out onto the stage. I mean, most performers walk out completely stiff, and you can sense the sobriety, the utter focus, the intense concentration - the barely concealed terror…Yo-Yo, by contrast, came out totally relaxed, guffawing, almost slap-happy….completely unfazed.
"And then he started to play….And his playing was so beautiful, so original, so intelligent, so effortless that by the end of the first movement I knew my cello career was over…Yo-Yo Ma was lost in the music, freed by it, speaking through it, in love with it….[Listening, it seemed to me suddenly] that I wasn't just inadequate - I wasn't even making music. I was training to be a showoff, that's all."
Salzman put his cello into deep storage, and he left it there for fifteen years. And then there came a moment in which he found himself writing a novel which - maybe not too surprisingly - turned out to be about an aging cello prodigy who can no longer play his instrument. Salzman writes, "As I was coming to the end of the book, I realized how badly I wanted this cellist to be able to enjoy playing once again - not as a concert soloist but just as someone who loves playing for the sake of the music."
The passage he was writing woke up Salzman to his own yearning, and like the protagonist of his book, he returned to the cello - not as a performer, not as someone competing for the top honors, not as a man driving himself toward perfection. He came back to it for the love of it, able finally to see and honor not what Yo-Yo Ma brought to the music, but what Mark Salzman brought - with all its errors and imperfections.
It seems to me that this is one of the truest measures of maturity: the ability to bow to what is, not because it's perfect but because it is real. We can still happily embrace the chance to get better at what we do, to stretch and improve ourselves and hone our skill. But that self-improvement should be done with joy, instead of a grim and driven competition. It can be done with joy when we figure out how to turn our eyes away from the distant Emerald City of perfection, gleaming on the horizon, and instead see the grace in every step along the way -- even if the path never takes us near that illusory city at all.
My youngest brother Tom is a comedian and actor by profession. For a long time now, he's been pulling together his wit and his timing and his charisma, walking out on stages and making people laugh: it's what he's done for his living since he was twenty years old. But he told me about an insight that only came to him about two years ago, and it's changed the way he does what he does.
He was in the wings about to go on stage for a performance in a big comedy club, and as he listened to the words of introduction being spoken he suddenly found himself muttering under his breath, with absolute conviction, "This is going to be a disaster; I will bomb out totally tonight, and they'll hate me." The introduction concluded, he walked out onto stage, delivered his first joke, and the audience howled with laughter. But his mental tic went on: "This won't last; they'll hate the next one", and so on all through the show. He delivered his final line and walked off the stage to wild applause - clearly, the audience liked him a lot. And then he heard his mental critic immediately say, "They didn't like me enough".
For my brother, the moment of really hearing that destructive inner critic was a moment of revelation. It allowed him to wake up to his life on a different level, and to pay attention not to some image of what ought to happen, but to what was actually unfolding in front of him. He realized the degree to which he was letting himself be driven by this grasping after an ideal that could never, ever be fulfilled -- because no matter what he did, the imagined perfection would demand something more.
I asked my brother how waking up to this habit had made a difference in how he does his work: how does he walk out on stage now? He said, "I meditate on what's really true. Did I do my homework? Yes. Am I committed to doing as well as I can? Yes. Do I believe I'm good? Yes. Okay then, shut up and get out there. At that point, what they think of me is none of my business."
In the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus says, "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect", it's pretty hard for our modern ears to find any wiggle room. He might as well be saying, "Be God!", as though it's only been a lack of will up until now that's held us back from our divine and holy nature. So it comes as a bit of a shock, not to mention relief, to learn from Kathleen Norris that a better translation is something closer to what we mean by words like "complete", "entire" and "full-grown". "Be full-grown, therefore, be mature". Still a bit of a stretch for some of us, but at least it's in the realm of the human!
One of the things Kathleen Norris doesn't mention in her essay is the context in which this instruction from Jesus is said to have been spoken. It comes at the end of that marvelous litany in which Jesus holds up to his audience a series of unexpected reversals, framed with the words, "You have heard it said….But I say to you". The final one, the culmination, is this radical demand: "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…for God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous…. For if you [love] only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others?"
And then comes that order, "Be perfect, therefore" - or as we can now hear it, "grow up, therefore! Be mature! Be full-grown! Let yourselves out of the box of programmed expectations and stretch a little, grow into who you really are." We're not being urged toward impossible perfection in that teaching, but toward the ability, as Norris says, "to make a gift of oneself…to give ourselves to others…no matter how little it seems." To give ourselves to others, not gilded and done up with bows but in the package that we truly are. What a liberating, joyful, attitude to cultivate! Not, "be ye perfect", but "be ye grown-ups". Bad hair days and all. AMEN.