The Great Parade of Failures (Including Mine)

About six weeks ago, I downloaded an app called Lectio 365. If you haven't heard of it, it's a beautifully designed daily prayer guide–morning, midday, and evening prayers, rooted in Scripture and contemplation. It's made by a community called 24-7 Prayer, and it's genuinely good. 

I downloaded the app about midway through my Lenten journey as an act of deeper intention. I was going to be disciplined. Focused. Present with God in a new way. And I was–at first. Right out of the gate, I was all up in that prayer game. Morning prayer-check. Midday prayer–check check. Evening prayer–check check check. Three times a day, like some kind of monk who also has Wi-Fi and an unlimited data plan.

But then I missed one. Then another. A meeting ran long and swallowed my midday prayer whole. I fell asleep during evening prayer–I mean fully, embarrassingly asleep, phone on my chest, mid-breath prayer becoming mid-breath snore. Then some days I'd open the app with good intentions and then just...not pray. The app notifications kept coming–oftentimes just sitting there like a beacon quietly judging me. It–more accurately, I–felt like a complete failure.

In his book Falling Upward, Fr. Richard Rohr speaks about failure in an interesting way. He writes, "When we fail we are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us." For Rohr, failure is a parade, an unbroken line stretching across generations.  

But it doesn’t feel like that to me. To me, failure feels like a complete breakdown. A crumbling. An interruption. A referendum of sorts on my worth. Maybe it feels like that to you too?

I don’t think Richard Rohr is trying to sell us on the idea that failure is full of fun, fanciful moments with candy being hurled at us from parade floats. I think he’s trying to help us find its rightful place in the human experience. Namely, that not one of us is the first person who has found themselves marching in the failure parade, nor will we be the last. 

Every saint, every sinner, every fantastic or fantastically terrible person of faith has counted themselves among the number in that parade–having fallen asleep during their prayers, having spoken words of anger instead of kindness during a tense moment, having started a new diet plan or workout plan only to be starting over again the following Monday, having disappointed the people we love. 

In other words, failure doesn’t make us unique or exceptional in the worst possible way. It makes us human. And–if we let it–it can soften us. It can loosen our grip on the illusion that we have to get everything right. That we have to be perfect in order to be loved just as we are. Failure can remind us that we belong to one another–not because of our successes, but because of our shared fragility.

In a very real way, failure has a way of bringing us back down to earth. Back to the truth of who we are. Back to the long line of ordinary people who are trying, stumbling, learning, and trying again. Not perfectly. But honestly.

And maybe that's exactly where God meets us. Not at the top of our game. Not in our most disciplined, check-check-checked moments. But in the stumble. In the snore. In the notification we ignored for the fourth day in a row. In the words we can’t take back. In the silence we chose not to break.

Because if failure makes us human, and if our humanity is precisely what God chose to enter and redeem, then maybe our failures are not as far from the sacred as we think. Maybe the crumbling, the interruption, the missed prayer, the misstep–maybe none of that disqualifies us from the very thing we were reaching for in the first place.

I still have the app. The notifications have all been turned off now, and some mornings I open it. And some mornings I don't. And I am more convinced than ever before that the God who made us for this long, stumbling, beautiful parade is far less interested in our perfection than in our willingness to keep walking.

The check marks were never really the point anyway. The reaching was. And as long as we're still reaching–no matter how imperfectly or how inconsistently–I think that counts for something. Maybe it counts for everything…

On the journey with you,
Pr. Melissa

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