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.

Civilians is Silly

The other day I got to help my younger brother move furniture. He and his fiancee' are preparing to merge apartments as their wedding approaches, and moving several pickup truck loads of furniture was the next step. It was great to help out with that, because, both of us being busy adults, we had not gotten time to hang out in a few weeks. I was in Georgia, studying for my National Registry Paramedic exam (which I passed, thanks be to God) and he was, is, and still will be for some time, preparing for a wedding.

It is great to have a brother. Friends are great, a wife is awesome, but no one is ever going to understand you like a brother. We can talk about things with that, "You know what I'm saying?" "Yeah, I'm right there with you," "People just don't get it," "No, they don't," kind of agreement. We have different opinions and interests, but we get similar things because we start from the same principles.

Civilians, for instance. Both of us share a similar attitude toward civilians and city folks. We grew up on a farm and were, if not exactly dirt poor, at least soil rich. We liked to build things, break things, learn things, discuss things, argue about things, think about things, and question things. Every thing had a million functions, only a handful of which were included in the instructions. "Ready made" was not in our vocabulary.

Then both of us joined the military and spent years being shuffled like a bad card trick from one side of the globe to the other on various missions. We had no control, we had to be ready to pick up and go at a moments notice and so we learned to discern what was needed and what could be deleted or returned or simply done without. If it doesn't fit in a C-bag or rucksack, it obviously is not required or can be acquired, jury-rigged or hot-wired on-sight, overnight, in flight, on the go.

We have a casual disdain of plans, because they never work. When you make a plan, you have only succeeded in describing one of the million possible ways in which it definitely will not go down. More often than not you have blinded yourself to the one or two ways in which it probably will go down. Best to keep it loose, and just make it up as you go. Screw it, we'll do it live.

One of the biggest discoveries we have both made, which we sometimes commiserate about, is that civilians freak out over the silliest things. Whether it is running late for work, or the color or layout of party decorations, or whether or not they might get a black eye from sparring with friends, or how hard it is to walk up a mountain at 2 mph for a couple of hours, they freak out about it. I once saw a patient in the hospital who was a veteran. He was working in retail as a manager, and when one of his subordinates started freaking out about some boxes that got knocked off the shelf, he told him, "Shut the f--- up and quit crying. No one's got their arms or legs blown off by a suicide bomber have they? No one is dead. No one is getting shot at. So what's the big deal?" This resulted in a complaint, a trip to his superior's office and subsequent trips to a psychiatrist's office. He was unable to wrap his head around the concept that you can't talk to people like that in the civilian work force.

I get where he is coming from. Sometimes I get frustrated and just want to shake people and say, "Wake up! Are you seriously complaining because the server made you wait five minutes before he took your order? Are you starving to death? Are you that important? Do you realize that right now, in a hundred countries around the world (including this one) there are millions of people who are not eating at all? Broaden your horizons and stop being so small and pathetic." People who complain about office politics especially unnerve me, because A: I just want to tell them they haven't gotten shot, lost a patient, or blown themselves up so quit crying; and B: I am going to have to make it in that civilian workplace eventually.

I can talk about this with my brother. He gets it. I can talk about this with my wife. She gets me. Most people start to nod and nervously back away, so I learn to let it go. You see, while our background gives us advantages, it also comes with some drawbacks. Neither of us is good at relaxing. Or rather, what is relaxing to us is incredibly strenuous to others. We want to be engaged, mind, body, heart and soul. The glory of God is man fully alive, and we don't want to be even the least bit dead until we are all the way dead. So a relaxing Sunday afternoon might involve hiking up a mountain, or discussing astrophysics, human genomics, and the moral ramifications of both. As a matter of fact, if we are hiking up a mountain, we are probably discussing some heavy topic at the same time. So we are great at relaxing in our own way, but we have been living at such a high level of intensity for such a long time, that our idea of relaxing is skewed, and neither of us does well with boredom. He goes to school full time and works nights full time. I feel like a day that doesn't start at 4:30 AM and run non-stop until 10:30 PM is wasted. 

We sometimes have a hard time being patient with people who aren't patient with the vicissitudes of life. As my brother says, "We had no control over our lives for so long, we learned to just go with the flow and not stress out about it." (He split that infinitive, not I. I merely left it in, in the interests of historical accuracy.) It isn't life's ups and downs that frustrate us. It is the people who get frustrated at life's ups and downs.

All in all, we are well on our way to being either incredibly active and useful citizens or grumpy old men.

Whichever we end up becoming, we will probably be whole hearted about it. As my brother likes to say, "I never half-ass anything. I always whole-ass it." (Which I believe is a Ron Swanson quote.)

Or, as I would put it, "The generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us. But, above all, we have learned that whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade, and will look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart." Oliver Wendel Holmes, 1884 Memorial Day Speech.

Real Men!!! Rawr!!!

The fact that you can pose with a chainsaw does not mitigate the fact that you are shaving.

 Yesterday my wife and I were video chatting with my parents to congratulate them on their 31st wedding anniversary. The conversation wandered, as conversations will, to gluten, autism spectrum disorders, the emerging links between ASD and autoimmune disorders, and the prevalence of hand sanitizer parents. We agreed that children probably need more dirt and less hand sanitizer in their lives to give their little immune systems more practice. Big, strong, barrel chested immune systems, that's what we need. This led my wife to tell a true story about her great-grandpa. 

One day, while he was working at the saw mill, a fan blade fell off of a scaffold and hit him in the head. It knocked him over and cut his scalp open. So he climbed down to the ground, picked up some dirt and stuck it in the wound to stop the bleeding, and then climbed back up to finish work. After the job was done they drove him four hours to Seattle, where the doctors opened and cleaned the wound and put in a steel plate to replace the missing piece of skull.

