Success & Failure: Life Goes On   

Rev. Bruce R. Russell-Jayne

Good Morning, I am Bruce, and I am a Unitarian Universalist.  When people ask me my religion I say “Unitarian Universalism.”  It used to be quite popular in UU churches to identify oneself as a hyphenated UU.  People would say, “I am a UU-Humanist,” or a “UU-Christian.”  I used to say I was a “UU-Buddhist-Humanist-Pagan.”  I had explored each of these religions and found things that helped me.  After I had delved deeply into them I began to claim them as part of my faith system.  For awhile I called myself a “Born Again Pagan.”  By that I didn’t mean I had had a sudden conversion experience - I don’t trust those - but Paganism’s honoring of women and the earth spoke strongly to me.  When I began to celebrate the cycle of the seasons on the Pagan wheel of the year, I physically and mentally became more in tune to the world around me, and that in turn helped me to feel more emotionally connected and stable.  Later I reclaimed Christianity in it’s UU form.  I get a lot from Judaism, too, but I never could quite claim it enough add another hyphen.  Finally, I dropped all the hyphens.  UUs consider all these traditions to be part of our religion.

The turnover of the calendar year on January 1st is not exactly a Pagan holiday, but it’s close enough for UUs.  We keep time with the rhythm of the seasons realizing the value of acknowledging changes that happen in people as the world changes around us.  So, while it was my Pagan friends who showed me the worth of living in harmony with progression of the earth’s cycle, it’s not necessary to be a Pagan to delve into the spiritual aspects of a New Year’s celebration.  It is a time when people of many faiths pause to take stock of the last year, and think about how to come to terms with their successes and failures, and use them to become better people in the future. 

There is something inescapably final about the end of the year.  We say we close out the fiscal year; the numbers for exactly twelve months are put down in the ledger books.  We tally up our football teams wins and losses for the record.  In our personal lives we have chosen some options and experienced the consequences.  Some questions have finally been answered - we no longer doubt the outcome.  We have visited some places and seen some people for the last time.  We are all one year older and one year closer to the ends of our lives.
In the past one year cycle, each of us has had experiences which have taught us something about ourselves that we had not known before.  When the Reds turned out to be so good last summer, Cece and I found out we could really enjoy being sports fans.  When my mother went back into the hospital for bleeding from a surgery, I learned a new appreciation for my siblings who were there for her in an emergency, and I thought about how our relationships are changing.  You might have had a new demand put on you that made you behave in a way that seemed strange to you.  You might have met someone new who opened up new worlds to you that were completely closed a year ago.  Each year, as we are born across the seasons by life’s events, parts of us that were hidden from us are revealed.  Are we happy with the our successes and reconciled to our failures?   As we look back and try to make sense of the year’s events, how does our faith system help us gain wisdom from them?
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My text for this sermon is a book for small groups I brought back from our UU Association General Assembly called Heart to Heart by Christine Robinson and Alicia Hawkins, respectively the minister and the leader of small group ministry at the First Unitarian Church of Albuquerque.  In their chapter on “Success and Failure” they say, “success almost always feels good and failure almost always feels bad, but in the totality of our lives, things are usually more complicated.”   I’m sure we can all think of a time when we caused a calamity, but then lived to see some good come out of it.  Once when I was swimming with my granddaughter, I let her face go under the water which scared her.  My daughter lost some trust in me that day.  Over time, I have learned to be more careful with my granddaughter in the pool, and she has learned to put her face in the water, and my daughter trusts me more again.  Conversely, I’ll bet we can tell stories of achieving a long sought after success that didn’t make us as feel as happy as we had hoped it would.   Maybe we pursued a goal that someone else set for us, and it wasn’t what we really wanted in the first place.  Maybe paid too high a price to earn a position or recognition.

Nonetheless, we invest a lot of emotional energy into pursuing success, and our experiences of failure or lack of success may weigh heavily on us when we look back over the year.  So, if we are to profit from our practice of taking personal inventory, it would be beneficial if we had some tools that would help us keep from being weighed down too heavily by our failures or lack of success.  I will tell you a few of the things I use, but first I qualify my advice by saying I am not free of these same kinds of concerns.  I quote Rainer Maria Rilke:
      “Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good.  His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours.  Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find these words.”
The advice I give this morning is intended only as a touch point from which a person might build her or his own understanding of how to cope with success and failure.  Take what you like and leave the rest.
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We learn what success is supposed to look like through not so subtle messages from our families and our society.  Success means having a fulfilling job, 2 cars, a house in the burbs, a loving spouse, and kids involved in all kinds of activities so they can have more success in life than you.  Being unemployed, divorced, or your kids not at the top of their class implies you have failed.  Right here is where I think our UU Principles encourage us to be different.  They tell us we affirm and promote the inherent dignity of every person - and acceptance of one another.  An extrapolation of this is that success and failure are not the most important things about a person.  They go on to say we promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning and spiritual growth.  I take this to mean it is up to us to define for ourselves what we call success.

