Religious life is continuously wrestling with the life-affirming and the life-destroying aspects of the larger culture. Our larger culture is very busy with heroes and villains, winners and losers. Indeed, in the larger culture, whether someone is a hero often seems to be because the person won a battle, sporting event, or other cultural praise. What bothers me morally is the way that the larger culture can ascribe morality to those currently winning and those losing. That way suggests we can assign salvation and damnation to people. And losers are damned.
The social reinforcement that losers are damnable and damned, villains and outcasts, furthers risk-aversion and reflects both a less than charitable care of our neighbors and a mistrust of learning and growing. Because human beings are the kind of animals that are obligatorily gregarious, belonging matters. Few things are more threatening and damaging to human spirits, bodies, and minds than ostracism and hatred in all its forms. People will engage in terrible things, things that violate their own sense of what is just, in order to belong.
We human beings are hard
pressed to really learn and grow without going past what we already know and do
well. Once we have mastered writing, we have to risk, fail, reflect, and try
again in order to keep developing our capacities for effective written
communication. Once we know how to stir together flour and water, we need to
try and study, fail, reflect, and try again to really learn how to transform
that flour and water into something recognizable as bread. We can follow another's recipe, but that isn’t the same thing as knowing how to make
good bread. Following someone’s recipe may be the way, like studying the
alphabet by first tracing letters, we first learn the process of breadmaking.
But it is when we transform that learned process with our creativity and the
ingredients at hand that we discover how well we really know how to make bread.
Failing at something is not the same thing at all as being a failure. The only failure in life, as far as I am concerned, is not risking your own life to extend the circle of inclusion, to care more than you imagined possible, to love more deeply than you’re comfortable, to make the world a better and more just place through your particular gifts and talents. Most of the time, when our larger culture is busy labeling someone a failure, that culture is itself failing to account for its responsibility in that failure. If we do not have universal health care in the United States, is that really the President’s failure? All the people, corporations, legislators, state governments, and non-governmental organizations bear some responsibility, both for the attempt and the failure. Sometimes, failure is how we identify what we really want, and gather new energy, ideas, and friends for the journey to achieve what matters to us. Failing does not equal being a failure.
I like to play
competitively. I swim against my own times. I knit the same pattern over to see
if I can do it better and faster. I make up new tunes and new patterns and new
recipes. A lot of the time, I fail. Some of the time, I succeed. When this
success or failure is truly individual is pretty rare for me at my age. The
much more complicated and more prone to fail endeavors (because the greater the
complexity, the greater the risk, especially when we’re talking about human
community organizing and life) are group endeavors. I might be identified as
the instrument or leader of what failed, and certainly have been (and will be).
I’ll be called a failure for trying something difficult and complicated. But
that doesn’t mean I am a failure. Yes, I failed in something I might have tried
to do. But that doesn’t stop me from sitting back, considering the challenges,
and trying again. There’s no victory in what doesn’t demand effort.
In the meantime, what we in
religious communities and who live spiritually might wish to consider is: how do we contribute to creating an environment supportive of learning and growing,
one that reduces the risks of ostracism and increases our care and support of
one another?
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