To establish a context, these reflections began with a story. It happened during an online conversation with my friend, David Johnson, and I don’t remember the situation he had been dealing with, but David clearly thought it had been time to leave it behind and, as he put it, to “Perform the ritual of failure and move on with dustless feet.” I was captivated by the concept and asked if it was original to him—he said, no, it wasn’t and he attributed it to John Hewitt, a mutual friend who had, incidentally, once been my Pastor. So, intrigued as I was, I contacted John, who said he had used the phrase, “sacrament of failure,” rather than “ritual,” and he thought the source was John Oman, a British/Scottish theologian.

I was familiar with Oman and a little research revealed that he had spoken of “the forgotten sacrament” to refer to the “shaking off of the dust” in Matthew 10:14. The context is that Jesus had sent his disciples out on a mission and said, when people refuse to welcome you and the gospel you preach, and refuse to offer you hospitality, shake the dust off your feet and move on! That is what Oman called “the sacrament of failure.” It is the acknowledgement that we have done all we can do, or should do, and it’s time to let go and move on. 

So much for the term itself. What then can we say about our own confrontations with failure? In what follows, I’ll offer what I hope are some helpful reflections on what I believe is this virtually unavoidable encounter, some drawn from my own experiences, which I will share later, and some from reading the thoughts and experiences of others, which I will identify at the end of the blog.

The Fear of Failure

Failure is something most of us have probably experienced—a wise person once said, “If you’re not failing, you’re probably not trying hard enough.” And yet fear of failure and feelings of shame and embarrassment can hold us back from taking on a challenge. In order to take on risks, one must consider failure as a possibility, but also as an opportunity to learn and to grow—and a necessary part of life itself with the tasks, projects, and roadblocks we encounter.

In fact, it is arguable that fear of failure is even worse than failure itself. In her 2008 Commencement address at Harvard University, titled “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” J. K. Rowling spent the first part of her address talking about her own early failures and contended that there is no real alternative to failure: “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”

So why do we tend to fear failure? When a baby is first learning to walk, she’s going to fall down many times, but—barring some physical handicap—she will surely eventually walk. We know that falling down and failing while learning to walk is just a part of life. So, why isn’t failure at other things treated this way?

The problem? Society!—which tends to celebrate the successes rather than highlighting the epic journeys towards success that are filled with trials, tribulations, upsets, setbacks . . . and failures. It’s just not as glamorous to talk about those things. So with the culture we live in tending to laud the achievements of those that haven’t failed—especially those that have endured risk and yet overcome them to claim success—the dark cloud of shame hovers over failure and we may tend to cower in a space inhabited only by odds-on chances of success.

But as one person advised, in the aftermath of a failure, ignore the naysayers, the people who shake their heads and say “I told you so.” Because there is a curious thing about failure: Once you’ve faced it, it becomes the enemy you know. That familiarity can help us move on with the confidence that a stumble or fall won’t be the end of the story—failure can have a way of motivating us, of keeping us hungry and also humble—and remember that it’s OK to fail, but it’s not OK to give up. “Shaking off the dust” doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning the task. It means leaving behind what didn’t work and moving on—which sometimes can mean trying again.

So we have walked through all kinds of reasons not to fear failure. Perhaps it would add further weight to the argument to list briefly some of the potential benefits of failure.

What are Some of the Benefits of Failure?

Let me suggest a few:

• One of the positive potentials of failure is that it allows individuals to learn from their mistakes, and move on.  In other words, when you fail, you tend to develop a better understanding of yourself so that not only will you be less likely to repeat the mistakes you make, but you also begin to ask deeper questions.
• Some have suggested that failure builds compassion, which makes a certain amount of sense. It’s hard to make fun of a person who has failed after having gone through the same painful ordeal yourself—i.e. there is a sort of “companionship,” a “community of failure.”
• For those who are willing to see failure not as a “wall” but as a “steppingstone” to further adventuresome projects, failure has the capacity to build creativity. That is, we may be more likely to question the “tried and true” and look for alternative ideas—to become less afraid to think “outside the box.”
• It is also highly possible for us to gain resilience from failure, which is important, because one failure isn’t likely to be the last one, plus simply living and working confront us with challenges that require resilience—the ability to adapt, to “bounce back,” from adversity and stress.

Finally, learning not to fear failure doesn’t mean that we seek it!  We simply learn not to be defeated by it, but to “shake the dust off of our feet” and move on. So from time to time we may embark on a task that we know carries a risk of failure because it also has a chance to be successful and meet an important need.  But there is nothing wrong, most of the time, with setting achievable goals that can become steppingstones as we move forward to confront tasks both simple and complex—the highly achievable and those covered in the possibility of the “sacrament of failure!”

In a second post, I’ll share some of my own experiences of failure that will, hopefully, “give life” to much of what has been said in these reflections on the sacrament of failure.

Some Sources That Were Helpful

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement, Harvard Magazine, YouTube, Sep 16, 2011.

The Psychological Benefits of Risk Taking, Rochelle Perper, on-line, June 23, 2014.

7 Surprising Benefits of Failure, Kentin Waits, on-line,  6 July 2016.

The Surprising Benefits Of Failure, Paul Koulogeorge, on-line, Nov 20, 2017.

”Shake Off the Dust”, Sermons and Writings by H. Stephen. Wendell Berry Shoemaker. Wendell Berry.