I am in Nairobi, and it feels great to be back! I have a team of 13 with me on this trip and they all traveled well. You can follow our journeys on my travel blog, which is also linked to my Facebook account. There may or may not be a Monday Memo next week depending on my access to the Internet where I will be.
In case you are just joining the Monday Memo family, I have declared the week of March 1-7 to be Celebrate a Failure week the world over. 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 March 7 or during your midweek gatherings. Someone wrote me once 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 said that failure to face my own humanity causes me not to accept the humanity of others. Failure is part of being human. You cannot serve God in the hopes that He will save you from your 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 won't try to succeed and if you don't try, you won't ever know which thing you could do is the thing you should do. If you don't fail, you deprive yourself of the great learning experience that only failure 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 your
spiritual growth by grounding you in your humanity. It's then that you
know God's love and grace, and are able to share those with your
fellow failing humans, not from a position of superiority, but from a
position of identification.
So I pray that you will have a profitable time leading up to March 1-7. This is an bi-annual event, so if you can’t cover all your failures this year, there’s always next time. 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 season of life! 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!
Feel free to post your comments on the site where this entry is posted.
You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try. – Beverly Sills
We should be the most radical people in the world. And why aren’t we? It’s fear, and very often its fear of what others think. If you learn more from your failures than you do from your success, shouldn’t you fail more than you succeed? - JohnStanko
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he falls, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt
Reward Excellent Failures; Punish Mediocre Successes. – Tom Peters
Success is 99 percent failure. - Honda Soichiro
No man ever achieved worthwhile success who did not at one time or other find himself with at least one foot hanging over the brink of failure. - Napoleon Hill
At 67, watching his lab burn to the ground, Thomas Edison said, "Thank goodness all our mistakes were burned up. Now we can start again fresh." Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
There are no failures in life…only people who give up too soon. - ???
Fear of Failure might be Fatal. - ???
Procrastination is opportunity's natural assassin. - Victor Kiam
Procrastination is the fertilizer that makes difficulties grow. - ???
A pottery class was divided into 2 groups. Half would be graded strictly on quantity (by weight); half on quality (only one piece judged). There was much more quality in the first group. We believe it was because there were more attempts. The latter group spent too much time contemplating perfection. - David Bayles & Ted Orland - Art and fear: Observations on the Perils (and rewards) of Artmaking p29
"Far too noisy, my dear Mozart. Far too many notes." ---The Emperor Ferdinand after the first performance of The Marriage of Figaro
"If Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is not by some means abridged, it will soon fall into disuse." ---Philip Hale, Boston music critic, 1837
"Rembrandt is not to be compared in the painting of character with our extraordinarily gifted English artist Mr. Rippingille." ---John Hunt (1775-1848)
"Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant . . . utterly impossible." ---Simon Newcomb (1835-1909)
"We don't like their sound. Groups of guitars are on their way out." ---Decca Recording Company when turning down the Beatles in 1962
"You will never amount to very much." ---A Munich schoolmaster to Albert Einstein, aged ten
After his first screen test in 1933, a director said Fred Astaire, "Can't act. Slightly bald, Can dance a little." Astaire kept that memo over his fireplace in Beverly Hills.
Ray Kroc was a fairly unsuccessful marketer of restaurant equipment before he sold his first hamburger at age 52.
When Dick Clark's older brother was killed in WWII, he went into a shell. But listened to the radio to ease the pain and dreamed of hosting his own radio show.
Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper for lacking ideas and went bankrupt several times before he built Disneyland.
Posted by: David Bugher | February 08, 2010 at 11:15 AM
Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.
-- Henry Ford
Posted by: Mark Wood | February 09, 2010 at 10:40 AM