Embracing Failure

Rev. Kathleen Ellis

20 February 05

Peter Fleck tells the story of a gnome who lived in the forest under the root of a tree. His greatest desire in the whole world was to own a green hunter’s bag. He thought about it during the day and dreamed about it at night. Everyone knew about his longing for a green hunter’s bag and finally he received one as a birthday gift. His dream had come true! You would expect that he would be pleased—even happy about this gift, but he said, “It is a nice hunter’s bag, only it’s not as green as I had imagined it.”

We all understand this story, because each of us has been disappointed when a deeply held wish comes true. Reality did not measure up to our dream of reality. Plato knew this: that only the idea of something is perfect. The reality is just a shadow of that perfection.

Experience makes a phenomenal teacher. To illustrate, here are two interesting personal ads from this week’s Austin Chronicle. The first one gives a hint of drama: “Seeking all the love the world offers. If that doesn’t happen, once broken-up, I won’t write letters detailing your faults or scratch a hole in your car. I won’t sleep with any of your friends or relatives or call you in a drunken-rage reiterating reasons we should be together.” In a contrasting ad, an “Artist in Decline would like to meet someone whose mouth waters at the astounding romance of each day.” What would you say about yourself or a desirable companion in a sentence or two?

In our heads we know perfection is not attainable. Through trial and error, two steps forward and three steps back, we learn the most memorable lessons. How does evolution work? Through adaptation toward strength and the elimination of weakness. The first fish to crawl onto land may have been there not so much because of its upper body strength, but from the weakness of its gills. But you can just imagine its parents! “Where did we go wrong?” they might have wondered. The first amphibian would have been subjected to merciless peer pressure and jeers.

There are lots of ways to think about failure. We all fall short of perfection. We may change the course of our lives because we failed to get the job or school we wanted. We can get the job and then fail to meet the company’s expectations or get laid off because of its financial situation. We can wish the hunter’s bag had been a brighter green. Perhaps most discouraging of all, we can harbor the sure knowledge that we failed to save a person or a relationship that meant the world to us. Some of us believe we have failed at marriage or failed at parenting.

My friend Greta Fryxell, a member of Wildflower UU Church in south Austin, knowing I was writing about failure, sent this memory:

“. . . it took years before Mother and I realized that losing the farm was a great blessing to both our lives. She was working herself to death physically, and leaving the farm really gave her another 50 years of life. As for me, I probably would have married the man who became the town drunk and would bring other women home to bed--telling his wife to get out of bed. I would be in jail for murder.

“Seriously, oceanography probably provided channels for my curiosity drive better than the farm ever would have. But seeing someone lead my little horse out of the driveway after the auction, I saw only the sad side of failure.

“I remember bombing on one proposal to the National Science Foundation regarding work off Australia--it didn't even get to a panel hearing because reviewers did not like it. However, one of the reviewers remembered it, and I was called on to fill in when a vacancy on a big program in the North Atlantic happened the next year. The trick is realizing that all is not lost when all is lost . . .”

In sports, we can identify the winners and losers, and we would just as soon not even talk to the losers. Outside of sports, we may be judged on how much money we make, how many articles we’ve published, whether we pass a major exam, whether we can make the comedy club laugh (or the congregation). In some professions, such as teaching at a college, the standards for success or failure are relatively vague. A college dean once told me that even in face-to-face evaluations when he told faculty members they had gone as far as they could go, they tended to ignore or misinterpret his assessment until the shock of failure to gain tenure is presented to them.

Engineering and medicine are two areas where mistakes can be deadly. The primary causes of engineering disasters are usually considered to be

	human factors (including both 'ethical' failure and accidents)
	design flaws (many of which are also the result of unethical practices)
	materials failures
	extreme conditions or environments, and, most commonly and importantly
	combinations of these reasons

So engineers try to design in such a way as to avoid failure, especially catastrophic failure that can result in loss of property, damage to the environment, and possible injury or loss of life. We sincerely hope for success when the space shuttle resumes flights in May.

Likewise, errors will never disappear from medical practice in spite of safeguards to make them a rare event. But once they occur, how should we respond? Certainly some corrective action should be taken in every case. If errors recur, there may be a real issue of medical negligence. From a strictly legal viewpoint even a single error is unacceptable. In the moral sense, however, feelings of guilt for an isolated tragic event may be adequate punishment. This is often true for junior doctors who are at the beginning of their careers.

Relationships are rich with opportunities for failure.

	For example, take parenting: No matter how much we try to guide children into a happy and healthy adulthood, they will go their own way and make decisions that break our hearts.
	Trying to change someone else simply doesn’t work, whether we want to change our children, our spouses, or our friends. All we can do is try to remove the log from our own eye.
	Estrangement from loved ones may resolve a difficult family situation, but it can easily affect your new family system.
	Neglect of children or elders has devastating effects on families.
	Failure to thrive; failing health; heart failure; substance abuse—each of these physical effects can sometimes be linked to difficult relationships in addition to genetic factors.

