On Perfection

This year's recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal is Dame Mitsuko Uchida who is described by the Society as "peerless".  I chanced upon the BBC article about this and, impressed by the notion that she may be "peerless," ventured to YouTube to check her talents out.  Apparently, thanks to Wikipedia, she is a noted interpreter of Mozart, Beethoven, Arnold Schönberg/Schoenberg, among many others.  After watching a few of her videos, I'm left wondering about something that many of us who play many instruments don't think about - what is "musical perfection?"

I write as someone who has not studied music beyond Music 101 at Wheaton College.  The closest I ever came to music school was a few months ago when I walked past Julliard on my way to the subway station on the West Side of Manhattan.  I can honky-tonk my way through the guitar, play something that won't drive people away on the piano, squeak something interesting sounding from my violin; many I know can do either of these a million times better than I can ever dream of playing.  But I think this is a topic worth exploring for everybody because, as an aspiring theologian, I'm thinking of the hundreds and thousands of Asian-American youths who are multi-instrumental thanks to their parents.  Some - maybe some - desire their children to be that way in order to gain an edge into college admissions.

My mom, when she had me take up piano, wasn't quite like that.  She wanted me to be able to appreciate something she's been wanting to appreciate for some time.  So she put me and my brothers through the paces, working through levels 1 and 2 and I-lost-count of various music books.  Later on, unfortunately, she had me take up the violin so I can be a part of the school's orchestra.  "It looks good on your college applications," she told me, "because it shows teamwork."  Sure, whatev.  And later on, I picked up the guitar as it seems quite indispensable for ministry.  Looking back, I'm glad I can still play some pieces on the violin, some praise music on the piano, and others on the guitar.

At no point, however, did my mom expect piano/violin/guitar perfection.  She knew I didn't have the talent to go to any music school, and she never forced it down on me.  But I remembered my piano teacher during my middle-school years who was, then, a student at the prestigious New England Conservatory of Music.  She was brilliant.  But she had a habit of getting me to pay attention to stuff I thought was just utterly unnecessary.  While playing one of Bach's pieces, she told me, "Henry, you need to think of this like a story.  Oh, picture a woman coming to church and she's praying..."  I just about tuned her out.  I thought it was utter nonsense - all I care about, being the utilitarian Chinese I am, is that I can play the notes just right and boom, next song please.

But looking back, my music teacher was right and I was utterly wrong.  See, what my music teacher wanted to teach was music; what I wanted to learn was how to play the piano.  What I did not understand was that the piano was merely an instrument towards perfecting music.  It is a tool to make the abstract/transcendent a little bit more concrete.  And with Uchida's performance, we can see that emotion just come out of not just her facial expressions, but the precision by which she presses down on the keys.  Every note must be applied with the right amount of pressure.  So good piano-playing is not just pressing down on the right keys at the right beat, but is about pressing down on the right keys at the right time with the right pressure and with the requisite emotion that beckons us to press down on those keys the way we did.  Good piano-playing, like much of life, is an ethic.


Two weeks ago my brother witnessed me staying up very, very, very late to finish my final paper for a class.  He was impressed - "I would've just gone to bed and ask my friend to finish it for me," he said, eliciting a quick lecture from me on academic integrity and Christian witness (these things happen...).  It was a difficult paper to write because the topic is dear to my heart and something I wanted to confront in a long time: the question of how Asian-American theology confronts the issue of shame and the quest for perfection among Asian-American youths.  Most of you readers know what I'm talking about - you are expected to get all A's, go to the "perfect" colleges (the holy Trinity of Harvard, Yale, or Princeton), get the "perfect" job, find the "perfect" spouse, and go on to have - you guessed it - "perfect" children.  This of course ingrains an impossible ethic of perfection into even our spiritual lives, which presents a theological problem because it forces us to deny the doctrine of original sin.  Of course, we give lip service to the doctrine to be the "perfect" Christian, but deep inside, we don't really believe it.  And so when we confess, the sins we confess are all not necessarily sins, but are personal shortcomings.  We've failed to live up to expectations.  We've failed to be who others want us to be.

What I wish to explore in this post is the possibility that perfection is only possible with grace.  Not "grace", but true, unadulterated, raw grace.  This is not a grace we exercise because we're Christian, but it's grace we exercise because God is gracious.  We know grace because God is gracious; we don't know it because we've read Phil Yancey's What's So Amazing About Grace? (which, by the way, is a very nice book).  Grace can only be experienced.

