While in divinity school I coined the phrase ” The Theology of the Awkward.” It opened a way for me to live more creatively with our noble Unitarian and Universalist ancestors. I needed a theological perspective that understood and held up how mistakes often lead to discovery. One of my favorite dance songs of this period was “Funky Town.” Perfection fixation grates contrary to the flux of life. Does the law of fluctuation make perfection passe? Probably not, but it allows for the mess and finding value in what’s easily discarded.
My belief in awkwardness and how it can benefit one as much as poise in the search of truth and TRUTH animated as I stared at a wall in the fire place room at the Starr King School for Religious Leadership. Amazing: the static and permanent wall whirled, particles in wild orbit, movement everywhere spooked me into happiness. It wasn’t drugs or drink that gave me that goofy look, just the loopy ride of new awareness. I sensed how an organizing chaos shapes the deep nature of our lives; how much one misses if you limit your view to one or two angles.
A turned upside down reality readily allows for a new take on the world. This is when you often find the lost key or smart phone or your self. Being different, seeing different, having a diversity of experiences becomes a source of fun; allowing the frivolous to cascade with meaning. I wonder “If everything is always in a state of change, everything in motion, how viable is the concept of perfection?” Maybe perfection is found in imperfection? Maybe perfection is the impossibility of perfection? Questions move faster than I can ponder.
An inside peek of how the uncontrolled and controlled, randomness and patterns, co-exist provides a glimpse of how tension between the two states nudges evolution. It helps me to value how the “one who walks backwards” in primal culture and in our techno crazed culture carry wisdom. So being gay, a cancer survivor, someone in recovery from a lethal addiction, a person who believes in no God or believes in many may all be wisdom paths, even if you can’t text or twitter.
The unexpected, a folly can be an opening to some of our most profound experiences. The person who is different and knows it, can lead from their difference. Groomed for the job can be the death of creativity and its free flow and exchange of ideas, experiences, information… This does not discount the expertise one also needs to forge creativity into something durable; something that helps us balance play and work. The best happens when they help us jump onto the magic ride of effortlessness.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian, martyred by the Nazi’s wrote while in prison, “We are so constituted that we always find perfection boring. Whether it has always been so I do not know. But it is the only way I can explain why I care so little for Raphael or Dante’s Paradise. Similarly, I find everlasting ice or everlasting blue sky equally unattractive.” It seems that if you get stuck on something being perfect then flow halts. A peculair beauty exists in the discarded. The awkward state of not knowing can bring one to sensing the visible and hidden places. Pretentiousness stifles. Oddities,eccentricities, quarks…well they have their sometimes forlorn, sometimes perfect place in the world.
Yogis and children know the value of standing on their heads. Wobbly experiences, while not always welcome, can bring us great vitality.