The Imperfect Duckling

Perfection is not a burden that I've had to bear in my life.

True, my parents brought me up insisting on a high standard - especially of morality and intellectual awareness of my faith. However, praise me though they might for my achievements, experience left no doubt that, while I might aspire to excellence, perfection was quite another question.

My experience in school made this even clearer. My muddled culture was an imperfect and constantly changing combination of my parents' background, the Stoney first nation among whom I grew up, and the blue-collar, recent immigrant cement mining families of Exshaw whose children were my classmates during my most formative years.

All this led me to take the story of the ugly duckling to heart, hoping some day I would find that I would be a fit in some culture of wonderful people who would turn out to be just like me.

Instead, I went to university and found that I fit in no better than at any previous time in my life.

After a few years of trying out different Christian communities, however, I was invited to one church where I found a niche, not because it was populated with people who were perfectly like me, but because it was full of a diverse mix of unquestionably imperfect people who were all different from each other and from me - and who accepted me as I was and didn't expect me to adopt their local microculture in order to fit in or be judged as acceptable.

I respected and enjoyed all of the different denominations I visited during my journey, and fell well-treated by all, but always as an inevitable outsider, who couldn't be easily adjusted to fit in and behave like everyone else.

But this last community, the Roman Catholic community at my university, didn't expect me to fit in. They welcomed me as myself, eccentricities, uniquenesses, imperfections and all.

Over 25 years later, I'm still an outsider in many ways - and yet, none of those ways make me any more an outsider than any other Catholic from one part of the church would be in some other part of the Catholic Church. I'm also still very imperfect - though I believe, by the grace of God, I'm getting better all the time. And I have yet to meet a fellow Catholic who isn't imperfect.

But that's OK with me. A fellow Christian who went to the same church as our family when I was growing up used to have a bumper sticker on his car which expressed this as well as I've seen anywhere: "Christians aren't perfect -  just forgiven."

(Copyright (c) 2011, Reg Harbeck, all rights reserved)