Doing What We’re Designed to Do

One April afternoon when I was seventeen years old, I penciled in my final answer to a fifty-five-question multiple-choice test, glided to the front of the classroom, and positioned it into a wired metal basket. It was a rare test day when I felt confident, but I had a secret weapon …Mr. Murray, a teacher who possessed an extraordinary power: He actually made me want to learn. The next afternoon, when he came round dispensing grades, he paused at my desk, our eyes met, and he placed the test face down. I slowly turned it over and saw it, at the tiptop in red: 100 percent. I was perfect.

Thomas Merton once said, “Whether you teach or live in the cloister or nurse the sick, whether you are in religion or out of it, married or single, no matter who you are or what you are, you are called to the summit of perfection.” In that line, Merton is not introducing something new. He’s simply drawing out what’s written across the pages of the New Testament:

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:48, emphasis added)
Stand perfect and complete in all the will of God. (Colossians 4:12 NKJV, emphasis added)
Let us go on to perfection. (Hebrews 6:1 NKJV, emphasis added)

Growing up, whenever I heard about perfection, I never thought of oneness or union. I thought of something like my test-taking story above, some kind of error-free existence. But that perfection was the transactional kind, the calculated, scored, and tallied kind. The version that has to meet some ideal performance.

So it was a joy to discover that ancient Christianity didn’t equate perfection with living error-free. For the early church, perfection was about alignment with your telos—God’s ultimate purpose for your life. It wasn’t about achieving perfect moral behavior.

For example, what’s the telos of a knife? What does the bladesmith want it to do? Cut. The knife isn’t perfect because it becomes an exquisitely honed piece of steel. It’s perfect when it does what it’s made to do — slice meat and dice vegetables. Sharpness matters, of course. But the aim isn’t some ideal edge; it’s about doing what the knife was designed to do.

And the principle holds for us.

We are perfect — not by chasing an idealistic life without error, but when we live in alignment with our telos. And as I’ve said again and again, what we were made for is to develop into the divine likeness. That’s our telos. Which means perfection isn’t about getting everything right. It’s about cultivating a relationship. It’s about union. It’s about becoming like Christ. It’s about becoming love.

It’s about growing Godward.

An Unending Advance

Let’s look at perfection from another angle. The old writers say God is immutable, unchanging. We, on the other hand, are mutable, changing. In short, God is fixed, we’re in flux. Think of your own desires for a minute. Have you noticed that when you gratify your hunger, you get hungry again? Or when you share a moment of deep intimacy, it’s not very long before you want it again? Or how about when you create something of great beauty or inventiveness, don’t you want to wake up and do it again?

As far as I can see, our desires are possible to gratify, but impossible to satisfy. And that’s our clue — our desires hint at something fundamental about how we are made. The things of this world, by their very nature, can’t satisfy the desire at the center of us. We were never meant to be self-satisfied. We were meant to be drawn into a life we can’t exhaust. We have an infinite capacity and we must find an infinite supply — only the eternal can satisfy the infinite.

Our endless desires point to a life that isn’t meant to be completed but continually deepened. And that’s the heart of perfection:

Not a finish line, but an ever-widening horizon.
Not a fixed state, but an unending advance.
Not stasis, but epektasis.

Gregory of Nyssa, one of the great church fat hers and a key voice behind the Nicene Creed, developed the idea of epektasis—a word drawn from Saint Paul’s language in Philippians 3, where he writes, “I press on” (epekteinomai in Greek). Gregory takes Paul’s verb and turns it into a vision: the soul in eternal motion, always stretching forward, always being drawn deeper, always pressing into the life of God. For Gregory, perfection wasn’t about reaching a finish line. It was the journey itself — a never-ending transformation into divine likeness.

There’s no end to our transformational journey because there’s no end to divinity.

God is an eternal discovery. The deeper we go, the deeper he gets. The more we know, the more he reveals. So when it comes to perfection, there is no definitive attainment. Perfection is progress. There’s always more to receive, more to become.

For Gregory, this is not a frustrating experience — it’s exhilarating: “The one limit of perfection,” he writes, “is the fact that it has no limit; there is no stopping place in the racecourse of virtue.“¹ From every new summit of virtue attained, fresh fields of vision open up before us, divine horizons more dazzling and inviting than the one before. Just imagine it:

You’re never going to reach a fixed measure of love — it will keep widening, drawing you further in.

You’re never going to arrive at a final degree of humility — it will forever deepen, reorienting you more and more toward others.

You’re never going to taste a certain amount of joy and then stop — you’ll be invited, endlessly, into richer and richer divine delights.

This is a far cry from the Cosmic Car Wash, a heavenly paralysis, a static state. No, perfection is entering an eternal life of never-ending, always-deepening union. It’s developing, always by degree, into the divine likeness. Union with God is not a destination but a direction. That’s why Thomas Merton wrote, “But oh! How far have I to go to find You in whom I have already arrived.“²

This is our destiny: To develop more and more into the divine likeness, to grow more and more into the reality to which we are called, to become more and more who we already are at the very center of our being — divine images cultivating divine life. To grow godlike is to grow forever.

As Aslan told Lucy, “Every year you grow, you will find me bigger.“³