Failing at Life

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It is the little failures that get to you, not the spectacular ones. With a spectacular fail you can take comfort in the fact of having been, at least briefly, spectacular. You may not have achieved what you set out to achieve, but at least you tried where most others would not have.

No, what gets to you is the little failures, repeated every day, day after day after day. Sometimes it is someone else’s fault, like not getting to work on time because the idiot in front of you couldn’t drive. Sometimes it is your own fault, like when I pound the steering wheel and call the idiot in front of me an idiot for not knowing how to drive. I forget the people I have cut off, the unsignalled lefts I have taken, the green lights I have held up because I was busy changing the song on my iPhone. Little failures, like not getting all of the errands finished, or going to store for ingredients and coming home having forgotten one small but essential thing that you absolutely must have; or big failures, like forgetting about the Eucharistic fast and not being able to receive Communion because you just had to have that last cookie before you walked out the door.

There is nothing great about these. They don’t even merit an “epic fail, bro!” None is life-shattering but each one chips away a little bit at your self-confidence. If I can’t even get the kids into the car and to school on time, what makes me think I could succeed at volunteering for a charity? Or writing a novel? Or getting in shape? Or learning to play the piano? Are you serious? I can barely get my carcass out of bed some mornings.

And it doesn’t seem fair, because you know, and I know, that we really are trying. Not like Bubba from highschool who still lives in his mom’s basement at 32 years old, works the same job at the car wash, and in all that time has not attempted anything more challenging than Final Fantasy XXIV: The Return of Zombie Aerith. Bubba is doing fine. Bubba has no problems. One might think that he may actually have figured this life thing out. Just don’t try anything you aren’t already good at and you will never fail.

But in our better moments we don’t want to be like Bubba. We have made enough progress to know that we at least want to do something worthwhile with our lives. We love some good, or are committed to a family or some worthy project, and we are sacrificing to achieve it. Would a little success be too much to ask for, Lord? Some support, maybe?

But I will tell you a secret, although you may not believe me.

The most valuable coin in the spiritual life is failure.

I know you think I am crazy, but it is true (both that failure is valuable and that I am crazy). God draws us up off the couch by proposing some good to us. Perhaps you fall in love with a woman. Perhaps you have a child. Perhaps you have a mystical vision of the poem that will express the inexpressible. You want to be a good and holy husband. You want to be a wise, loving (and absolutely perfect) parent. You want to be a divine poet. The painful truth is that success was never the point.

When God proposes the dream to us, we must not imagine that He is saying, “If you are a good boy and you work really hard, you can do anything you set your mind to. You just have to believe in yourself.” Really He is just saying, “Here is a faint shadow of just the tiniest corner of a fraction of my Being. Will you pursue me in that vision?” So we pursue. The vision and desire for success in pursuing that vision are necessary first steps. Even self-confidence can be a step.

But in reality, whatever we may imagine, we do not pursue in order to succeed, we pursue in

order to fail. The harder we pursue, the more quickly and surely we will fail, and to a certain extent the sooner and harder the better. That was the point all along. I said above that these failures are not life shattering, but they chip away at our self-confidence.

That is exactly the point.

God wants to destroy our self-confidence, because as long as we trust in ourselves we can never be saved. Dom Lorenzo Scupoli, in, “The Spiritual Combat,” opens Chapter II, the initial chapter on the Way of Perfection with this stern warning:

“Distrust of self is so absolutely requisite in the spiritual combat that without this virtue we cannot expect to defeat our weakest passion, much less gain a complete victory. This important truth should be deeply imbedded in our hearts; for although in ourselves we are nothing, we are too apt to overestimate our own abilities and to conclude falsely that we are of some importance. This vice springs from the corruption of our nature. But the more natural a thing is, the more difficult it is to be discovered.”

 This is an echo of the Apostle Paul

“It was sin, producing death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure. For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.... Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.” Romans 7:13-15, 24-25.

These are not the words of a man who is succeeding at everything he tries. He is failing, and acutely aware of his failure. This is the same man who writes:

To keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the

revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” 2 Corinthians 12: 7-10.

Or to quote C. S. Lewis (Mere Christianity): “No man knows how bad he is until he has tried very hard to be good.” The better you try to be and the harder you try to be that way, the sooner you will have opportunity to learn how far short you fall.

That is the reason God asks us to try. Not because He wants us to "be good or else," but because He wants us to want to be good, to try to be good, and to fail so that we realize that we cannot be good. Then, and not before, we will be humbled enough to ask Him to help us, to do it for us. 

We will see that our perfection is His work, not ours, we are only called to be willing participants. 

This is not to say that our goal is to be neurotic, or to lack all ability to try. That is why destroying self-trust is the second step, and not the last. Distrust in ourselves opens the door to trust in God. Unless we take that next step and trust in Him, destroying self trust would be worse than useless.

There is more to this, much, much more, but this blog is already too long so maybe another time.

Masterpieces Upon this Transient Earth

Sometimes things that I see or read just speak to me. I cannot say why at the moment. As my cousin, a photographer and independent filmmaker, would say, they come together “behind my head.” Without fully understanding it on a logical level, somehow something in my heart seizes upon it and says, “This is important. This is good.” I usually ask why, but the part of my mind that recognizes has little interest in explaining. It knows that this is important, or beautiful, or good, and that is that

This blog post about an artist who makes beautiful designs by walking back and forth for hours on freshly fallen snow was one such focal point. When I read the story, and

saw the pictures, all I could think was, “This is a work of love.”

