Touching the Corpse

                        


In today's reading from Luke 7, Jesus is traveling near the spot where Elijah raised a widow's son from death, and he  comes across another widow following her son to his burial; at first glance, it is a familiar human sight: the heads down, the wailing, the dark clothing of the mourners shuffling slowly behind the bier burdened by a white-shrouded lump, inert, helpless, a shell, a nothing, lifeless. Jesus sees the situation, and identifies with her: a lad has died, her lad, and besides, she has no one to care for her. He says, first, "Do not weep," then walks up to the bier and touches the corpse; as he does so, everyone comes to a halt.

This moment is deeply profound, and this profundity is reflected in the fact that all the people stop--perhaps everything suddenly goes still, a collective breath is held. Why? Jesus has crossed a major line, and we can look at this using St. Augustine's four levels of interpretation: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. Literally, everyone must stop for him as he touches the bier; he has halted the procession. Allegorically, he has stopped the procession to death, the inexorable movement to the return to dust; allegorically, also, he has stepped into the shoes and life of the widow and her community, and has identified himself with the corpse, with death, by touching it. On the third level, the moral, Jesus has also made himself impure by identifying thus with the dead lad and his community, all of whom were now impure because of having a corpse in their midst. Anagogically, meaning the spiritual or apocalyptic (revealing the truth of God), Jesus identifies himself with a humanity bound to death, under the law of death--even the young.

Jewish ritual laws around impurity and purity have that profound, beautiful, pregnant revelation common in Abrahamic and Mosaic culture and law, down to the richly-laden Object-Sign reality of each letter in their alphabet; Jewish concepts, and most viscerally, perhaps, the rituals of impurity and purity, have the ability to carry consciously all four levels at once. The concepts of tumah (impurity) and taharah (purity) were at Jesus' time, and are, for strictly Orthodox Jews, expressed in literal actions (touching impure things like corpses, menstruation, releasing semen, childbirth, eating the wrong foods or the right foods, washing in special pools like the Pool of Siloam, or temple rituals like that of the red heifer for severe uncleanliness--like that contracted from touching a corpse). Physical, human, literal activities were expressions, or signs, of a common-life, symbolic, moral and cosmic reality, a reality that we can analyze into four levels but which in reality is one, a wholeness, one reality. There was no secular and sacred for the Jews: there was life and death and all of it was God speaking to them, all of it was about reaffirming and praising the Source of Life. There is a deep truth to this, because even though one can separately analyze the four levels of interpretation, in reality they are all connected intimately with each other: we know the allegorical through the literal--the literal things around us have obvious comparisions and connections with both other literal things, both physical and non-physical realities, like the death of an animal is comparable, relatable to a human death, yet not the same, and the death of a living, physical being is analagous to the death of a bond or a covenant; the allegorical naturally, logically points to moral content, because comparison is an assertion about reality which is ordered, and we are inherently moral beings, and the creation, the cosmos, is imbued with order, and order always implies right and wrong; the order of something always points to a final cause, and there is a right or wrong-ness, on more or less serious levels, of course, about whether or not the final cause is fulfilled and whether or not it should be. There is always an ought associated with order. The moral level also naturally points to a deeper, more cosmic reality of our relationship with the Creator of order Himself, the anagogical. So, in reality, though in modern Western culture we talk about 'literal' and 'allegorical' and 'moral' and 'spiritual' (anagogical) as separate spheres--after all, we moderns live astride two profoundly separated paradigms: the secular and the sacred, and the sacred diminished and split from even the literal, from 'reality,' to the point that we can no longer sit astride them but they instead fracture us--yet, though we talk about it and even experience these as separate, they are not. Therefore, the Jewish purity laws remind us that our modern fracturing is not reality, or at least is only a 'saving of the appearances' or the model we chose to adopt somewhere in the late Medieval period with nominalism. The saving grace in Western culture comes through the Sacraments of the Church, the fulfillment of the Jewish laws, most especially in respect to God-laden signs, signs which really participate in God, and allow us to participate in Him--the source and summit of all of this the Eucharist. Like their fulfilments (the Sacraments), the Jewish purity laws are an experience of a wholistic mindset in which literal activities, even common daily activities and events, are a kind of participation through the will, through praise and affirmation of God as Creator, as Source of Life, not source of death.

More explanation is needed: I take some of this from a beautifully-written article from a Jewish scholar, Lauren Berkun, entitled "Life, Death, and Impurity," from other encyclopedic sources on the Jewish concepts of impurity and purity, and from Martin Buber, the great phenomenologist.

