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Looking Forward to Failure in 2017

Looking Forward to Failure in 2017

Last updated on: January 1, 2017 at 7:23 am by Anne Kennedy

Looking Forward to Failure in 2017 2017-01-01T07:23:30-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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I spent whole moments on twitter yesterday looking at people’s New Year resolutions. More love, less bitterness was one. Speak less, listen more was another. And then a few leaned in the magnanimous, giving, ‘let’s not worry about ourselves when the world is such a mess’ direction. Not so much about getting in shape and getting on top of the practical details of life. It’s as if we all learned, in 2016, how to answer an email right away but we lost the ability to speak peaceably at all, in email or any other venue.

This tacit, although perhaps we might also say tepid admission of failure, it will not surprise you, causes my cold lifeless heart to warm. For one thing, I like irony, and funny things. And so I love the optics of a carefully crafted list of ways that I personally (I’ll use myself as a bad example) plan to use to order my life and bring order to the world twit-picked against a riotous and potentially debauched evening. I didn’t go out, but I did sit in my comfortable rocking chair eating half a Brie and drinking a glass of champagne, mere moments after explaining to Matt how, in 2017, I was going to impose a strict laundry folding schedule on myself so that I would Never Get Behind Again. It’s inconsistent, is what I’m trying to say, contradictory. We say one thing with our mouths, and do another. The party during the night makes it impossible for us to start our diets in the morning.

Most of the time, though, I have no trouble living my life as a walking contradiction. I easily say one thing and do another all the time. It’s, as the song says, who I am, it’s who I am, it’s who I am.

But at New Years, and sometimes the beginning of Lent, I look flutteringly at the contradiction and am dissatisfied. I Really Want to be better. I do know that if I tried harder I could do more. I understand that if I made less excuses for myself and just did the hard things I would ultimately be happier because I had become Better. I, and all the rest of the world.

And that knowledge, that moment of clear recognition of the way I really am and the way I could be if I tried, is truly a gift. It is a good thing, because it is a tiny taste of the best experience that life can offer and that is Failure.

Why, you ask? Well, Failure has the potential to be a bright moment of unveiled, inescapable truth. And therefore, failure holds in itself the greatest moment of hope, of opportunity, although we rarely use it to its fullest, or embrace all it’s wonders.

We should stop and tease out the various dimensions of failure. There is the usual kind, where you were supposed to do something and didn’t do it well enough that it can be counted as a success, but at least you did do it. I live in that realm all the time, particularly in my homeschooling life. Then there is the failure of forgetfulness. You said you would do something, maybe only to yourself, and then you didn’t do it, through neglect and procrastination. In this case you have to live with yourself as a liar. You expected something of yourself that didn’t materialize and you can’t blame anyone but yourself, although you will figure out a way to if you can. Weight loss always falls into this category for me. And then there’s the more bitter kind of failure that we might call sin. You thought of yourself as a kind, good person, but then someone walked into the church kitchen and heard you saying the most unkind, ugly things about another human being (maybe them, maybe not) and you can’t take it back or erase it. The words hang out there in all their destructive power. Or maybe, like me, you are so angry about the dishwasher not being loaded when you Said To Load It that when your child slams her finger in the door you honestly don’t care and basically say so. You watch yourself from the outside, being awful, and are unable to stop. You cannot but fail.

The New Years option is you saying, “I’m not going to do that in 2017. I’m just not.” And maybe also, “I will give all money to the poor and solve the Middle East crisis.” And maybe “I will not be so selfish. I will love all my fellow men, I mean people, and I will Not Sin So Help Me”

and there the matter is left because you are not appealing to God, you are appealing to yourself. Which is a terrible misuse of the Wonders of failure. Failure being the unique moment when the human person can look at God and admit to knowing how things really are. If, once you have failed, you don’t double down in yourself, but rather turn round and face your perfect Creator, your failure becomes the door to new life, to hope, to freedom, to the grace of living with all those things you wanted in the first place–love, and patience, and kindness, and peaceable speech. Not because God has mercy and gives you the little extra boost you needed so that you can basically do it yourself. No. Rather, he scrapes you up out of the ash heap of your hypocritical contradictory self, forgives you for being that way, removes the power of the bitter enslaving pride that has kept you fixed there, and then works his methodical and miraculous way through your soul and heart and mind and failed expectations and bad habits and general foolishness. In the weakness of your failure, you finally have room for God to be God in all his supernatural glory.

This is why I really don’t like it when people tell me I’ve done something wonderful, like write a book. Matt does this to me all the time. “You wrote a book!” he’ll say, “You did it!” And yes, I did do it. I put the words on the page, just like I brought six people into the world. Assuredly, I am amazing. Except that, just like the people who grew in my flesh and came out into the light of day, who were sustained mysteriously by God and me eating truckloads of ice cream, so this book, and this blog really, and everything I do at church, happen when I mostly feel like I don’t know how to put one foot in front of another. The fact that I get out of bed every day is a miracle. The fact that I do anything is the extraordinary, powerful grace of God, the preventing grace that raises me up and sustains me moment by moment. There isn’t any way that I can take credit for anything, at all, none.

I am weak, as Paul says somewhere, and he is strong. A new year, a new season, just like every other single day of a person’s life, should be the greatest opportunity to look at God and admit defeat, admit all the lack, tot up the failures, and then be surprised and charmed by how much he can do when you’ve essentially given up.

A blessed 2017 to you all!

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