I am in Amsterdam on my way to Abuja, Nigeria. I thought I would send the Memo while I have a chance today, not knowing what the Internet is like where I am going. Before I left home yesterday, I got a rejection notice from a publisher about a book proposal I submitted. Isn't that great? I know for sure that the publisher isn't someone I am supposed to work with, and I am gathering my own material for the upcoming Celebrate a Failure Week, starting Sunday, April 27. In case you are a new reader, here are some ways to celebrate (you can also read more about failure on the Monday Memo site):
- If you are a pastor, you can talk about failure in your Sunday services on April 27 or during your midweek gatherings. Someone wrote me that there is no failure in the Bible. See if they're right. If not, then share what you find that can help people who have failed. You have plenty of them sitting right in front of you every Sunday.
- If you are a business leader, why not talk about failure with the other leaders and staff. Do you have any failures to celebrate as a business or team? What did you learn from them? What is stopping you from creating new failures? What could you possibly achieve today if you weren't afraid of trying and failing?
- You can celebrate as a family. You may want to study a biblical character who failed, like Samson, Moses, David or Peter. Maybe there is some family story of failure that can be discussed and examined. Maybe you can even focus on some historical figure like Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela or Winston Churchill, who were great leaders who also experienced great failures at some point.
- Classroom settings need not be left out of our celebration. If you teach, I would imagine that you can find enough teaching material to make up a classroom session or two. History and science are full of failures that eventually led to success, of failures that provide significant lessons for your students.
THE QUESTION
This week, let's consider whether on not failure is spiritual. Let me start by quoting from Thomas Merton’s book, New Seeds of Contemplation.
Perhaps we still have a basically superstitious tendency to associate failure with dishonesty and guilt—failure being interpreted as “punishment.” Even if a man starts out with good intentions, if he fails we tend to think he was somehow “at fault.” If he was not guilty, he was least “wrong.” And “being wrong” is something we have not yet learned to face with equanimity and understanding. We either condemn it with god-like disdain or forgive it with god-like condescension. We do not manage to accept it with human compassion, humility and identification.
Thus we never see the one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems: that we are all more or less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, our self-righteousness and our tendency to aggressivity and hypocrisy.
Merton was saying that failure to face my own humanity causes me not to accept the humanity of others. Failure is part of being human. We cannot serve God in the hopes that He will save us from our propensity to fail. If God did that, for example, He would not have commanded us to forgive one another. He knew we would fail one another and provided the means by which we could deal with it appropriately. God didn't say, "Now that you are mine, you won't be needing to forgive one another any longer." He was saying, "Now you can come to terms with your failure toward one another by forgiving one another."
Those who take refuge in a false sense of spirituality as they try to avoid human failure have already failed. If you don't fail, you don't try and if you don't try, you won't ever know which thing you might have done was the thing you should have done. If you don't fail, you deprive yourself of the great learning experience that learning can provide. If you don't fail, you won't fully know or understand God's love that is with you no matter what.
THE ANSWER
So is failure spiritual? Indeed it is, for it contributes to our spiritual growth by grounding us in our humanity. It's then that we know God's love and grace, and are able to share those things with our fellow failing humans, not from a position of superiority, but from a position of identity.
So I pray that you will have a profitable time leading up to April 27. This is an annual event, so if you can’t cover all your failures this year, there’s always next year. I already have enough failures to cover the next ten Celebrate a Failure weeks, and I'm sure t I will collect even more material in the coming year! With that in mind, I look forward to celebrating my humanity and my spirituality with you in a few weeks. Thank God He still loves and uses you and me, even in our human condition. Have a great week!
Good afternoon! I hope that you are enjoying Africa, I am sure its a lot sunnier than here in the UK where our introduction to spring has been snow and sleet!
I just wanted to say how wonderful it is to be having a failure week! And how much it has helped me. I have been stressed senseless about exams I have coming up and more stressed about what a total and utter loser I would be if I failed them! I was petrified I would be in a dark deep hole for eternity hiding in shame. Yes drastic I realise but still how I felt. Until I realised that doing my exams was actually a result of something I had learned from a past failure.
I decided not to do my A Levels at the end of my O level year and go onto a college instead, to cut a long story short I never got to finish the course and could not go onto University as I had never done my a Levels. I always kicked myself for it, and on my gap year here in England when i saw the opportunity to do my A Levels jumped at it and have been studying them at night. I have exams in 5 weeks and felt stressed witless, more out of the fear of failing than actually doing the exams, it was so bad at one stage i actually thought I'd just give up while i was ahead and go home and not sit the exams, at least then I gave up and didn't stand the chance of failing.
Your failure week and writing on failure has really encouraged me, I'm now happy that I at least took the chance and can write my a Levels, regardless of whether I fail or not now at least I know I tried and I can stop asking myself, 'What if I had?'
So thank you and enjoy sunny Africa, I'll see you back in Zimbabwe sometime, hopefully with an A Level Pass! In the meantime, I'm really learning from failure week preparation!
God bless
Posted by: Tracey | April 09, 2008 at 04:17 AM
I appretiate what you have said on failure, but, what if i keep on failing numerous times over and over and it ends up as if failure is a habit?
Posted by: collin | May 05, 2008 at 01:04 PM