First, as Berkun relates, it may seem arbitrary and even misogynist to demand that a woman who has just given birth be separated from the community for a time and then go through a ritual cleansing, and that the time to purify is twice as long for a baby girl as it is for a baby boy. Is this about the relative goodness or badness of gender? Berkun says no. She says that it is connected to all of the other ritual purity laws, in that all of them are about re-affirming and praising life. The collection of these laws in themselves have a single meaning, a single source. So, menstruation is a sign that there is no pregnancy, or there is a loss of pregnancy, a loss of life. This is a deep affirmation of the good of human life in the womb. The spilling of semen is also, in a sense, a loss of potential life: Oman's deliberate spilling of his semen so as not to impregnate Tamar is doubly impure, and sinful, because he is not only deliberately wasting his semen for selfish reasons, but he is also deliberately preventing life in Tamar's womb. He is on the side of sterility, 'lacking life' and so is on the side of 'absence of life.' It is not the same as willing an already-living being to die, but it is still a lack of affirming life.

This is a literal act, or occurrence as in the case of menstruation, that holds within it a final Object. That final Object, through literal action, allegorical understanding, moral affirmation, and finally, participation in praise, is God as Source of Life. In the case of childbirth, the woman is no longer doubly full of life, but is bereft of that blessed state, a woman who has the deep capacity to be herself a vessel, a living affirmation of God's giving of life, a giving of His own image once again. She is bereft of that state after childbirth, and so there is a sense of impurity--she is not as affirming of life in her body as she once was; a baby girl is a double impurity because the woman has been bereft of another woman, another potential ark of new life. This makes sense with biology, too, in that a baby girl has all her potential eggs, potential life, from the time she is a fetus in her own mother's womb: allegorically and literally, she is an almost endlessly potential chain of new life, new images of God. Therefore, the time of purification for a baby girl is twice as intense.

This throws a whole new world of light on these purification laws, ubiquitous in Jesus' time. Touching a corpse, like menstruation, like childbirth, like emitting semen without directly willing absence of life, was not actively sinful: these occurrences were part of daily life, and people, in a sense, were subject to them...one was trying to affirm the Source of Life in a world often imbued with death and reminders of death. The ritual cleansing (a red heifer ceremony for the presence of a corpse in one's home and community) was a way to re-affirm one's commitment and praise of life; it was, also, deeply, a way to deal with death psychologically and emotionally. Human beings have always needed rituals not only to comfort, but to re-establish order in the face of the faceless, the nothingness, the dissolution of death. This need, though, is more than a pacifier; being so universal in human culture, it points to deeper realities about life and death, about the need to affirm life and the need to reject or recognize the disorder that is death. Anyone who has been around death knows instinctively that it is a scandal, a blot, for a human soul a disorder. It should not be. Therefore, when one is associated with it, one has associated with something cosmically impure, disordered.

Therefore, we replay the scene on the dirt road to the tomb (etymologically related to the Jewish word for impurity, tumah). Wailing. Huddled, shuffling. One woman near collapse with grief and the double curse of death and immanent poverty and helplessness, an endless closing down of life, of the future, maybe years of it. The bier carried in double-grief; the death of a loved lad, the duty which means one, for a time, must affirm death and therefore must be impure, separated from the Source of Life until the cleansing can take place. One must live in Death's Camp for a time, along with the corpse. One must be a corpse. A crowd of corpses.

Jesus, a Rabbi with many followers, a teacher of the Torah, is expected to not even look, or to turn away, as the fictional Pharisee turned away from the mugged man on the road whom the Pharisee was afraid might be a corpse. Instead, Jesus looks; more than that, he identifies in the heart: "He had compassion." Not only does he identify in the heart, he acts upon this in a literal way and places his hand on the bier, on the corpse.

Of course they all stop. This is unprecedented. One might think that this is a Rabbi actually choosing to affirm death, not life. Why does Jesus do this? No other Rabbi would, not necessarily out of selfishness, but not to give the wrong teaching, the wrong affirmation. Another Rabbi would affirm the ritual law because he wanted to affirm life, not death. Death was not to be seen, to be acknowledged, except by those to whom it had been given to deal with for a short time. This could shed light on Jesus' affirmation of the faith and charity of the Centurion, who does not wish Jesus to risk many levels of impurity by entering the house of a goyim and one with the shadow of death hanging over it, and who yet knows Jesus has the power to heal without risking impurity. This shows the level of concern around these laws.

