Errorless pitching, imperfect lives

Baseball's playoffs, according to Boston pitcher Curt Schilling, are about "being perfect." National coverage magnifies mistakes, so Schilling's goal before yesterday's game was to be prepared so well that he'd make no mental or physical errors on the mound: "We hold ourselves to that standard unrealistically a lot of times, but this is one of those times where I think it is realistic."

Schilling pitched seven shutout innings to lead the Red Sox to a 9-1 win and a three-games-to-none sweep over the Los Angeles Angels. His comment about unrealistic attempts at perfection reminded me of a conversation we had over lunch in spring training in 2005.

He spoke then about how during the 1990s he wanted to be perfect, and sometimes came close on the mound, but he was still frequently depressed. One day in 1997 he was "driving home from the ballpark and thinking about how tired I was of waking up every morning with no real aim in my life.... While I was driving I said the Lord's Prayer. I waited for thunder and lightning and that never came, but my outlook on the world changed."

In particular, he stopped tearing himself apart when he made mistakes: "You work as hard as you can with what God gives you. You fail only if you quit." When Schilling stopped holding himself unrealistically to a standard he could not achieve, his pitching improved: He no longer panicked when things went wrong. He said his life improved as well.

Doesn't life imitate baseball? Perfection in life is never sinning in action or thought: that was Christ's experience. The rest of us know that much goes wrong, but we don't have to fry ourselves when it does, since God the father overlooks our faults and looks at Christ's perfection.