A Radical Acceptance
March 15, 2025
Renée Darline Roden
Perfection has become a dirty word.
For too many women—especially Christian women—Christ’s call “to be perfect” feels like a weight. Too many have experienced this call to perfection as a rebuke: you’re not enough, you have to give more, you will only be loved when you change.
I have spoken to men, too, who have experienced this burdened form of moral perfectionism. But, for women, the message of perfection is too often distorted through the warped lens of patriarchy. Patriarchy tells women: you are barely tolerated, your worth is only determined by how much you can serve men, how you can make yourself useful to others’ desires. Your acceptance is contingent on meeting fantastical standards of personality, demeanor and appearance.
But the perfection Christ speaks about in today’s Gospel is not the perfection of patriarchy—it is the perfection of the Heavenly Father—whose perfection shatters patriarchal logic. For to be perfect in the eyes of God is to live in a logic of mercy, a logic of generosity, a logic of love that flows from a love that knows itself to be gift and to see all it touches as gift.
What acceptance must God feel for you, me, our neighbor, our enemy or even the worst person in the world? God sends the sun to shine for each of us, rain falls on all our fields, tides go our way, birds sing in each of our mornings, no matter who we are.
“Nature is, above all, profligate,” Annie Dillard writes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The generosity of the Creator is stamped on nature’s laws, in its autumn colors and summer sunsets, from its rainbows to creek beds.
That must be a radical acceptance: an acceptance based on a love that cannot be earned, only given away. The Creator spills out the beauty of the world before each of us, to either squander and destroy or to embrace and imitate. In today’s first reading, God calls the Israelites to follow in the Creator’s generosity—a pattern of living that nourishes creation and the community—and a way of life that nourishes and affirms our own hearts, designed to love with that same profligate love of God.
How do you feel God calling you to learn a new way of perfection this Lent?
Where do you see beauty today? How can you make some of your own?
Renée Roden is the author of the forthcoming “Tantur: Seeking Christian Unity in a Divided City” with Liturgical Press. You can learn more about her work at reneedarlineroden.com and read her writing on Substack at Sweet Unrest.
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