Of course both my wife told the story with gusto, pride and appreciation, and my Mom listened to it with the same feelings. How could you not? That is a Real Man! 

I looked at my Dad and said, "You see how they are both in awe of that? Just watch! What would happen if either you or I ever did anything like that?" 

My Dad laughed at the memories (he actually has things like that a time or two and so speaks from experience). "Oh, we would be dead! The fan wouldn't kill you. The wife would when you got home!"

As a case in point, when my dad got his leg caught in a grain auger, which miraculously broke and did not drag him in and chew him into sausage, he did not bother telling Mom because it was just a scratch. He only lost a few square inches of skin and muscle, and a pint or so of blood. Nothing to worry her about. He let my brother and sister know when he got home, expecting them to let Mom know when she got home. It wasn't his fault that they did not pass on the message, and her first clue was the blood soaked socks on the bathroom floor. Oddly enough, that did not go over so well.

It is part of the paradox of manhood, I suppose. I have written about it before, how women always want a "real man." They are attracted to men with strength, courage, determination, and a certain hardiness or indifference to physical hardship and danger. These virtues can take a lot of different forms, from soldiers, firefighters and rescue workers, to youth ministers, farmers, fishermen, mechanics, outdoorsmen, what have you. These virtues can also be found in men who work white collar jobs, although they may not be quite so obvious.
The point is that while these virtues may be attractive, they can also be inconvenient. Nearly every virtue is at some point. My wife doesn't like me to tell her about my Afghanistan days when I was digging up IED's with my field knife. She is all for having fewer IEDs in the world, but she doesn't want me to be the one doing it (I don't either. It was a pointless mission). A firefighter's wife might agree that someone should be putting out fires and rescuing the people trapped in them. She just doesn't want it to be her husband who has to do it.
That's why I love this picture. That is strength. The strength to be crucified. I have to remember that, but not only when endurance of pain, hardship or risk is required. I also have to remember it when the desire for these things comes. You see, if we are honest, I think we men admire stories like that, and sometimes we take the tough guy thing to an extreme because we want to be tough guys, and we want to be known as tough guys. I am not suggesting that Great Grandpa or my Dad was doing that, but I know that a lot of my crazier adventures, if I am honest about them, have not really been strictly speaking necessary. I did them to prove to myself that I could. A more enlightened manhood, I think, simply does what is necessary. If it is easy, he can live with that. If it is hard he can handle that too.

Occasionally he wrestles bears too. Just because it is fun.

The Adventure Worth Having

In my last two posts I talked about home, and what home is to me. Home to me is people, or a Catholic Church (which is really a Person). I do not miss places. I enjoy them when I am there. No matter how long I am there I find them beautiful, and no matter how long I am in different places I don’t miss the old ones. Perhaps because there is so much to discover in any one place, and perhaps because I try to enjoy everything I am presented with, I am always too busy enjoying my current place to miss my old place.

One interesting result of this way of thinking of place is that it radically (in the old sense radix: root; from the roots up) shapes my idea of adventure. To most people going somewhere they have never been before is an adventure, in and of itself. The very idea of seeing something new is exciting to most people, or terrifying, or inconvenient as the case may be, but certainly the novelty of a place they have never seen before is one of the key features of that place. 

For me this is less true. It is true that I enjoy seeing new things, but no more than I enjoy enjoying old things. For this reason I consider it a very good thing that my job has forced me to go to new places and see new things. It has greatly broadened my mind and sharpened my mental and emotional appetite for beauty. It is a good thing, not because I would dislike the idea of traveling if I were not forced to, but because without that impetus I would probably be too busy just being wherever I was or doing whatever I was doing.

Simply going somewhere is not an adventure for me.

Neither is adrenaline. I have experienced my share of adrenaline. I have hunted IED’s with a knife and handheld mine detector. I have witnessed IED’s blowing up a mere vehicle length from me. I have been shot at with rockets. I have jumped out of airplanes. I have practiced martial arts and fought in full contact tournaments. I have blown things up, fired thousands of rounds until simply pulling the trigger was a chore, and broken into rooms with live bullets flying feet from my head. I have cross country skied into back country mountain passes and downhilled across miles of untouched powder (rather clumsily, I might add; my skiing skills are not the best. I have navigated across miles of wilderness alone with a map and compass. some of these things were fun in their own way, or terrifying, or merely a dreadful bother, depending on my mood at the time. All were thrills, at least at first.

None of them have satisfied me. Not one of them provides a strong enough reason to keep doing what I am doing, which is part of why I am getting out of the Army at the end of this enlistment. Thrill is not a reason for existing. An adventure ought to have a purpose, and only one purpose have I found that still seems meaningful to me. It is not “America’s Interests.”

It is not that I consider all of those “adventures” worthless. Each one served its purpose, although it was not necessarily the purpose I or anyone else thought it served at the time. I have grown from each one. I have succeeded where I expected only failure, and excelled when by all rights I should have flunked. I have also failed when I expected only success. I have met my limitations and surpassed them, met them again and been utterly crushed and unable to go one step further. I have cried out for help in desperation and been answered out of marvelous darkness. These are good experiences, I think, for any man to have in his younger days.

If nothing else they have given me this perspective, that I have tried them and found them wanting. At twenty-eight years old I can say confidently that love is the only adventure worthwhile. Love of God, first and foremost, and then love of everyone that He loves. Love is the only purpose that still seems meaningful to me.

But lo and behold! Love is meaningful, and for its sake and by its light every other thing is meaningful. Everything is an adventure. Everything is worthwhile and beautiful when done with that love.

That seems to me to be something worth learning.