Have you been asked to respond to a “short survey” lately? How about someone asking you to take just a few seconds and rate the service you received? At the post office last week and then today at the grocery store I didn’t even have to respond; the person helping me went ahead and completed the rating for me. You will not be surprised to hear that one person received from themselves the very happy green face, and the other person gave themselves a ten out of ten. On the one hand I was impressed by the confident self-assessment, I had no complaints and they were both pleasant, on the other hand it made me realize how truly ridiculous these reviews have become practically and philosophically.

I grew up going to synagogue and was always drawn to the beauty and the power in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The freedom that comes from courageously standing before God and acknowledging all the places where you missed the mark the previous year. Something in that collective confession told me, as we recited the litany of transgressions together, that I was not meant to be perfect, I was not meant to have it all figured out, that we all made more or less of these mistakes, and we could all ask God to help us do just a little better next time. The key though was the willingness to acknowledge where we had missed. If you can’t see that you made a mistake you can’t work to change your behavior and avoid it in the future.

The same idea exists in 12 Step work where you make amends after completing a moral inventory and listing all the people you have harmed. And then of course the ongoing task of continuing self-awareness that allows you to make amends right as you make the mess in the first place. Built into the system is the awareness that mistakes will be made; it’s what you do with mistakes, how you approach them, how you approach yourself that is the key to the whole thing working.

I’m not catholic so I don’t know what the experience of personal confession is, though I did once have the opportunity to study with a Coptic priest who invited confession and I have to say it was a profoundly moving experience to sit with someone, share what was clenching at my heart and to have them say to me personally, ‘you are a beloved child of God, you are forgiven.’ I was able to let go of the mental and emotional energy that was stuck in a place I could do nothing to change anyway, and I found I could now redirect that to being more of who I wanted to be in the present. That is ultimately the power of all of these modalities. You don’t get to hide from the consequences of your actions but you also don’t have to stay frozen in time.

This is all what I got to thinking about as the grocery clerk flipped the screen toward herself and marked ten out of ten for all attributes of interaction and service. It’s what I have been thinking about since I deleted the four emails about recent purchases asking for my feedback on everything from the checkout experience to the interaction with the phone representative who in fact could not solve my problem through no fault of theirs because you have a ridiculous system of dysfunctional policies. I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot.

A few years ago, back when there will still a lot of customer satisfaction surveys but not so many as to make us numb, a gentleman about whom I was going to be asked to provide feedback, very politely asked me to give him five stars. It hadn’t been a great experience and I had not planned to say it was, but neither was I going to say he was awful and there was no hope. I was going to give what I thought what constructive feedback to help with growth. He said he would get fired if he got anything less than five stars. I don’t know if that was true, I’m not sure it matters. But I do know, I strongly believe, that if we live in a system where we all have to be perfect all the time, or at least say we are perfect, we will never grow at all. We will never learn. We will never be able to be honest or genuine or even vulnerable in our relationships.

We can’t control other people’s feelings. Sometimes someone is having a bad day and it doesn’t matter what you do, everyone is a victim of their one star mood. In the same way we are often beneficiaries of someone’s good feelings and the difference between a four star interaction and that five they gave us has more to do with them than us. We need to stop rating every interaction, we need to stop judging every step of behavior, and we need to stop lying because it is easier than telling the truth or learning from the truth.

At this point all these ratings and surveys are likely meaningless, the goal for what they were has been lost in the volume and commonality. We have all been trained to give someone a green smiling face, or five stars, or a thumbs up. We don’t want to be mean, I hope, and once you do something other than say it was perfect you have to start explaining and that takes too long anyway. Getting feedback is only helpful if it is true, and if the person giving it can separate their feelings from the facts. So start with yourself, you know what is true: were you thoughtful in that interactions? where you present? where you kind? did you do just what was required or did you do a little more?

I did not do all those things we recited together on Yom Kippur, I did some of them, some of them taught me what to avoid, some of them were just not the sins that tempted me. Sometimes the confession we read in the Presbyterian church I go to today feels like it was written for me, and sometimes I just wonder at the feeling because I can’t relate. But when we sit for a moment of quiet self-reflection I think over the last week and say to myself, ‘for the things I did that I should not have done, and the things I should have done that I failed to do, for the words I said that I should not have said, and the words that I did not say but should have, forgive me, pardon me, grant me atonement.’

Sometimes I would give myself two stars, sometimes three, occasionally four; I am never so bad or so good. I rise after that quiet moment and am told that I am a beloved child of God, that I am forgiven, and I know that if take the time to notice I can learn from where I have been. So can you, so are you, regardless of what anyone else has to say about it.