Journey
Mining the Consequence of Showing Up
A Peace and Justice Perspective
I call it “The School No One Ever Wants to Attend.” It’s the school of suffering and pain and loss, and there’s clearly no line of hopefuls queuing up to register. Who, after all, would be waiting with bated breath to be ushered into such a school? Who would ever choose such a potentially life-altering enrollment?
Still, might we, after some reflection, be able to name some learnings that have come our way because of attendance in that very school? Perhaps some wisdom earned by being brought to our knees through pain, illness, or the loss of a cherished loved one? Perhaps we’ve had to own our inability to save others? Found ourselves brought up short in the glaring light of a public forum? Underestimated the power of grace blessing our limitations?
And then there’s this: perhaps we’ve landed in the school no one ever wants to attend because of outright failure or actions for justice that yielded no apparent success. We may wonder if any learnings are worth the experience of watching our hard-earned reputation slowly collapse or our energies dwindle. We might be tempted to choose instead a path that is constantly cautious, that embraces no risks, that avoids failure at all costs
Ah, but here’s the wrinkle: failure itself can be transformative. We hear hints of that in the Principle and Foundation of Ignatian spirituality, which notes that “everything has the potential of calling forth in us a more loving response to our life forever with God.” 1 And yes, “everything” includes failure.
Author Dee Dee Fisher2 encourages each of us to find what she calls a soul-making room, a holy space in which we are in community with others. She believes that “the most essential work we have to do in this world is to marry the hope and vision of youth with our failures. This work allows us to become who we are meant to be. It releases a wiser, stronger power in us that will sustain us for the long haul. We cannot tap this power,” she asserts, “if we do not face and share our failures.”
In the safety of a soul-making room, we can acknowledge and name the learnings that have come into our lives and into our work for peace and justice through what may seem, at least on the surface, to be unproductive, or futile, or the end of the story.
A holy space was created in my IHM congregation’s Chapter of 2018.3 At this gathering, we invited a small group of our sisters to reflect back to us each day what they had heard. The reflection from the second day was especially enlightening. The reflectors noted that the day before, we had arrived at some solutions and had come up with a few answers.
But then they opened up significant “What if?” questions: “What if we also shared with one another our failures and what we learned from them? What if we shared what we wish we had done differently—in our collective life and in our individual lives? Might our best work be done when our hearts are broken by what we have seen and experienced?”4
As we sit with those questions, we have before us the witness of giants, holy ones who have given over their lives for the sake of a more just and inclusive world. They have sometimes had to live their “failures” out loud and with cameras rolling. Yet Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lewis, and Mahatma Gandhi, and Rosa Parks, and Malala Yousafzai, and Dorothy Day and a host of unnamed and unknown saints among us keep showing up, even when tangible results and success stories are hard to find. Their showing up keeps moving us closer to the fulfillment of God’s dream for all of us.
In his poem, “Self-Portrait,”5 David Whyte asks questions about our deepest experiences of both failure and transformation. He wonders:
“I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have been told, in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God.”
As we move forward, our prayer is that we may learn to live richly in the face of loss. Our hope is that our learnings will continue to be transformative for us as well as for our beautiful yet wounded world.
1 David L. Fleming, SJ, Draw Me Into Your Friendship, A Literal Translation & A Contemporary Reading of the Spiritual Exercises, The Institute of Jesuit Sources, St. Louis Missouri, 1996, p. 27.
2 Dee Dee Fisher, The Soulmaking Room, Upper Room Books, 2016.
3 A Chapter is the governing body of a religious congregation, in which members participate.
4 Questions from Day 2, reflections on Chapter 2018, Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Scranton, PA.
5 David Whyte, “Self-Portrait,” Fire in the Earth, Many Rivers Press, 1992.