No other Rabbi would touch the corpse.

Perhaps we can change this a little? What if we say, "No other Rabbi could." No other Rabbi could both touch the corpse and affirm life; no other could identify with death and bring life. Only, perhaps, a prophet, which is why this event being so near where Elijah raised the widows son centuries before is symbolically important. There was  precedent--one given the power of God, and only one given the power of God, the Source of Life, could bring life out of death, could bring being out of nothing, out of dissolution, out of absence. Jesus is therefore taking an enormous rhetorical risk--what was He communicating? What was He affirming? Would they understand? The nearness to Elijah's raising of the widow's son would bring to their minds the nearness of the power of God, a reminder that God is not far away, not an absentee Father, not a Source only in terms of time-bound generation. It would remind them of God's dynamic, present, relationship. God had listened to the prayers of Elijah and had worked through him to bring life out of death, to conquer death, which is a more powerful, intense, affirmation of life, an affirmation beyond human power.

It is what the man born blind says to the Sanhedrin when they question him about Jesus' healing of his eyes: blindness was a lack, a constant affirmation of disorder and, in a lesser sense, death. The blind man was a walking disorder and this, like death, was a reflection ultimately of death and disorder coming from sin, the sin of Adam and Eve. The blind man therefore says, "None but one with the power of God could have made my eyes to see again."  The blind man is reiterating the principle that if God is the Source of Life, the only Source, then only He can give life to something that is dead, from one's body to one's eyes or one's hand. Therefore, the blind man's argument is irrefutable by those--all Jews--who claim, intellectually at least, the premise that God is the Source of Life.

Jesus touches the corpse in the middle of the walking dead, the impure, and in their eyes, is either choosing impurity and death, or is at the least filled with the power of God, like Elijah. Of course they stop and wait. Jesus says, "Young man, I say to you, arise." And the dead man sits up, and begins to speak. And he gives him to his mother. Fear seizes them all, and they glorify God, saying, "A great prophet has arisen among us!" and "God has visited His people!"

Indeed: God has come again, the Creator has come again and created, or re-created. Out of death, from death, the Creation happens anew, and life is never more firmly affirmed that when drawn from its opposite in the direct, personal, particular scene, the direct, personal power of the Source of Life, in a small town among those who are dead, are poor, are nothing. As Mary, Jesus' mother sings, "His mercy is on those who fear him: throughout all generations. He has shown strength with his arm: he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their seat and has exalted the humble and meek."

The Source of Life is not distant, like Aristotle's Prime Mover, or a Deist god; mirrored in the Jewish conception of language and action, with all meaning truly, really, presently imbued in the simplest, daily things, God is present, and very near, as He was through the prayers and work of Elijah.

But in this second incident in the same area, in this raising a dead son, is there someone greater than Elijah present? Did the crowd differentiate Jesus from Elijah? It seems not; they dare no other language, or concept, perhaps, beyond "prophet"--one through whom God works and reaffirms life, one whose whole life is a living sacrament of the Lord. No small thing, to be sure.

What would it take to see Jesus as He claimed to be? Not a prophet, not a purely human instrument, but someone much more than that...in other places, people comment on the way Jesus exhibits the power of the Source of Life, of God. They say things like, "He speaks with such authority." Elijah is taking orders; he is praying, and asking, as Jesus does as well, but Elijah follows instructions; through this obedience to God's directions Elijah is able to be used as a tool in the hands of God.

Surpassing this,we see Jesus, in this scene and in many places in Scripture, acting and speaking with authority, and acting from his own inner desire, a place of mercy and compassion. He says, "Do not weep." He gives the orders: "Arise." He gives the son back to the mother. He is both obedient Son and God; he asks the Father, and prays often, but knows also that God always hears him. He acts with an authority beyond one who acts based on instructions or visions given him; He acts with the Father, in a union of love. Jesus' attitude and actions make most sense if one posits a fully human and fully Divine, a union.

And then, sometime after, he becomes the son on the bier after a horrifying death, the death of a criminal; he is followed to the tomb, becomes tumah, and he is followed there by his mother, a widow. He literally dies. He has already told his followers that he will die, and will "raise this temple."

