Inspiring Tales of Failure

June 4, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Let us pray for some measure of comfort and peace for those who mourn significant losses. They are members of your church community; they are the families of lost military men and women, and they are the survivors of natural disaster.

Let us rejoice for our lives, for all that we have: a soft bed, good food to eat, a choice of what to wear each morning. The future. Let us reflect – gently, but with conviction, with courage.

Which part of us is given the most permission, the most air time, the most control? Are we living our lives the way our best self would choose? Do we know who that person is? Are we giving ourselves the right “to be fabulous?” Are we giving our best self a chance to live?

Though it is fearsome, let us listen to the nagging voices in our minds that ask us to consider new ways of living, to consider changing habits, to consider changing how we think about failure and success.

Let us love ourselves in the story we find ourselves in. We each have a story, and may we see that our mistakes are important, that failures are the means to hard-earned growth and happiness. With calm intention may we let our hard lessons become blessings.

May we keep close to our hearts the certain knowledge that the nature of our world, and of ourselves, is always to be in flux. No state of our being is ever permanent.

May we each honor the other’s response to change, and the need to make a better world. Each of us are on a different path that we have been called to take.

May compassion be our guide, for ourselves and each other, and may courage be our salvation.

AMEN.

SERMON

This feels like a homecoming. It reminds me of when I preached for the first time at the church I grew up in; First Church of Austin is my second home church, I hope that’s alright with you. And I’m so pleased that the children’s choir of Tulsa is here to hear me preach today. When I was your age, I found myself forced to sit through an entire church service – I think it was summer, no Sunday School, no RE wing to escape to. The subject of the sermon was failure, and I’ll never forget it. The main message was there’s no such thing as failure. There’s only not trying. I could grasp that, as an 11 year old, or however old I was. When we’re kids, we are asked to succeed a lot; we’re not asked to fail, but we should be. We should know that option is open to us.

What this minister was saying in his sermon is that it doesn’t matter as much what the outcome is, it matters that we are part of the process of something, that we participate, that this is more important than anything. And at a young age, this is absolutely true. I won’t Pollyanna all the way for you here, it’s true that as you get older, it does matter more and more what the outcome is. But for a youth, it’s a message of courage – just have courage, it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, it matters that you try at the things you’re drawn to, that you get to know yourself by figuring out what you’re good at, and what you’re not good at.

When I was an intern minister here for nearly a full year, one thing that helped me greatly was to know I had “permission to fail.” That was Davidson’s phrase (Davidson was my supervisor and is the Senior Minister of this church, for the many visitors who are with us today). It was perhaps the most attractive thing about this church for internship, because it seemed to turn failure on its head and take the sting out of it. It was okay to fail! In fact, it was expected. Failure didn’t seem like such a specter then, and instead of walking on egg-shells trying to do everything right, I could just be myself.

Of course Davidson was not shy about telling me when I did fail. Mostly this had to do with the first drafts of sermons. I pretty much failed all of first semester with my preaching; I just didn’t get what I was failing to do. But I finally succeeded with the sermon I delivered at the very beginning of the new year. I had an “a-ha!” experience, and I finally got it. I doubt I ever would have understood what I was doing wrong, what was missing, unless someone wasn’t kind enough to tell me how I was failing – over and over.

And now I’m a working minister delivering a sermon on the topic of failure. If I fail at a sermon on failure, is that a success? I’ll worry about that later.

What are some of your most prized failures? The failures that you learned and grew from, and never could have succeeded without? Which failures do you still need to learn from? Maybe we’ve failed to maintain our health, or spend enough time with our families. Maybe we’ve failed to nurture our creative sides. Maybe we’ve failed to reach some kind of cherished ideal.

We tend to forget, though, that ideals aren’t meant to be reached. We set high ideals to remind ourselves of what we want to be close to. But we don’t reach them.

The truth is, that, most of the time, we are off-course. The nature of the world and of us is one of imperfection.

