How acceptance of failure can make us open to God

It is evident from today’s second reading that, like all real human beings, Saint Paul’s character was an amalgam of inconsistencies bordering on contradiction. On occasion, he boasts in ways perilously close to vanity, if not pride, about his religious pedigree, his social status, and the depth and breadth of his learning. At other times, as in today’s reading, he speaks with disarming self-awareness about his sins and the persistent temptations he experienced.

Paul’s honesty and the reassurance from God that he reports is encouragement to all of us who share his experience. His transparency reminds us that failure is our friend not our enemy. Acknowledging and living with failure is not only an inevitable aspect of our humanity but an essential aspect of sanctity, the first, indispensable step to becoming a saint. On the other hand, nothing saps initiative and isolates us from our fellow human beings more effectively than fear of failure.

As St Paul makes clear from his own experience, the acceptance of failure and fallibility opens us to the effective work of God’s grace in our lives. The first of the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (or, more starkly in Luke, “Blessed are the poor”) is rendered in one translation as, “Blessed are they who know their need of God”. As St Augustine has it: “Let us never assume that even if we live good lives, we will be without sin; our lives should be praised only when we continue to beg for pardon.” (Sermon 19, 2-3) Saint Paul’s disarming frankness and reassuring realism are a million miles from both deadening complacency and debilitating anxiety. But most significantly, his honesty is diametrically opposed to the only vice that Jesus himself rails against in the gospels, namely, hypocrisy.

What makes hypocrisy so deadly is not so much the lies we tell others about ourselves, but how over time we ourselves come to believe those lies. In hypocrisy, we fashion a virtual world from which there is no escape, until the moment when the scales fall not only the eyes of others but from our own. But painful as that moment is, it is our salvation. The only effective antidote to hypocrisy is coming genuinely to believe that all we have has been given to us, or better, shared with us, by God, albeit through multiple secondary agencies. And it is in that recognition that genuine humility is rooted. As Saint Paul says, “It is by the grace of God that I am what I am.” (1 Cor 15:10) And, as Denys Turner once wrote, one of the surest signs of genuine humility is a sense of humour that finds nothing more worthy of mirth than our own selves.

It’s recorded that the late Cardinal Basil Hume, when a monk of Ampleforth, was accustomed to giving two pieces of advice. To young novices: “Take God seriously, take your vocation seriously, but for God’s sake, do not take yourself seriously.” And to a particularly gifted member of the community: “Enjoy the praise, but don’t inhale.”