By Rev. Paul Graves
Editor’s note: This is an occasional letter Paul has been writing – since 1997 – to his now young-adult grandchildren.
Dear Katie, Claire and Andy,
Your grandma enjoys avocado toast for breakfast. Our retirement community chefs make good avocado toast. Well, unless the avocados aren’t ripe yet. Then Grandma has to wait until the fruit has become more “perfect” (ripe, complete).
It appears that avocados, like United Methodist clergy, also “go on to perfection.” (Please let me explain that seemingly unrelated connection.)
When Methodist pastors are ordained elders, the bishop asks a few historical questions from John Wesley, our founder. One question prompts behind-the-back crossed fingers from many clergy: “Are you going on to perfection?”
If we silently substitute “perfection” for moral flawlessness or sinlessness, we miss Wesley’s whole point. John actually challenged his pastors to become mature – as in ripe, completed human development. Like an avocado goes on to “ripeness”?
“Perfection” isn’t merely an achievement, but an ongoing process of maturation. The Greek for perfect is “teleios,” a time when an object achieves its intended purpose (like a hammer, an avocado – or a person).
For hammers or avocados, perfection is achieved pretty quickly.
But for human beings, perfection is aptly titled “Unfinished Business.”
In 1 John 4, we read – but not easily heed – that we can be “perfected in love” (4:12) and that “perfect love casts out fear” (4:18). That’s a whole lot of unfinished business for us all!
So perfection in love has little to do with moral perfection. It’s more about maturing into how we treat other people with acts of offering justice, compassion, love, encouragement and safety.
One of Joan Chittister’s essays, “Sadness” (in “The Gift of Years: Growing Old Gracefully”), speaks briefly about elders having unfinished business. “There is unfinished business aplenty to do.”
Her phrase sparked my attention, because even at 83, I still have a good deal of unfinished business to conduct. All elders – and youngers – who care about their relationships and the culture where we live have unfinished business (UB).
Kids, what “unfinished business” do you have to address today? Tomorrow? Next month or year? Here’s a bit of my unfinished business.
I wrote many of these words the day after I attended an evening Peace Vigil in Hillsboro, Oregon. We prayed about, protested and lamented the ICE-related murder of an innocent woman in Minneapolis and the ICE shootings in Portland. I’ll continue to seek ways to bring pastoral support into the immigration chaos.
My UB also includes finding ways to share my “values legacy” with our family, and to encourage others in our new retirement community. Additionally, next month I begin my 31st year of writing these faith-and-values columns.
My UB includes learning who I am at my age. Grandma and I see that as a daily opportunity. I also want to learn about – and from – nonfamily people in my past who have been heroes to me, who are spirit-guides for me, so I can pass along their wisdom.
We’re all “going on to perfection.” That means we all have “unfinished business” ahead of us, kids. While we still breathe, we’re called to make a difference in someone else’s life, in our own lives, and in the world. I like how Joan Chittister says it:
Unfinished business is “a process of ripening as we go, getting stronger, getting more caring, becoming more procreative, sharing more wisdom as we grow – so that those who come after us can walk a clearer path.”
Not one of you is an avocado!
Your unfinished business will go beyond an avocado’s life.
Your unfinished business is still out in front of you. What is it? I know it will partly involve supporting immigrants. What else?
To find it daily, look deep inside your soul.
Love,
Grampa
The Rev. Paul Graves is a retired elder member of the Pacific Northwest Conference of The United Methodist Church.