Dies.And rises. The Source of Life has lived among us, and has, through death, conquered not only physical death, literally, but on all the levels--death as the death of all, death as sin, death as cosmic disorder--and so the way back to Life, to the Source, are opened. The law is fulfilled. The signs now must reflect this cosmic healing, this absolute affirmation of life. Our daily lives must reflect, sacramentally, the way the Jewish laws did, the reality, the revelation of God. Thus the Sacraments are both descendents and fulfillments of those laws.

What does this say about the idea of perfection? Although the making of Himself a corpse, identifying, in a sense, with a most imperfect thing, a corpse lapsing out of the integrity and wholeness of life into the dissolution that is death, was perhaps one of the deeper signs of His compassion and the lengths he would go, Jesus seems almost constantly to teach the lesson of identification with death, with imperfection. Why? This apparently goes against the logic of the Law, against worldly logic around the identification of life, perfection, goodness, success, 'the righteous.' The clarity and affirmation of perfection found in the laws of the Torah, in their directness, cannot seem to account for one claiming both identification with God (the source of perfection, of life) and who, in action and even words, seems to identify with the dissolute, the sinner, the dissolution of death.

This walking enigma from Galilee, of all places, was not the affirmation of the Law that was expected: a straightforward blast of power into the Law the way it had been applied to life in Israel at the time Jesus enters the scene as a teacher. The application of the Law had been highly logical, and was a bulwark against the cultural and religious disorder that surrounded them in the pagan world; to be the Chosen and to be Separate and to be Holy seemed unequivocal terms. Do they not seem so to us, as well? Don't we also see perfection as a living being unmixed with mistakes, with error, a machine with all the parts in perfectly working order, an aesthetic symmetry whose form most clearly and easily and directly reaches the end for which it was made? Was not the Law, and its many and complete applications to every action the only way to imitate the perfection of God, to be His Chosen, His signs in the world of what the world had lost, a way one could return from the exile that was Babylon, the sign of the world? Was not sin "missing the mark" the mark being the perfection that is God?

In the Old Testament, there are two basic root words indicating perfection: taman, which denotes a wholeness, completeness in terms of justice, integrity, ethical perfection; the other is calal, which denotes a completeness and perfection more in the sense of beauty, comeliness, that which would draw one to itself out of desire, an aesthetic perfection. Though through those who saw Jesus, and through the lives of the saints in the millenia following Jesus' sojourn through this world as a man, we do get a sense of the Beauty of God to the point of it being, in the case of the Father, an overpowering experience (to Moses' request to see God's face, God replies, "You cannot see my Face and live"), the Suffering Servant verses in Isaiah seem to point to taman (ethical perfection) as the primary perfection Jesus meant to teach when he came as a man:

And he shall grow up as a tender plant before him, and as a root out of a thirsty ground: there is no beauty in him, nor comeliness: and we have seen him, and there was no sightliness, that we should be desirous of him: Despised, and the most abject of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with infirmity: and his look was as it were hidden and despised, whereupon we esteemed him not (Isaiah 53).

In God, the Trinity, the perfection of Beauty (the sight and experience of Order), Goodness (the living reality of Order as it creates), and Truth (the existence and being of Order) are all One, yet we humans, like Moses, cannot receive it all at once in this world, in a world of time and the learning, wherein  radical free will is somehow essential to our willing and loving, of choosing God. We live, rather, in a kind of mess that we must sift through with marred, diintegrated beings--the flesh fighting against the spirit, the flesh doomed to dissolution. We are in this world under the power of Death. Just as a corpse cannot comprehend or respond to the living spirit any longer, so our wills deadened and dissolute through our participation (a participation by generation) in original sin, we cannot on our own choose God.

The Greeks understood this, and expressed it in their profound tragedies, like Oedipus Rex and The Trojan Women, and many others. They had a sense of perfection, either in the Source, the Prime Mover, the One, the perfection most closely aligned with the dance of the planets: unchanging, pure, simple, end and form and material all aligned with the efficient, the power that set them in motion. Herein was Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. But on this planet of shadows and imperfect choices and movements, a world of conflict and impurity, a mass of competing wills for scarce goods, there was no perfection. Aware also of the inexorable passage of time, the Greeks conceived of a world which was moving away, in generational steps, from Perfection, and that there was no return; one might as well wish for the water to return to the spring. Destined, fated, to be along the imperfection chain which stretched endlessly away from the Perfect Origin, the world was, in the sense of absence of perfection, evil. Therefore, human achievement was best expressed through an enduring and a learning of one's place through suffering. There was no redemption or return: there was learning, there were hints of a kind of holiness and grandeur in one's suffering, as we see in the mysterious Oedipus at Colonnus, but was there true redemption?

