Humility is Real; All Personality is Euphemism
Dear beloved of God, imperfection forever points to perfection, which is why you are so beloved. This is indeed a truism resting at the heart of true faith and all reason. Owning imperfection is not about being proud of wrongness. It is to be truly human as created. We must ask ourselves, what are we improving? It is through our honest humanity, we find the path to something far greater than ourselves or what we could ever hope to be. Are we seeking perfection as an end based in our understandings, allowing our imperfection to lead us? The answer will determine whether we grow or stagnate.
Consider the tiniest and most incidental amount of faith a person can have, the fragile thing that yet grows. It does grow, and the more it is denied and rejected, the stronger it becomes. The strongest faith is based upon completions and recognition which renders hope beyond itself and places it firmly into all things. Its growth is both exponential and linear at the same time, messy yet predictable, and filled with moments of doubt and struggle. Yet, it is this very imperfection that allows it to thrive. The same is true of our journey toward truth.
To fixate on perfection as some achievable objective is denying the processes teaching us to learn better, which is an inevitability we are able to accelerate when we stop fighting the reality of our creation. Every mistake, every failure, and every moment of uncertainty is both eternally fading and enlightening at once, yet immutable. You cannot change the past, there is only a present which is mostly already set and there is tomorrow which is the actual now that you may manifest in this present.
This idea is not new. It was taught in the earliest days of the Church, when the apostles and prophets recognised that their understanding of God was incomplete. They did not claim to have the final answers, but rather they listened and learned. They followed the light, and not the darkness, which they had received. In so doing, they became instruments of divine grace, guiding others toward truth through their humility and faith rather than their certainty and arrogance.
Modern thought has twisted these truths of those events into something else, a belief that perfection is an achievable end in itself. It is laudable to wish for improvement, but, with all due respect, we cannot speak of perfections which we cannot completely comprehend. These things are outside of our scope. To demand perfection is to reject the very process by which we may arrive at any truth at all.
The deepest truth is that each person chooses their devotion. Whatever an imperfect being focuses upon becomes the perfection (outcome) of their energies. The more we cling to our ideas of perfection outside of our created purpose, the more we believe our flaws to be erasable rather than manageable through God’s plans, the more we distance ourselves from the grace that makes us whole.
Humility is no substitute for knowledge but neither is knowledge a substitute for humility, however humility without knowledge is still valuable but the alternative is dangerous. Our limits are endemic of our being and so too of our own potential understandings. The only way for imperfection to break through its limits is in humility, identifying the self accurately, which is to to say open to God, to others, and to the infinite love His divine grace implies.