Good Enough (Janice Odom)
 
Good Enough
16 August 2009 ~ Umstead Park UCC ~ Janice Odom
Readings: Micah 6: 6 – 8
Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
    --from "Dream Work" by Mary Oliver, Atlantic Monthly Press
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Last week I stood here and talked about the word Fear.
A word we actually speak rather infrequently but feel with great regularity.
We all know what Fear is.

Today’s word is nearly the opposite . . . a word that is as common in our vocabulary as mosquitoes in the south in August, but the meaning of which is rather elusive.

The word is Good.
Good morning. Good Day. Good bye. Good night.
How would we greet one another without the word ‘good’?

And how would we respond when folks ask us: how are you? Without the automated response: Good!

It’s how we compliment the cook: This is good. .! or give each other that affirmation that we are holding up well, though I think it seems to connote a level of surprise, as if the speaker didn’t really expect you to be in decent condition, when they say, “ …you look good!”

Good even helps us give exclamation to what ISN’T good: Good riddance! Good grief!

And then there is our admonishment:
. .. Be good. . .!

Now it is even a fashion line: Life Is Good.
(Not to be confused with its antithesis clothing line I found this week on the web: Life is Crap.)

In our call to worship we were reminded that good is the primary adjective in the creation story. It’s the refrain after each new aspect of the world is brought into being:
And God said ‘It is good.’
When I really stopped to think about this it was a rather big aha!
God didn’t say: This is excellent! Superb! Outstanding! God didn’t say ‘this is perfect.’
God said ‘This is good.

OK, so I had some fun imaging the possibility that maybe God averaged things out a bit – like he looked at an indigo bunting caught in the sunlight or a whale breaching through the waves, he looked at a sunset or listened to the wind through the trees just before a rain and said. .. That’s pretty excellent. .. but then he got caught in a swarm of those southern mosquitoes, or got a little tickled at the raggedy looks of an opossum, watched the terrifying power of a hurricane or realized his tomato plants had the blight. . and so he averaged things out. . . This is good.

But truly we’ve heard it so much that we don’t even hear it anymore.
And ‘good’ rolls off our tongues without meaning.

I think it is because it is such a ubiquitous term that I wanted to take it on. And because it is a word that has haunted me for most of my life and is why I decided that the words Fear and Good should get back-to-back attention. . . . Because I was raised with a strong internal voice to be ‘a good girl’ and not being ‘good enough’ has long been my biggest fear. It feeds right into today’s fear: can I deliver a good sermon.

And for all us, defining what it means to ‘be good’ and to live a ‘good life’ are questions at the very heart of our living, and of our faith journey.

What does it mean to make a good life and not merely a good living?
What does it mean to be a good girl, to be good boy, husband, wife, or mother . . . .? or a good Christian? And why do these vague phrases have such a hold on our lives?

This is a discussion that could be examined from many perspectives.

We get a lot of instruction on being good from culture.

Ah, but the cultural voices on what is good are so darn many, which ones do you listen to?
Is it affluence, achievement, youth and beauty, or excess and extravagance? While The UPUCC crowd defines itself quite apart from these voices, we cannot deny their insidious presence and the work it takes as parents to counter these voices in the job of raising our children.

Perhaps a better measure of being good is an ethical one.
If we take an ethicist’s point of view we can look at the laws and expectations of our communities and the moral codes of our faith and we can do a check-list to see how we measure up for being ‘good.’ Do we follow the laws and rules? Have a good driving record & credit score? Do we meet social approval? Being ethical is a quality I would wager we all aspire to. But too often we stay on the lower end of the scale of ethical behavior – more focused on following the rules than the principals which guide them.
This is what the Pharisees, the religious rule-followers of the New Testament were caught up in. They were constantly butting heads with Jesus who tore their check-lists up right in their faces. There is no "Christian To Do List" Jesus told them
It is just not that simple.
It is a life Jesus came to help us live, not just a series of accomplishments.

But what is it to live this life from a faith perspective?

The Bible tells us Creation is good. We’ve gotten that far. We are created in goodness. We don’t start off at a deficit we have to make up. Matthew Fox, among many others, says we were born not with Original Sin but Original Blessing. So that is good news. . .. But still the question remains, how do we live a good life?

There are the laws of Moses, the Ten Commandments that are foundational to that ethical sense of being good.
They give us a lot of ‘thou shalt nots.’
But there is more to ‘being good’ than just ‘not being bad.’

What is it that we are to do with this goodness and potential we are created with? Apparently the same question was being asked nearly 3000 years ago in his little village where Micah lived, the village of Moshereth on the outskirts of the city of Jerusalem.

The people ask Micah a good question: What would make my life pleasing in the eyes of God?

