The Heart of Perfection: How the Saints Taught Me to Trade My Dream of Perfect for God's - Hardcover

Campbell, Colleen Carroll

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1982106166 ISBN 13: 9781982106164

Publisher: Howard Books, 2019

Synopsis

An award-winning author, former presidential speechwriter, and mother of four weaves stories of her own struggles against comparison and impossible expectations with those of seven ex-perfectionist saints (and one heretic) who show us how to pursue a new kind of perfection: freedom in Christ.

Spiritual perfectionism—an obsession with flawlessness rooted in the belief that we can earn God’s love—is the most dangerous form of perfectionism because so many of us mistake it for virtue, or deny that it afflicts us at all. Its toxic cycle of pride, sin, shame, blame, and despair distorts our vision, dulls our faith, and leads us to view others through the same hypercritical lens we think God is using to view us.

As a lifelong overachiever who drafted her first résumé in sixth grade and spell-checked her high-school boyfriend’s love letters, Colleen Carroll Campbell knows something about the perfectionist trap. But it was only after she became a mother that she started to see how insidiously perfectionism had infected her spiritual life, how lethal it could be to her happiness and her family, and how disproportionately it afflicts the people working hardest to serve God.

In the ruins of her own perfectionist mistakes, Colleen dug into Scripture and the lives of the canonized saints for answers. She discovered to her surprise that many holy men and women she once saw as encouraging her perfectionism were, in fact, recovering perfectionists. And their grace-fueled victory over this malady—not perfectionist striving—was the key to their heroic virtue and contagious joy.

In The Heart of Perfection, Colleen weaves the stories and wisdom of these saints with Scripture and beautifully crafted tales of her own trial-and-error experiments in applying that wisdom to her life. She introduces us to such saints as Jane de Chantal, a single mother who conquered her impatience only after her ex-perfectionist friend Saint Francis de Sales convinced her to trade punishing prayer regimens for the tougher discipline of showing gentleness to rude in-laws, rowdy kids, and herself. Colleen describes the battle against obsessive guilt that turned timid people-pleaser Alphonsus Liguori into a fearless defender of God’s mercy; the discernment rules that helped Ignatius of Loyola overcome crippling discouragement and distraction; the concern for reputation that almost cost the world the radical witness of Francis of Assisi; and the biblical work-life balance that Benedict of Nursia pioneered after years of driving himself and others too hard—and without surrendering his holy zeal.

Gorgeously written and deeply insightful, Colleen Carroll Campbell’s The Heart of Perfection shows that the solution to perfectionism is not to squelch our hard-wired desires for excellence but to allow God to purify and redirect them, by swapping the chains of control and comparison for pursuit of a new kind of perfection: the freedom of the children of God.

About this title

About the Author:

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an award-winning author, print and broadcast journalist, and former presidential speechwriter. Her books include her critically acclaimed journalistic study, The New Faithful, and spiritual memoir, My Sisters the Saints, which won two national awards and has been published in five languages. Colleen has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Christianity Today, America, and National Review, and she has appeared on CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, ABC News, PBS, NPR, and EWTN, where she hosted her own television and radio shows for eight years. A former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and editorial writer and op-ed columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Colleen is the recipient of two honorary doctorates and numerous other awards for her work. She speaks to audiences across North America and Europe and lives in St. Louis with her husband and their four children, whom she homeschools. Visit her online at Colleen-Campbell.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The Heart of Perfection

Chapter 1

AN ANCIENT LIE
For the law brought nothing to perfection; on the other hand, a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God.

(Heb. 7:19)

I never considered myself a perfectionist before I had children. Perfectionism was someone else’s problem.

It was the affliction of those pasty-faced library moles that haunted the campus stacks on Saturday nights, still cramming after everyone else had left to grab a beer. It was the curse of the hulking workout kings who passed entire spring days pumping and groaning in the mirror-lined mausoleum of the campus gym. Perfectionism was what made frazzled mothers stay up all night hand-sewing Halloween costumes and what turned fathers into red-faced sideline screamers or workaholics who missed the game altogether.

