Spirituality of Failure

TOWARDS A SPIRITUALITY OF FAILURE

I dread retirement!

Or, to be more accurate, I dread finishing up in a retirement village, or home with other retired clergy, who spend all their time telling each other how they filled their empty churches to capacity, rescued parishes from financial disaster, or just missed out being made a bishop. To be honest, I have enough of this already at chapter meetings.

Yet, underneath all the boasting, I know and they also know that such success stories are seldom true.

They are merely our human reaction to trying to live with failure. They are the means we employ to secure acceptance of our colleagues. They are the way we feel we ought to behave in order to survive in a world dominated by the cult of success.

You see, my friends, failure is anathema to the world. It is the spectacular, the sensational and the exciting that appears to attract attention and affirm our self-esteem, and not the dull, mundane and ordinary.

From the cradle to the grave we are encouraged to seek for success and despise failure.

The result is that we are obliged to weave a web of deceit around ourselves and pretend that everything in our garden of life is rosy.

Some years ago I was leading a confirmation class with some people who were young in the life of the church. Also present, to help, support and encourage, by sharing their own stories of faith, were some more mature people in the life of the church. We were talking about prayer and belief and sharing some of our doubts and failures when one of the more mature Christians announced that he had never had any doubt or failure in his Christian life. We all immediately shut up and felt that we were even greater failures.

Whilst that could have been true for the person concerned, I suspect that deep down it was not so. He was merely pretending because that was how he thought he ought to behave.

And whilst you and I will shrug our shoulders and say "no worries" and pretend we are a success, deep down we know we are not. Not only are our lives full of failures, they are full of repeated failures. Nevertheless, we often choose to ignore them because we do not know how to deal with failure in a society dominated by the cult of success.

So let us begin to work towards a spirituality of failure.

After all, you and I are in the business of becoming holy. Holiness means wholeness. And if we are to make our lives holy, or whole, it must include not only our successes but also our failures. We cannot choose to ignore a large slice of our life and pretend that it has nothing to do with God. You and I are called to live fully integrated lives and that must include our failures besides our successes.

We may fool others into thinking we are a success. We may fool ourselves into thinking our lives are a success. But you and I cannot fool God "unto whom all hearts are open, and all desires known and from whom no secrets are hidden" to quote the words of the Collect for Purity.

So let us begin by stressing the need for honesty in our lives. After all, there can be no lasting spiritual growth until we can be honest with ourselves and with God.

This may not be easy since our motives are often very complex, and we may well need the help of a spiritual director to challenge us to face up to our real selves, so that we may arrive at an accurate assessment.

Honesty will involve accepting responsibility for ourselves. In other words, it means we must stop blaming other people for our failures. Those sentences which begin with the words "if only" are often the introduction to self-deception and the evasion of personal responsibility.

I am reminded of some words of the Benedictine Sister, Joan Chittler. Writing to her community she says: "If you are not committed to your own adulthood, if you are just coming in and going out, letting others take care of all the rugged edges of your life together, then you will see for ever the problem in someone else. If you want to know if you are committed to your own adulthood, ask yourself, 'In the last three things that bothered me within this community, whom did I blame?'".

And I would suggest that if you are committed to your own adulthood - if you are committed to living whole lives, and owning your failures besides your successes, you should ask yourselves “in my last failure whom did I blame?”

So honesty includes accepting responsibility for yourselves.

It will also involve a degree of personal suffering for failure has a wonderful way of knocking the cocksureness out of our lives. It is a painful humiliating experience which brings us to our knees crying "Lord have mercy upon me".

We suddenly realise that we cannot achieve holiness or wholeness by ourselves; that we need the help of God in our lives. Now this goes against the grain of what the world would teach us. The world would have us believe that we can achieve everything by ourselves; that humankind is capable of saving itself. We can indeed pull ourselves up with our own shoestrings. This inevitably adds to our sense of shame when we fail.

But the Christian acknowledges his or her need of God.

Now this does not mean that God wants us to fail, or that he wills us to fail so that he may feel needed by us. God is complete in himself and does not need anything from us in order to be God. Rather, that by giving us freewill, he permits us to fail as well as to succeed.

But it is not enough for us just to need a god. We need a God who understands our failures. Such a God, I would suggest, we have in the person of Jesus Christ who has personally known failure.

No one in their right mind could ever claim that the earthly ministry of Jesus was a howling success. In fact, looked at from a human perspective at the time, it was seen to be a total and utter failure. It finished up on a cross. And that cross stands for all time as a symbol of failure.

What I am trying to say is that failure need not be wasted. It need not be a negative experience of life. It can be used as an occasion, not only for our own spiritual growth but also for the growth of others.

I am reminded of a little book by Henri Nouwen called The Wounded Healer. In it, he suggests that the sharing of our own vulnerability, and that includes failure, with others in a similar position can become a source of healing to them.

In other words, to go back to that Adult Confirmation Class, it would be much more helpful if that mature Christian had admitted that he too had difficulties in prayer and belief rather than pretending he had none. That could have been a source of hope and encouragement, indeed of healing, to others.

And there are today in the world, many lonely and unhappy people who are crushed by the cult of success, and yet afraid to admit to their own personal failure. As a result they are crippled by a sense of guilt and unable to live full and whole lives. They are ill at ease with themselves and in fact are dis-eased.

They are crying out for help. They are crying out for healing. They are crying out for wholeness in their lives.

Only those who are at ease with their own sense of failure can offer the necessary understanding to bring healing to those who are dis-eased.

Only those who have accepted and owned their own failures can enable others to live with theirs.

Only those who have come to know God in their weakness can enable others also to know Him in their weakness.

In short, our experience of failure can be a source of strength and encouragement to others.

To sum up then.

We cannot be a success all of the time. It is inevitable that there will be times in life when we will experience a degree of failure.

What really matters is how we responded to that failure. Do we deny it and thereby allow it to destroy our self-esteem by the crippling effects of unnecessary guilt, or do we accept it as an opportunity of a further growth in the spiritual life?

The choice is ours.