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Failure seems like such a negation. I did not….
It points to the fact that we are imperfect, incomplete; that our reach exceeds our grasp. Yet hidden in that very fact is a positive. I did try. I learned something. Thomas Edison famously said: I have not failed; I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
Our failures are great teachers, if we are open to the lessons. As it says in our Sunday Service for Children, we learn so that we may understand and work in the world. We are here to find truth, to expand our understanding of reality, to make a difference in the world. The fact that failure is often humbling is perhaps a lesson in itself – we are not yet all that we want to be. But we may have just found the 9,999th way that doesn’t work – one step closer to a way that does.
As Saul, St. Paul believed that Jesus couldn’t have been the Messiah. Jesus’ life ended as a failure – he was tortured and executed as a common criminal. Therefore Saul knew he couldn’t have been God the All Powerful’s Son. But what looked like a failed life became The Life, as Paul came to know at Damascus.
Christ came to the earth for the express purpose of becoming a human being. He came to experience, in the flesh, how human beings fail. How they learn. How they find truth. He explored the depths of human existence. And since he is an eternal being, what he did, he does eternally. He experiences the depths of humanity so that He, eternally present, can be here with us when we fail. When we learn. When we find truth, which is ultimately, Him.
Lo! I am coming like a thief! Blessed is he who is awake, keeping his garments that he may not go naked and be seen exposed. -Revelation 16:15
Christ’s coming again, which makes itself felt more and more as a spiritual fact, asks of individual human beings grave decisions. It does not leave us as we were before. If we sleep through the event, we are inwardly poorer – this is the point of comparison in the strange and yet realistic picture of Christ coming “like a thief”. In comparison with this is the blessing of him who is ‘awake’.
In ancient times, the Lord gave to His own in sleep, but humanity has stepped out of the divine dream of the early childhood of humanity; mankind has to wake up – primarily at first to the earthly world. If the wakefulness is limited to the material world, however, there gradually arises the feeling: unfortunate are the wakeful. Then, we bear this adult wakefulness like a burden, and seek narcotics and opiates in order to escape the desolate reality. Rightly understood, Christianity is not opium. It means raising the power of wakefulness beyond the material world into the spiritual. Whoever shrinks back from the full adult responsibility of sober awakening in order not to lose his or her childhood faith does not yet know that all waking and knowing that could be dangerous to Christianity is always only a half-waking and half-knowing. It is precisely within the meaning of Christianity to penetrate to the full awareness and a full knowledge that includes the Super-sensible. Therefore “blessed is he who is awake”.
-Rudolf Frieling
The Earth has sometimes been compared to a spaceship, a machine hurling through the black void of outer space. In this scientific vision space is stunningly cold and inimical to all life. But this simplified picture is wrong; it leaves out the Sun.
The Earth is not alone. The Sun’s gravity, warmth, and light, a trinity of forces, constantly bless the Earth. Read more