A perfectionist was that tortured soul who always seems to land in front of me in the salad bar line, the one who inspects each lettuce leaf as if sifting for gold and complains to the waiter about the radish shaving someone dropped in the fat-free ranch.

That’s a perfectionist, I thought. And that’s not me.

Now it’s true that I’ve been called an overachiever. In elementary school, I considered a B-plus an abject failure, and I was updating my résumé before most kids could spell the word. I used to return my high school boyfriend’s love letters to him spell-checked—in red ink. A journalism colleague once predicted that given where I was at twenty-five, my next career move would be a midlife crisis.

I laughed off such comments, but secretly, I relished them. When interviewers asked my greatest weakness, I proudly offered the stock response I knew no one actually deemed a flaw. “Me? Oh, I guess I work too hard. I’m a bit of a perfectionist.”

I always thought of myself as too fun-loving and balanced to be a true perfectionist, of course. I was a little hard on myself, maybe. A little hard on others, too. It was a family trait, just like setting—and meeting—high standards. Who would I be without my achievements?

If you had asked me to square that statement with my belief that we should stake our identity on Christ’s merits rather than our own, I would have spouted something about God wanting me to live up to my potential. Maybe I would have quoted that line from the parable of the talents that my teachers liked to quote to me. “To whom much has been given,” they’d say, in a solemn, grown-up voice that always sounded vaguely threatening, “much will be expected.”

I went through times when my self-confidence was shaken and my achievements could not console me. I wrote about some of those in my memoir, My Sisters the Saints. As I chronicled there, my journey through infertility and my father’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease, along with the saints I befriended in the process, helped me understand my dependence on God in a new way.

Still, my perfectionism—and its central role in my lifelong struggle to trust God—remained hidden from me. Until I became a mother.

· · ·

I still remember that surreal September afternoon when my husband, John, and I brought our twins home from the hospital. As we clicked our little bundles of pink and blue into their new car seats, we laughed at how crazy it was that we were responsible for these two human beings. It seemed like we should need a license or something.

We’d read the books. We’d taken the classes. We’d received the advice—ad nauseam, as new parents do. Really, though, what did we know about parenting? We knew we’d make mistakes. But which ones, and when? Would we know while we were making them? Or only decades later, when our twins dropped by our nursing home, therapists and parole officers and ex-spouses in tow, to detail each way we’d scarred them?

I had joked to friends about the mistakes I’d make as a mother. Inside, though, it was no joke. I was scared.

I knew from my reporter days about the research on brain development and how much those early years—even those first nine months in the womb—matter. I knew from my own childhood how vulnerable children are, how something that looks like no big deal to an adult can be traumatic and searing to a child. I’d sustained some deep wounds as a girl that no one noticed at the time—wounds, I would later realize, that fed my perfectionism. I wanted to spare my children the same.

How could I do that, given all my blind spots and flaws? And how could I do it while performing all those mundane tasks that had always made motherhood a daunting prospect for me, even as I longed for children: the round-the-clock feedings and diaper changes, the all-night vigils with sick children, the endless repetitions of itsy-bitsy spider and pat-a-cake and peek-a-boo? I’d spent the past two decades interacting almost exclusively with adults. My last babysitting gig was in seventh grade. I desperately wanted these babies, but was I ready for them?

I had figured I would just have to do my best—my very best. I’d love them. I’d pray for wisdom. Then I’d put on my journalist hat and do what I always did when I wanted to succeed at something: research every possible angle, interview every reliable source, test my assumptions, evaluate my progress, and compare my results. I’d work, work, work. And I’d succeed—or at least, sleep peacefully knowing I’d done all I could.

As it turned out, sleep was the first thing to go when my babies arrived. Peace of mind—along with peace of body, and peace in my marriage—soon followed.

