“Perfect”

My oldest daughter once said to me, “The gap between expectation and reality is disappointment.” I love that definition of disappointment. It is also true for the gap between hope and reality, between what should be and reality, between a perfect society and reality. It also depends on your internal experience of disappointment. For some disappointment is fairly mild; for others, a major emotion.

We live in a broken world, a society where people behave out of their brokenness in ways that kill, maim, and cause other suffering. We also live in expectation of perfection, that if only people believed like I do, or behaved the way I wish, or if society truly recognized and lived by what we know to be good and right, then all would be well. A world in which so many wrongs and tragedies did not happen. The scale for measuring perfection is wide and varied all the way from my child getting perfect marks in school to no one dying from (fill in the blank).

However, in our striving for perfection, for a world with no sadness, for the world “Imagined” by John Lennon, we must also be careful not to make an idol of perfection. We don’t learn much if anything at all from perfection except perhaps envy. When we lament about “society”, we often depersonalize tragedy, no matter how well intended we are. Tragedy is always personal to someone or it isn’t a tragedy. And, WE all are society. Collectively. When we lament about society, we are also lamenting our own flaws and shortcomings.

We cannot achieve perfect or remove all sorrow or avoid disappointment. We can however, learn to grieve in ways that keep us from contributing to other’s sorrow, to bring comfort to others, to strive for what is better, and remember Who is in control.