Ethical failure means willfully violating a moral law that you know.

	·Mechanisms are needed to overcome the need for whistle blowing. Ethics committees address concerns that go beyond mere compliance. In addition, they have to protect staff who speak out in the defense of patient health and welfare.
	Bribery, conflicts of interest, fraud, misuse of time and resources, travel violations. These are examples of ethical misconduct that are also illegal. They have occurred so frequently that laws have been written about them.
	Criminal background checks have swept through all kinds of organizations from schools to employers to churches because so many apparently good people have violated personal boundaries.

In an example of spiritual failure, I was fascinated by a speech sent to me by a friend the other day. Last September, a Jesuit priest by the name of John Dear spoke to some 2,000 students during their annual lecture at a Baptist college in Pennsylvania. As he tells the story,

“After a short prayer service for peace centered on the Beatitudes, I took the stage and got right to the point. ‘Now let me get this straight,’ I said. ‘Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” which means he does not say, “Blessed are the warmakers,” which means, the warmakers are not blessed, which means warmakers are cursed, which means, if you want to follow the nonviolent Jesus you have to work for peace, which means, we all have to resist this horrific, evil war on the people of Iraq.’

“With that, the place exploded, and 500 students stormed out. . . .

“So much for my speech. Not to mention the Beatitudes.”

He went on to claim that we are a Pharisee nation:

“We side with the rulers, the bankers, and the corporate millionaires and billionaires. We run the Pentagon, bless the bombing raids, support executions, make nuclear weapons and seek global domination for America as if that was what the nonviolent Jesus wants. And we dismiss anyone who disagrees with us.”

You may agree or disagree with Dear’s politics or his other arguments on one point or another, but he certainly failed to convince the 2,000 students who attended the lecture. The students failed to show him respect, but he might have been able to make his points without slamming their sincere belief that the war in Iraq has been a necessary and ultimately successful mission.

In the long history of human development, society was transformed from a concern with good and bad luck to a concern with right and wrong. To think we have the corner on what’s right and wrong means that we set ourselves up as judge and jury based on our own interpretation of the choices people make.

Success and failure have little to do with right and wrong. On one hand, some people succeed at immoral, illegal actions. We wonder sometimes why good things happen to bad people. They never seem to suffer consequences for their immoral actions, or they land on their feet in spite of everything that happens. On the other hand, if you start a new business to provide day care for poor kids and the business fails after six years, it’s important to remember the successful six years.

The popular philosopher Homer Simpson said, “Trying is the first step towards failure.”

And what’s wrong with that, after all? As Jim Rohn pointed out, “It's too bad failures don't give seminars. Wouldn't that be valuable? If you meet a guy who has messed up his life for forty years, you've just got to say, ‘John, if I bring my journal and promise to take good notes, would you spend a day with me?’”

If you don’t learn from your own failures, you’d better borrow someone else’s.

How should we respond? After a significant failure, we usually try to change our behavior.

	First, we work harder—but that doesn’t work if we’re doing it wrong in the first place
	We try working smarter—with better planning and better efficiency.
	We may have to lower our expectations. Maybe it just isn’t possible with the resources at hand.
	If it still doesn’t work, we’ll try just about anything—abruptly change a career, plunge into or out of the stock market, find a new love relationship, or radically change our health habits.
	Only then we might consider giving up our goals.

If we fail to measure up to our own moral principles, certainly there should be remorse, and an attempt to understand HOW it happened—to stop the action as well as to insure future growth. However, failure can produce defeatism, irresponsibility, despair, low self-worth, hopelessness, and even physical illness. We often have to feel the pain before we’re ready to achieve the growth.

If you are at war with yourself, it is not a failure to seek help. There is nothing worse than struggling with depression, feelings of inadequacy, overwhelming fears, or moral dilemmas all by yourself. Friends can be great, but they may not have the resources to listen for hours or to give you information about how to come to terms with your shortcomings. Then may be able to let it fade into the past and look toward future success.

What should we teach ourselves and our children?

Failure is human. Failure makes us interesting.

Martin Luther King, Jr. did not reach the Promised Land. Moses did not reach the Promised Land. But they both saw their Promised Land better than any of their followers.

Live Oak wants to live in a Promised Land of our own design—about 20-30 of us spent hours on improving our design just yesterday. For that we give special thanks to Antaro Burke, who organized the day even after surgery, other members of the Strategic Planning Committee, and Daniel Kaulfus, the committee chair.

As a faithful gathering of human beings, our intention is to invite everyone into our community and we want you to be a part of the planning! Each of us brings not just gifts and abilities, but also our imperfections and our constant striving for a better life. We know that perfection is not part of this life, either at home or in the church. Remember this: each of us has failed in some profound way.

Knowing this, may we continue to grow in humility and compassion.

May we forgive ourselves and each other.

May we begin again in love.

Amen