After twenty-two hours of labor with my daughter and an emergency C-section with my son, I found myself recovering from two deliveries rather than one. I never slept more than an hour at a stretch in the hospital and spent most of my waking moments trying to get someone to wheel me down to the neonatal intensive care unit nursery where my son was spending his first day and a half of life without me. When we finally came home from the hospital, my terror of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome had me bolting upright in fifteen-minute intervals the entire first night to make sure my babies were still breathing. As soon as I’d lie back down, one would need to be nursed or changed. Then the other.

On it went, all night, every night—and daytime, too—for weeks. John was soon back at work and exhausted. I was delirious with fatigue, still bleeding and in pain. The babies were preemies, so they needed to be awakened every two hours to nurse even on nights that they—or I—could have slept longer. They spent a week on BiliBeds for jaundice. We had to log their every wet or dirty diaper and tote the babies—wrapped like mummies for fear of germs—to the pediatrician’s office every few days. There were moments of breathtaking joy, but most of the time, John and I were too tired to see straight. We were fighting and overwhelmed and desperate. “It’s like a war,” I heard one ex-military father later say, when someone asked him about life with newborn twins. “Except in a war, you sometimes get some sleep.”

After six weeks, I finally roused myself to go to my women’s book club, which I hadn’t attended since before the birth. I felt like hell but needed a few hours away from the babies. A glass of Chardonnay and some chocolate wouldn’t hurt, either.

As we stood around my girlfriend’s kitchen that night, someone asked how I was enjoying motherhood. I tried to crack a joke, but tears came out instead. I confessed that it had been rough, even rougher than I’d expected, and I felt guilty for not enjoying it more because I had wanted these babies so badly. I felt guilty about something else, too: my twins’ early arrival at thirty-six weeks, which made them preemies, and my son’s NICU stay, which deprived him of the mother-infant bonding time that I’d always heard was so crucial right after birth.

My son was fine; the doctors said he had a clean bill of health. And thirty-six weeks is actually term for twins. Still, I was sure that the long walk I had taken the day before the birth was the reason I went into labor. And my early labor must have been the reason for my son’s prolapsed umbilical cord, which had prompted his NICU stay. And his NICU stay would be the cause of countless unseen problems sure to follow in years to come, all thanks to his stupid, selfish mother and her Sunday stroll. My babies weren’t even two months old, and already, I had blown it.

I remember how one of my friends stood watching me from across the kitchen counter, nodding as I talked. I could see something that looked like tears glistening in her eyes. She was a fifty-something mother of five, including a set of twins. Her children had all taken turns in the NICU. Now they were all healthy and grown—all but one, a little baby girl who had died a few days after birth.

“Colleen,” my friend said, in a steady, clear voice I’ll never forget, “I don’t know if there’s a place for perfectionism in any other part of life. I don’t know about that. But I know this: There’s no room for it in motherhood.”

Her words hit me like a floodlight. I felt shocked, exposed—and oddly relieved.

Maybe the traumatic birth I had been forcing myself to relive every day of the past six weeks wasn’t the calamity I had imagined. Maybe the case I had been prosecuting against myself wasn’t as airtight as I had assumed. And maybe the real threat I posed to my children’s future had nothing to do with my prenatal exercise or their premature birth.

The real threat might just be that insatiable demand for flawlessness that I had carried like a leaden backpack since childhood. Now I was transferring it to my children. Loaded onto shoulders so small, it was sure to crush them. It was already crushing me.

I knew in that moment that my friend was right. There’s no place for perfectionism in motherhood.

I knew something else, too: Perfectionism wasn’t just a problem for other people. It was a problem for me.

· · ·

You don’t have to be a congenital perfectionist like me to have a problem with perfectionism. Nor must you demand flawlessness in every part of your life. Perfectionism is simply an addiction to control and a refusal to accept imperfection in some human endeavor. Looking at our culture today, I’d say a whole lot of folks suffer from that.