How many of us feel this way, especially those who struggle with perfectionism? How many of us fixate on the mistakes we have made, or on the fact that we see our bodies fall away from perfection as we age, or for how many of us is there an innate repulsion from anything that is not whole, sound, comely, desirable? How many have worshiped another and wished that what they experienced was finally this perfection, only to abandon that person when the flaws become, inevitably, apparent?

Was there a way back to the Origin? To perfection? Socrates is one of the first major hopes for this in the Greek world: through the discovery of Truth, through a search for the Whole, we could achieve wisdom (the apprehension of the Wholeness, the Oneness of Beauty, Truth , and Goodness): the human mind was able to apprehend this, through only in stages and through hard labor; Socrates hints at a kind of afterlife and potential for blessedness, but he was not himself able to redeem others. Was he preaching a way back to the Origin, the "sun" of Plato's cave? His teaching is a mystery, and he is almost unique in his time; he was popular with those who preferred to find success and power in the mess of conflicting wills, those who felt it foolish or even blasphemous to attempt to apprehend Perfection.

But the way back had already begun among the Jews. God called Abraham out of the world, much as He had called Noah, and began to open the long road: was it 'back' or 'forward'?  God uses the language of generation with Abraham, but not as a movement away from Himself, but as a promise: "Your descendants shall be as the stars in the sky." This was an affirmation of life from a Creator. The major difference is that this God was transcendent, beyond, a Father of the whole thing, not simply a source within a system, beholden to that system for his being. In the Greek, non-transcendent worldview, how could re-generation, or a truly new generation, happen? In Tolkien's allegorical representation of a Creation, not supplementation, myth, the Creator can even take a marred note in his perfect symphony and create new variations, a new symphony that begins anew, that enriches; a Creator can go beyond a simple return to the Garden, but can enlarge, create a going forward to a Garden of Gardens, as Peter Liethart says in Deep Comedy.

The difference between an Origin within the Cosmos and a transcendent Creator? One has an inexorable part to play, and there can be no true personal connection with that which flows away from it, as the beginning of the equation cannot jump to the middle of it and relate to it in any rational way. But a Creator is not only the Source, but the Father, separate from His Child; He can love all his children, and He can re-create them, renew them, for He is Lord of all, an artist of a living artifact.

So God, because He is the Creator, is Being itself, is the fullness of perfection in both senses--taman (wholeness, completeness, the integrity of justice), and calal (wholeness, completeness, as apprehended in symmetry). The Jews, through the Law, were attempting to imitate God in this integrity and were taught that this integrity must reach to every part of life: to be integrally ethical, one must be perfect, in the wholeness of one's life.  The Jews were imitating, or attempting to imitate, the perfection of God, which for a Creator, also means that one is imitating the affirmation of life.

But what of the weakness and lack of perfection endemic to human life? What about those who mess up? When Jesus speaks about "coming not for the righteous but for the sinner" he uses medical language, a physician healing not the well, but the sick; we must put this in context with his admonition that "only God is good." Therefore, who are the well? Who are the righteous? Is there any human who follows the Law to perfection, both outside in action and word, and inside, through thought and motivation?

That is a rhetorical question. Yet, in Matthew, Jesus calls us "to be perfect as your Father in  heaven is perfect." He seems here to be very Jewish; in fact, His call "to clean the inside of the cup so that the outside may also be clean" far outstrips the demands made even by the Law, and leads us to ask along with the disciples who are responding to a like demand for integrity, "Who then can be saved?" Jesus answers, "With men, it is impossible; with God, all things are possible." Here, again, Jesus is pointing to a Creator. A Creator! God transcends and can destroy death and evil, because He can fill those absences of disorder and dissolution again with order and life.

Yet Jesus did not come as One who would attract the worldly, those searching for the perfection of beauty as found in this world, or through the messy machinations of this world. He also did not come to affirm the idea that by following the Law on one's own that one could achieve perfection. He came and did that Himself, but He did not preach self-sufficiency, because this could not work. God Himself must be part of any perfcetion; He is not a legal contract, or impersonal state. To counteract this, and to show that the Law pointed to a deep reality, a relationship, He came as a Sign of Opposition to these false understanding of perfections. In fact, He goes so far as to identify Himself with the deepest weakness of failure, sorrow, suffering, dissolution; not only did He touch a corpse, but He allowed Himself to become one through the death of a criminal, a blasphemer, the bane of both Roman and Jewish orders.