I did not know why I thought that. I could not have explained it, but somehow it only makes sense in my mind to do something like that for love. The man spends hours trudging back and forth, and back and forth to create something that will be gone with the first new snow, vanished without a trace, as if it had never been. The only trace will be in the minds and hearts of those who have seen it. Without my thinking it through, this intuitively seemed to me to exemplify the purest form of art, to create something of beauty and rigor and rightness, and then to let it go so completely that, not only do you not care if it gets destroyed, you have designed it specifically to be wiped out. Perhaps, in a way, these snow designs are like the sand mandala’s of the Dalai Lama. 

One of the books I am currently reading is “The Story of a Soul,” The Autobiography of Saint Therese of Lisieux. A day or two ago I was reading Chapter 6 where she describes the pilgrimage she made to Rome with her father and sister. She speaks wonderingly about the beauty of Switzerland, “With its high mountains, their snowy peaks lost in the clouds, its rushing torrents, and its deep valleys filled with giant ferns and purple heather. Great good was wrought in my soul by these beauties of nature so abundantly scattered abroad. They lifted it to Him Who had been pleased to lavish such masterpieces upon this transient earth.”

It was the last half a sentence that caught my ear, “to lavish such masterpieces upon this transient earth.

One of the most ancient, most noble and most controversial of human undertakings has been the production of art. The question of what truly is and what is not art takes up a good deal of space in the writings of philosophers, along with subordinate questions such as its purpose, its use, its value to society, how or if it should be regulated or controlled, etc. (Another of my current reads is Plato’s “Republic” which is greatly concerned with such questions.) But it seemed to me, with a sudden clarity, and indeed a certainty, that both Simon Beck and the Dalai Lama had, perhaps intuitively or perhaps more cognitively, grasped the real purpose of art; that is, to imitate God in “lavishing masterpieces upon this transient earth.” Precisely by focusing their creativity into mediums of extreme impermanence, they see and escape one of the most dangerous snares of art, which is the illusion of permanence.

Every aspiring artist nobly and rightly wishes to create art that will outlast him. He or she looks to the immortality of Shakespeare, Dante, Michelangelo, Boticelli, and others whose creations of goodness, truth and beauty have kept their names alive long after their bones are dust. Even the painter of the cave paintings in Cro Magnon, France, though his name is lost, his paintings live on. We all aspire to that.

However, in the immortal words of Admiral Akbar, “It’s a trap.” The permanence of Shakespeare and Dante are illusions. The marbles of Michelangelo will crumble to dust. Even the prehistoric caves will one day be a charred lump, along with the rest of this planet, in the cosmic sink that used to be our sun. When that happens, however, the soul of the human who created it will still exist. Perhaps this was why Therese of Lisieux was able to explain the precise place of art in such a brief sentence, in the middle of a book that meditates pretty exclusively upon the impermanence of all created things. She saw that only God is eternal, and she loved Him, and desired Him before all else, and so everything else fell into place, including created beauty. God does lavish masterpieces upon this transient earth, and calls us to do the same. We are called to pour out our attention, our effort, our blood and sweat and tears in imitation of Him, creating beautiful things with full knowledge that they are destined for oblivion.

This idea is especially relevant to the internet generation. On the internet you have millions of people, all trying to create something. Some are trying to create art, some are trying to create noise. Some still believe and are trying to create something meaningful, others have given up and are just hoping for five minutes of fame and a few thousand hits, by any means necessary. Some try to create beauty and meaning, others are content to expose themselves in any tomfoolery imaginable, if it gets them a little attention. My blogging is the same way. Each blog post lives for a few days at most, and even that is only if it is unusually popular, and then it disappears, snowed under the constantly shifting heap of relevance that is the Internet. It reaches a few people, maybe a dozen, and at best one or two will read the whole thing. The rest scan the first sentence of each paragraph, agree or disagree, and then move on to the next link.

In cosmic terms, i.e. in terms of eternity, the complete works of Shakespeare will fair no better, which is not to put myself even remotely in the same class as Shakespeare. It is only to point out that all things pass away, except God.

Once, in a discussion about art with my cousin (the same cousin mentioned above) I tried to describe art as “drawing my best picture with crayons and hoping God will hang it on His refrigerator.” Only in God’s eyes is the art that I create eternal. That is an amazing thing, if you think about it. God and I together create "memories" that exist in God's eyes for all eternity?
Whoah! Mind Blown!

I imitate God for the same reason that a two year old walks around with a plastic hammer hitting the furniture all day. That is what he sees Daddy doing. When I create a work of art, God sees it, He sees me creating it, He loves me. I give that work of art to Him with the same delight and trust with which a three year old gives his scribbles to his Mommy. Then I go on to the next one. The greatest masterpiece I will ever create is nothing more than another memory of my childhood for God to hang on His refrigerator. When I am fully grown, I will look back upon my worldly Magnum Opus and laugh at the squiggly lines and juice stains and dirty fingerprints. Only love makes anything permanent, because only love is of God. 

That is the only worthwhile reason to create art, as a work of love, knowing that while the work may pass away, the love will outlast the universe.