What other common thread links today’s Tiger Moms and Helicopter Coaches, work martyrs who won’t take their vacation days and exercise addicts who anguish over missed workouts? What connects our soaring rates of pharmaceutical addictions and eating disorders, our escalating levels of anxiety and depression, our epidemic of credit card debt and the explosive popularity of cosmetic surgery? Many factors contribute to these trends, yes, but a key driver is our demand for perfection.

That demand falls heavy and hard on women. From the time we are girls, we are told that we must have the perfect figure, perfect wardrobe, perfect career, perfect marriage, perfect children, and perfect house. And we must do whatever it takes to achieve that perfection. So we see women starving themselves by the millions, women self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, women trying to prove their worth by giving their bodies to men who don’t care about them—men who may not even know their names—then punishing themselves afterward with more starving or cutting or even, sometimes, suicide attempts.

The age-old comparison game that women have always played with each other is now high-tech emotional blood sport. We no longer compare ourselves only to friends and family. Now we must compete against supermodels with computer-enhanced curves and social media pals whose real lives bear little resemblance to the shiny, happy images they post online. In our desperation to keep up, we do violence to our relationships, our consciences, even our own bodies.

Men don’t get a pass from the Perfection Stakes. Consider the “social perfectionism” that researchers such as psychologist Rory O’Connor have linked to rising rates of male depression and suicide. It seems that a growing number of men today feel shamed by their inability to live up to our complicated and often conflicting social standards. It’s no longer enough for a man to be a good protector and provider, loving to his wife and attentive to his children. Now he must also be a metrosexual in fashion, a testosterone junkie in sports and sex, a tireless tycoon at work, and a sensitive listener and firm-but-positive disciplinarian at home. All without being late for carpool duty or taking offense at a pop culture and legal system that treat dads as dunces and expendable, second-class moms.

Men who fail to make the cut find few places to turn for peer support. The same society that sets such a high bar for men mocks as sexist or sinister nearly any form of male fellowship other than the stereotypical beer-swilling, obscenity-hollering camaraderie of Monday Night Football.

Perhaps this all sounds a bit exaggerated. Not everyone is obsessed with looks or résumés or bank balances. Maybe you laugh in the face of today’s helicopter parenting fads and you wouldn’t dream of going under the knife or going into debt to impress others.

I’d venture a guess, though, that if you look within your heart and your life, you can find at least one area where your concern for success or control consumes more attention than it should. Maybe it’s something trivial, like your never-ending battle to lose those last five pounds or improve your kid’s batting average. Maybe it’s something painfully serious, like your lifelong quest to win the approval of a critical parent.

Or maybe it’s something even trickier to spot, an obsession with being the best that’s disguised by piety. In devout Christian circles, most of us know better than to compete openly over money or jobs or clothes. We compete in other ways, though: comparing to see who has the most faithful children, or the most children, or who has given up the most for their children. We may compete over who gives the most time or money to the church or whose family behaves the best at church or who is on a first-name basis with the pastor.

Sometimes perfectionism takes even subtler forms. Have you ever thought that all that talk of God’s mercy isn’t about you? That if you didn’t do all the things you’re doing now—your daily prayer routine, your service to family and community, your tithing and public witness to the faith—God might love you less? That He might even punish you? Have you ever told someone about God’s limitless love and forgiveness and secretly thought, That doesn’t apply to me? Have you ever said that you’re one of the good ones—the people God expects to know better—so there’s no excuse when you fail?

In other words, you may not be a perfectionist by worldly standards. But are you a spiritual perfectionist?

It’s a real problem, one of the most pervasive and insidious of the spiritual life. And it’s dangerous precisely because so many of us mistake it for a virtue.

Spiritual perfectionism is that same obsession with control and flawlessness transposed into our relationship with God. It’s rooted in the lie that we can earn God’s love and work our way to heaven.

Most of us know better than to think that out loud. Yet we often live like we believe it. We spend our days striving to improve ourselves, to acquire virtues and purge vices as if will-powe...

About this edition

• Publisher: Howard Books
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1982106166
• ISBN 13: 9781982106164
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256