Why? Is the way forward somehow through death? How can death serve and affirm life? It is a paradox, a crossing of the wires, that either demands rejection or a search into its mystery. It is either foolishness or a deeper-than-human wisdom that still scandalizes us. God-as-man? A particular man? Creator-as-creature? Life dying? No, in human terms, it does not make sense; more than that, to those who wish to affirm life through the Law, it is blasphemy of the worst kind: a subversion of the order that is the way forward to the blessing of God, a turning back from the promises of Abraham and Moses.

Isaiah 53 again alludes to a mystery identical with Jesus' claims about Himself and His actions and His mysterious identity not only with imperfect humanity but also with death itself:

Surely he hath borne our infirmities and carried our sorrows: and we have thought him as it were a leper, and as one struck by God and afflicted.

But he was wounded for our iniquities, he was bruised for our sins: the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and by his bruises we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray, every one hath turned aside into his own way: and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

He was offered because it was his own will, and he opened not his mouth: he shall be led as a sheep to the slaughter, and shall be dumb as a lamb before his shearer, and he shall not open his mouth.

He was taken away from distress, and from judgment: who shall declare his generation? because he is cut off out of the land of the living: for the wickedness of my people have I struck him.

Herein is the mystery of the scapegoat and the lamb slain as restitution, as a sign of redemption: "The goat can 'take on' or 'be identified' with your sin, so that the dissolution and disorder as consequence can be averted." There must be restitution, or payment; there must be a means to re-order or the sense of order, order will be lost. We matter that much, we humans. The Jewish legal sign of sacrifice to re-achieve perfection was only a sign; an animal could only analogously take on sin and disorder: the whole, real weight of it would require the Scapegoat who could simultaneously re-create, who could by His suffering, redeem and re-order the cosmos: this is an act only permissible, only effective, by the Creator Himself, for only He had power enough to take it all on, and only He had the power to take up life again and therefore conquer death itself: it was again an act of Creation ex nihilo.

Isaiah 53 continues:

Because his soul hath laboured, he shall see and be filled: by his knowledge shall this my just servant justify many, and he shall bear their iniquities.

Therefore will I distribute to him very many, and he shall divide the spoils of the strong, because he hath delivered his soul unto death, and was reputed with the wicked: and he hath borne the sins of many, and hath prayed for the transgressors.

 The book of Hebrews takes this one step further: "By one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy." Not only has Christ walked forward through death to reclaim life, He has opened also this way forward for the imperfect human beings He asks to love Him. Therefore, perfection is found in 2 Corinthians: "My grace is sufficient for you, because my power is made perfect in weakness." 

The mystery of the God-man who touches a corpse begins to reveal itself a little: A Creator who identifies with His creation so much as to be able to take even disorder on and re-create it, can therefore truly redeem it, can re-affirm life in a much, much more profound way than any law-following or imitation: the Pharisees were face-to-face with the real power of God, and they could not recognize that this power was made a redeeming power through identification, through the dive into emptiness in order to fill it, like one who befriends disorder in order to love it and make the desert bloom again. 

But this power goes on, for there is a reality beyond time; Christ the Redeemer, He who touches a corpse and brings it life again, can fill and water the empty places, the imperfections, the disorder, in our lives. Thus, our weaknesses become opportunities for Him to teach and reach the world again and again. Does this mean we try to be imperfect so as to leave room for Christ? No, because love is willing the good; Christ never said "Fair is foul and foul is fair" or conflated absolutely the essence of perfection with imperfection; it is just that there is some deep and profound good when a creature, bumbling through the disorder and injustice of this world, willingly turns to his or her Creator and desires, beyond all ego-desires for self-sufficient perfection, the holiness that comes rather from God, the love and perfection that is God. This choosing is all. It means we have a participation, a relationship of love--a love chosen in the face of great obstacles and suffering, in the face of being forgiven of much--comprised of of the greatest love, a love beyond our capability: and the joy of recognizing who God really is, partly through knowing that we are not Him. 

My imperfection is God's perfection, if I love Him and let Him work and re-affirm my life, which may be as of yet more corpse-like than I realize. Cut off from Him by my ego and self-sufficiency, I recognize these places of death and He comes to touch them, to take them on Himself, to identify Himself with them, to become the water that allows itself to become one with the dry ground and make it fruitful again. 

Love.