And amidst all the haze and confusion of OT drama and personalities and social norms: different scenes, same themes as today - Micah’s hand rises out of the crowd and his finger points us in a direction.
He gives us one of those rare nuggets of great clarity.
And what does the Lord require of you?
But to do justice
And to love kindness
And to walk humbly with your God.

Do justice: To do justice is to work for the common good. This is the call to bold living; it is the call we heard last week when we poked a finger at fear and reminded ourselves that living small does not serve the world. Doing justice in the world where the voices of what is good are pretty darn loud about keeping social norms and not making a mess of things is no small feat. Doing justice is so often counter-cultural, and not likely to get you points for being a good girl or good boy. Doing the work of justice can be hard. That is why we get the next part:

Love kindness. This tells us how to do the work of justice. Do it with love. Do it with kindness and mercy and generosity. The Hebrew word here is hesed. This word normally refers to the "love" that someone shows another person when they are not obligated or expected to do so. To “love kindness" is to do justice and to give love, not for ulterior motives, not for approval’s sake, not for obligation’s or expectation’s sake.
But where do we get the energy to give out this kind of love?
That takes us to part 3 of Micah’s statement:

Walk humbly with your God. I adore this image of walking with God. We could go on for days on what this means . . . in fact at this point of preparing this sermon I realized that trying to dissect the word good is like trying to eat an elephant and with the pressure to bring this all together in some reasonable way, I’m back to my fear of preaching a good sermon.

So, while I’m already out on this limb of an aside, I’m just going to go ahead and jump to another tree and ask you to jump with me. I’m going to look at ‘what it is to be good’ through the lens of psychology and I’m going to drag us into the world of D.W. Winnicott. Winnicott was a pediatrician who through coming to terms with how he was living his own life, and trying to meet his expectations of being good, he became deeply interested in psychology.

In looking at his own life, Winnicott described his adolescence as “disturbed”, one driven by what he called “self-restraining goodness" - behavior he adapted to try and assuage the dark moods of his mother.

The aha! Winnicott came to that had great impact in psychotherapy is the idea of the ‘good enough’ mother.
The “good enough” mother is the mother who is imperfectly attentive.
The good-enough mother tries to provide what the infant needs, but she instinctively leaves a time lag between the demands of the child and her rush forward to meet those needs. It is in that time lag that the child has the chance to develop his or her own identity and esteem.
The good enough mother is in contrast to the “perfect” one who satisfies all the needs of the infant on the spot, and in doing so prevents him/her from developing their capacity as a separate being.
The developing child is best served by the mother who doesn’t rush in to fix everything but allows the child the time to develop her own abilities and sense of self.

We can all take a cue from Winnicott here.
To be good enough is to resist our compulsion to be perfect.

Anna Quindlen has written a little book called Being Perfect.
She tackles all those voices of oughts and shoulds that live inside of us. They are the voices, which keep us from our capacity to Love Kindness . . . for us to love kindness and do justice we have to love our own lives. Anna writes:

“You must look backward instead of ahead, to remember yourself from your own childhood days, when you were younger and rougher and wilder, more scrawl than straight line. Remember all of yourself, the flaws as well as the many strengths. Pursuing perfection makes you unforgiving of the faults of others. As Carl Jung once said, “If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand to love their fellow man better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards others can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.” Give up the nonsensical and punishing quest for perfection that dogs too many of us through much of our lives. It is a quest that causes us to doubt and denigrate ourselves, our true selves, our quirks and foibles and great heroic leaps into the unknown.”

The compulsion of the perfectionist is to ‘fix things.’
My compulsion to fix things is driven by my discomfort and anxiety with the unsettledness of things getting figured out.
To give up my need for perfection is to give up my need for control.
Fixing things for everyone else takes away their capacity to do their own living.
My compulsion to fix things is about my own inner anxiety.
And it is, I would argue, about not trusting God.

The perfectionist is not walking humbly with God. The perfectionist is racing ahead, opening doors, tidying up; fixing things . . . there is none of that peaceful image of walking with God. Of listening and trusting and of getting our egos out of the way.
We read it last week, that line from Psalm 45:

Be still and know that I am God.

I am God. . not you.

The best is the enemy of the good.
It is a gift to hear: This is good enough.
The original Saxon meaning of our English word God is 'The Good.'
It’s one of the first things I learned as a child in Sunday School.

God is good.

The Indian teacher Sri Chinmoy wrote these words:

If you make greatness your companion,
You may suffer.
If you make goodness your companion,
You will not only prosper
But you will also have God
As your Companion.

So walk on, walk humbly with your God . . . You are good enough.
                                                  
Thanks and acknowledgements to members of the UPUCC worship committee for sharing with me their theological wrestlings and creative energies which helped shape this sermon and the larger service of which this was a part.
Thanks to Eleanor Smith for sharing the Mary Oliver poem and the quote from Sri Chinmoy.