Joyous Failure

Let’s talk about failure.

Yes, I know some folks will immediately decide that such a discussion is doomed to depressing negativity, but actually this essay is an invitation to joyous grace. It is a meditation on the core good news at the center of our faith stream.

First, failure is absolutely necessary for success. Failure is a consequence of trying. Every good work we do contains a certain amount of failure because we had to keep trying until we got it right. Michael Jordan started as a small boy shooting hoops for the first time. I am sure those first attempts at basketball contained air balls, bricks that clanged off the rim and shot down the driveway into the street, and shots that got stuffed right back in his face by a bigger, stronger kid playing defense. In fact, even as you peruse game film from days gone by when he was the pinnacle of basketball, the greatest player in the NBA with gravity-defying jumping ability and muscle-tearing absurdity able to change directions in mid-air, there were still air balls, shots that clanged off the rim into the third row, and, yes, even bigger, stronger defenders able to stuff the ball right back into his very exalted face. It was all part of the game, and it did not diminish by single dot his greatness as a basketball player.

It should come as no surprise that failure is an essential—if not existential—piece of faith praxis. Look at the ideals and glorious standards revealed in Christ for a life that is holy, just, and as God fully intended in the creation of human beings. As we look at the precedents set by Christ, all of us surely sympathize and even repeat Peter’s great cry of anguish, “Who, then, can be saved?” As we seek to do the work revealed in Christ as the work of faith, we will fail. We will boldly affirm our commitment to the ways of compassion, grace, and mercy, then not twenty minutes later, speak to someone fully revealing the truth of our inability to practice what we preach. We will hear Christ’s admonition to love our enemies, then someone will say something really stupid that we find unforgivable, angrily rejecting them, their place in our lives, and vowing never to do a blessed thing with them ever again. We will hear Christ’s call to always think of others before ourselves, emptying ourselves to make someone else full, then we will catalog all the self-indulgences of the last week and a half. Failure looms up uglier and uglier. But note that every person we regard as saintly also met the same conundrum. There was uproar when Mother Theresa’s personal journals appeared in public form. They were far more confessions of ineptitude, doubt, fear, and failure than they were records of holy beatification. Yet, the truth is that in her great revelation of her abject humanity in service to God, they were as holy and sacred as anything ever written by anybody seeking to follow Christ. Poor Theresa shot her fair share of air balls!

Second, God never leaves us in our failure as we meet it, confess it, acknowledge it, and own it. Christ named this process “coming to our senses” in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. It, too, is absolutely essential to the success of our faith praxis. Note that the one group Christ could do nothing with were the people who declared themselves righteous and pure. These were the “well who have no need of a physician.” He was the Great Physician, so immediately he found himself outside their circle. No, admission, known by its theologically heavy term, repentance, is walking into the waiting room of God’s holy hospital for lost souls. There, God can begin to work. There, God accepts us fully into God’s presence. There, God begins the work of transformation and transcendence.

Returning to Mr. Jordan for a moment—did you know that he got cut from his high school basketball team? He just wasn’t good enough. Now, had he practiced the contemporary approach to such disasters, he would have railed at the coach, the other players—heck, possibly the school itself—for not recognizing genius as it walked among them. He didn’t. He went home and practiced. And practiced. And practiced some more. 

That is how we enter the grace of God. When we meet our failures, we do not blame everyone else but us for our weaknesses, inabilities, poor judgment, or lack of decision. They are ours. We own them and try again. And again. And again and again. God will be with us in each and every attempt, as close as our breathing in each experience. 

Finally, God never leaves us without help along the way. There will be teachers, guides, and friends to walk with us. Some will be official leaders of a church—pastors, officers, or trained teachers. Others will just be fellow travelers, sharing their experience along the way. Christ made sure we understood this essential tenet to faith praxis when he taught that he would be present where two or more were together. Community (and its deepest expression, communion) is absolutely necessary for our success. Here, we overcome our failures, first, by seeing that we are not alone in our failure, and, second, that we need not know everything in and of ourselves, but rather it is in the simple pooling of resources that full revelation and wisdom manifest themselves. 

So, failure is inescapable. It is also essential. It is how we become who we are to be. 

Fear not, I am with you, says the Lord.