Grace, it should be note, is not condoning.  We do no service to others by condoning mistakes.  It's not okay that we trip and fall; we want to keep walking right!  I think Asian American churches understand this part of grace - we understand it very well.  Grace enters the picture when we step back and look at the situation around why we trip and fall.  Perhaps the road was craggy and unpaved, allowing people to easily trip and fall!  Perhaps the individual was deep in worry or thought and wasn't paying attention to the road.  Grace, in other words, empathizes with the fallenness of humanity.

The key word here is empathize.  To empathize is not just to "get alongside".  This assumes that we're perfect, and the fallen person needs someone perfect to pick him/her up.  True empathy requires us to first realize that we are fallen people; and this is not "I know I am fallen because of Romans 3:10, blah blah." No - that's just agreeing with a bible verse; one can agree without fully believing Scripture!  To truly empathize you need to realize the totality of your fallenness.  You need to honestly embrace the fact that you fall down all the time, yesterday, today, and very like in the future.

The second step is that the community needs to embrace their own fallenness.  Indeed, this is probably more difficult because this requires all people to have the humility and be willing to experience the vulnerability of embracing our own fallenness.  Of course, this can be shameful.  But shame does not originate from the individual, but from the community; the community sets up social structures and regulations, and shame results when people fail to live up to those expectations enforced by those structures and regulations.  Thus, an Asian/Asian-American church that takes seriously the claims of the Gospel needs to take concrete steps towards disarming those structures and regulations.  By doing so, the way is opened for people to empathize with each other's fallenness.  Thus, we can truly take seriously the doctrine of total depravity.

Of course, we can all commiserate in our sinfulness and spend our days in sackcloth and ashes.  But the power of grace is that it allows us to build each other up.  We no longer have to grovel in our sinful state, but are freed to live boldly for God because the grace of God has taken our sin as far as the East is from the West.  That is why total depravity is necessary; its existence allows for "total grace" so we can rise from the ashes and walk again.  No longer will our journey with each other and with Christ be impeded by our fallenness, because grace picks us up so we can continue walking onwards, taking incremental steps towards perfection.  This is true for the musical arts and for even the written arts as well.  Uchida's peerless musical talent does not mean she was absolutely perfect whenever she touched the piano.  No doubt when she began learning, she made a few mistakes.  Perhaps even as she practiced, she made a few; you won't see it in her performances.  But the key of a good musician is that one or two big mistakes don't impede him or her from producing good music.  Good music comes in spite of the mistakes.  If we only focused on the mistakes, we miss out on what good music is about; namely, that good music is about the story the music tells.  We all can read, but if you just zero in one or two mistakes (or maybe 1,001 in this post alone), and render a judgment based on those mistakes alone, you miss out on the message the post is trying to get across!  In practice, when there is a typographical error on a paper or book, don't we just gloss over it once we realize what was supposed to be in its place?

That's why I want to venture the possibility that many Asian American churches are really not Christian insofar as they do not understand God's grace.  Therefore, they cannot truly comprehend God's sacrifice on the cross.  So long as we are loci of gracelessness, we are deserts devoid of the Gospel.  Oftentimes we focus on not-sinning, not-disappointing.  But in doing so, we miss out on the story of salvation that releases us from the condemnation of sinning.  By focusing on not-sinning, we miss out on the Gospel, because we are rather held captive by a philosophy completely alien even to Jewish thought - the notion that we can, by not sinning, find ourselves acceptable in God's sight.  No - such a theology is beyond liberal in that it dismisses the doctrine of total depravity.  We can never be acceptable in God's sight in spite of our efforts to practice a life of not-sinning.  We will always sin, we will always trip and fall, so let's not feign ignorance at this fact of life.  To do so is deception!  It is also self-deception, because in our seeming perfection, we delude ourselves into thinking we're somehow closer to God when we are as far as far can be!

If we would simply be willing to incur some vulnerability, and even shame, and work towards tearing down cultural structures that promote errant theologies of perfection and sinlessness, I am confident we would take one giant step towards the perfection we so desperately are looking for.  The problem is that we often don't want to be vulnerable.  We don't want to be shamed.  We want to be the shameless, the powerful, the sinless, and oh yes, the perfect.  And when we do so, we tear down the Gospel in an effort to buttress our notions of perfection and marginalize those who, in all honesty, Jesus came in the first place to save.

On the YouTube video there's a quote allegedly from Mozart saying that

Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.

I should like to think the same is true of the Gospel, that in situations of even the greatest sin, the Gospel remains nonetheless still beautiful in spite of the sin.  This can only be so because grace is always present. The fact that the world cannot see a difference between Christianity and grace-lessness is, in my view, evidence that we don't know grace at all.   For that reason, the Gospel will always be tied to sinlessness, and when we trip and fall, we are rightly called out for our hypocrisy.  Let us start being gracious people instead of sinless people.  Maybe we can once again become a truly Gospel-centered church.