Perhaps some of you remember when, 30 years ago, the commercial plane The Concorde, began flying across the Atlantic for the first time in less than 4 hours. Because of its phenomenal speed, the course was actually maintained by two computers, one to take course readings every few seconds, and one to correct the course when it was going off-course. A passenger touring the plane asked the pilot, “what percentage of the time is the plane off-course?” The pilot smiled, and replied, “About 99 percent of the time, sir.”

This story was taken from Rachel Remen’s collection, the woman I inevitably end up borrowing from in so many of my sermons, as Davidson taught me to do. She asks, “Might it be possible to focus ourselves on the purpose we wish to serve in the same way… [as] the Concorde? Once we stopped demanding of ourselves that we be on course all the time, we might begin to look at our mistakes differently, giving them… a frictionless response. They will not prevent us from reaching our dreams nearly so much as wanting to be right will. [my italics]

Those who have the courage to offer us honesty, to be our navigators, might even come to be seen as worthy of… gratitude… “You are off-course,” they might tell us. “Why, THANK you,” we might reply. “

She goes on to say, “Serving anything worthwhile is a commitment to a direction over time and may require us to relinquish many moment-to-moment attachments, to let go of pride, approval, recognition, or even success. This is true whether we be parents, researchers, educators, artists, or heads of state. Serving life may require a faithfulness to purpose that lasts over a lifetime. It is less a work of the ego than a choice of the soul.”

If we’re using our souls to choose a destination, it is enough to be heading in the right direction. We get in trouble when we make the ideals of the world our destination. We cannot choose a trajector – or a path to follow – under the guidance of what is outside of us. These are the questions I don’t think anyone can answer for us; we have to ask our own souls, our own spirits: We have to begin inside ourselves and ask, am I trying to succeed in becoming more human, more whole? Do I do what I love? Do I know what my gifts are, and does it offer some gifts to others?

While they don’t have to be the gifts the world wants, we do need to offer the world something; but it has to be what we are able to offer. Nobody gets all the gifts, and there’s wisdom in being delighted with the few we’ve got – loving to use them and offer what little we have to offer. Howard Thurman, a theologian, can help us figure out what this is when he said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.”

Sometimes the gifts we have, though, aren’t the ones we would choose for ourselves. There are always going to be things, that, in the end, we wish we’d been better at; there are failures we regret, but there are probably some gifts we’ve been given too that we didn’t even know we gave to others.

There was a very successful businessman named George who got diagnosed with lung cancer. He was told he didn’t have much time left. He said to his therapist, “‘I have wasted my life… I have two ex-wives and five children. I support all of them but I don’t know any of them… I don’t think they’ll miss me. I’ve nothing behind me but a lot of money.'”

It turns out that the business of this man was selling a gadget of medical equipment that he invented. The therapist – who of course is Rachel Remen, this is another of her stories – had another patient who used this device, and knew that it had completely changed her life. Her name was Stephanie. Rachel asked her if she might write a letter to the dying businessman, to thank him. The woman wanted to have him over to dinner, and he came. Rachel Remen writes,

“The week after this dinner, he sat in my office shaking his head in wonder. He had expected to have dinner with this young couple, but when he had arrived, George was welcomed by Stephanie’s whole family. Her mother was there, her three brothers and sisters, several of her aunts and uncles, and a crowd of nieces, nephews, and cousins. Her husband’s parents were there, too, and many of her friends and neighbors – the whole community of people who had sustained her in the years she was an invalid. They had decorated the little house with crepe paper, and everyone had cooked. It was an extraordinary meal and a wonderful celebration.

But George told Rachel that wasn’t the most important part. George said, “‘They had really come to tell me a story; they had each played a part in it and had a different side of it to share. It took them over three hours to tell it. It was the story of Stephanie’s life. I cried most of the time. And at the very end, Stephanie came to me and said, “This is really a story about you, George. We thought you needed to know.’ And I did, I did.'”