I parented 3 children through their teen years.  I wanted certain things for them, and I tried to make available to them opportunities to explore the world, hoping they would all go to college.  They each have found their own way in the world; one went to college, one joined the army, and another entered the work world.  Whenever they chose a path different from the one I thought was best, it was hard for me to let go of my expectations for their lives and not feel like I had failed them.  But you know, they are each wonderful people, who are living wellwith their decisions, and I am proud of them.  My definition of their success was not the same as theirs, and I am very glad now they created their successes in their own way.

Hawkins and Robinson advise, “It’s harder to define our own failures, but we have to do that, too.”  For example, I know a woman whose mother stayed at home to raise her children, and her mother told her she should do the same.  However, she wanted to work outside her home and struggled with the feeling she was failing her mother.  She felt she not only had to be be a success in her career, she had to somehow convince her mother she was not a bad parent.  Of course, with all the internalized messages about raising children, all parents have to come to terms with this issue.  And all parents know - in raising our children, no matter how hard we try - we’ll come up short some of the time.  That’s why, when we assess our performance, it is important we create our own set of realistic expectations and not beat ourselves up if we are adhering to the  life script our parents or anyone else would impose on us.
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In the face of success or failure, what matters is that we believe in ourselves.  If we get a promotion at work or if we lose our job, we have to respond similarly, acknowledging our fate and thinking, “I have something to learn from this, and it does not define who I am.”  Yes, our successes and failures contribute to our life stories, some of them in very significant ways, but they don’t totally define who we are.  When we turn over in our mind an episode of our lives, it helps put it into perspective with all the events of the past year and of our entire lives for that matter.  Looking at our lives in aggregate gives a wider view, one in which we can see the various aspects of our personality and sense the balance between our triumphs and our shortcomings.  You are the only person who can look at your whole self, and when you do, you know you contain much more than what one success or failure can say about you.

“Success can be dangerous if it causes us to concentrate on developing one aspect of ourselves to the detriment of all others.  We’ve all known successful people who were lured by their talents, luck, and hard work into a terribly one-sided life.”   A classic example is the medical doctor who is a wonderful healer, devoted to helping save lives, but who spends so much time at work he has little time for his own children.  We are fascinated by the extravagant lifestyles of sports and entertainment personalities, and we tut-tut when they succumb to the many temptations to ruin it all.  We may have spent the last however many years honing our job skills and becoming recognized as a professional in our field, but when the economic downturn comes, we could still be out of a job.

“When life brings us success, we need to make sure we are healthy and balanced...When the inevitable failures come along, we need to invest in other parts of our lives.”   When we have done everything we can think of to help our child get good grades in school, and the report cards still aren’t super, it may be time for us to take a few lessons in painting or to join an exercise class that will give us a sense of accomplishment.  If our technical skills were learned in the Nineties it may be time to learn some new ones for the Two Thousand Teens.  “Diversification serves us well when we feel we are failing.”

As our meditation this morning told us, “The meaning of a life is not contained within one act, or one day, or one year.  As long as we are alive, the story of our lives is still being told, and the meaning is still open.”   Our successes and failures alone, or in aggregate, do not totally define us.  Every new act we perform matters and becomes part of our life story.  We add new chapters all the days of our lives, and we can change the plot, add characters, and give ourselves another role to play.  The end of the story is not yet written.
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What matters most about all our attempts at living is not so much whether we succeed or fail but what we create inside ourselves and in our relationships.  So the questions we ask after each success or failure are, “What does this say about me?” and “How has this affected others?”   It is on this spiritual level where we judge ourselves and where we can learn and apply life’s lessons.  That is why it is fitting to do some spiritual work on ourselves when we come to the turn of the New Year.  My hope for us is that we can keep a wide perspective when we take personal inventory, and that we learn to reject shaming messages about our failures or our successes.  I believe that if we look into our souls, deep inside where our essence can be known, we can find those beautiful parts of our humanity, like love, compassion, and hope.  And when we find them, we can determine to live out of them, to define our lives by them as we go forward.  If we do this, our lives will be successful.