Rachel asked, “How many of these things do you make every year, George?”… “close to ten thousand,” he said softly. “I just knew the numbers, Rachel. I had no idea what they meant.”

That kind of story asks us to measure success and failure correctly: by our effect on others, by the gifts we’ve shared, not necessarily by the world’s standards – or maybe even our own standards.

Another inspiring tale of failure is about West Point graduate Capt. Ian Fishback, a story you perhaps already know, but merits repeating. It’s a story about doing the right thing, in the face of failure on an enormous scale.

When the Abu Ghraib scandal unfolded in Spring of 2004, Fishback, from experience, knew the tortures were in accordance with interrogation procedures. According to him, those terrible things were done to prisoners on a regular basis. But as a by-the-book officer, Fishback held his tongue, that is, until Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld disavowed the evidence of torture before Congress, testifying that “the letter of the Geneva Conventions” had been followed in Iraq. “That,” Fishback said, “is when I had a problem.”

He told Human Rights Watch, “It is infuriating to me that officers are not lined up to accept responsibility for what happened . . . That’s basic officership, that’s what you learn at West Point. It blows my mind.”

Fishback could have chosen to stay anonymous, but instead he crafted an open letter to Sen. John McCain, accusing the top officers of contributing to murder by refusing to set clear guidelines. In the letter’s conclusion, he wrote, “If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession.”

What courage it took this young man to tell it like it is! To express so succinctly the exact nature of this national failure, this international humiliation and tragedy. The fact is our country is not anywhere near on course, the fact is our ideals of freedom, the democratic process, and justice have been abandoned.

One of my failures as a minister has been speaking out against the war. I don’t feel I’ve done enough of it – but I’m making progress; I did do an anti-war sermon about 5 weeks ago, and rite of passage occurred. I got yelled at after the service by an elderly couple. I mean, really yelled at. It was amazing though, my grandmother happened to be standing there and she came to my defense – she started yelling right back at them! And I shuffled away. I’d never been yelled at before like that after a sermon, so I knew I had pushed some buttons.

The truth is I’m optimistic! I don’t want to push buttons perhaps so much as urgently share the message that we can be optimistic as a country.

I’ve got a wonderful quotation of George Clooney’s. He says, “I think we’re really great at this as a country: We do dumb things, and then we fix them. Pearl Harbor: We grab all the Japanese-Americans and throw them in detention camps. Well, that’s not very sporting of us, but we fix it. In the fifties, we grab people because they read a newspaper and bring them in for investigation. Pretty dumb. Vietnam? Pretty stupid. But there seems to be a tide turning. The Democrats aren’t providing the answers, but the Republicans aren’t getting free passes on everything. You don’t get to say you’re either with us or with the enemy anymore. So I’m an optimist about the United States.”

I think Clooney may be on to something there, and I agree: We are going to rise to the challenge of this country’s failed sense of direction. We will once again orient ourselves to the North Star, to a trajectory that is noble, and we will set a course. I know we will!

When you’re told you can either succeed or fail, either way you are being challenged. Our country was built on challenge, and I think it’s one of the nameless anchors of liberal religion as well, of Unitarian Universalism. We don’t get a lot of religious direction necessarily, we each have to challenge ourselves to identify our own noble trajectories. When we find ourselves seriously off-course in life – when we are failing – that’s our opportunity to re-orient and embrace the challenge of setting a new course. It was Edwin Friedman, a brilliant family therapist, who said, “Challenge is the basic context of health and survival, of a person, of the family, of a religious organization, or even (in the course of evolution) an entire species.”

The hardest part may be deciding which challenges to pour our hearts and souls into, because we can’t do them all. The one we should pick is usually the thing we have the most fear about doing. We have to ask, what challenge is going to honor my life, my family, my community, my country, my planet?

You have permission to fail. You also have permission to succeed.

No matter how old you are, do not be afraid to do the things that make you come alive! Because what the world needs is people that have come alive.

The contents of this story are taken from the December 29, 2005 issue of Rolling Stone magazine.