I’m a famously terrible handyman. Usually my attempts to fix things end in frustration for me and something around my house broken beyond repair. A few years ago, we had an empty space in our bathroom that seemed like the perfect place to install a few built-in shelves. It was a simple enough project but still far beyond my capabilities.
My brother-in-law happens to be a carpenter so I got in touch with him and asked if he would help me put them in, which led to the two of us spending a whole Saturday together working on these shelves. I cannot begin to recount the number of mistakes and blunders that I made along the way. In all honesty, it probably would have been easier for him to just install them himself. Him letting me help felt more like a favour than anything else.
I wondered as we worked: “am I just getting in the way?” Then the realization dawned - for both of us, this project was more about spending time together than building shelves. If anything, my lack of ability when it came to making things with my hands was an opportunity for us to grow in friendship as I learned from his patient instruction.
Our broader culture doesn’t have much of a category for failure unless it helps you to achieve greater success. We say things like “it’s okay to fail, as long as you learn from it” – which can be good advice, although it can actually be discouraging if we find ourselves failing over and over again. What if success seems (or actually is) totally unattainable?
It can certainly feel this way when it comes to building a relationship with God. As a Church, we have a moral law - a set of commandments designed to steward us towards love of God and love of our neighbour - but even the most holy and perfect among us never keep that law perfectly. For the average Catholic, it can feel like discipleship is one long string of failures to live up to the standard we’ve been called to.
What are we to do when it seems like we’re falling behind rather than growing? What’s the point of even trying if our attempts will only result in failure and it seems it’s never possible to actually succeed? Am I making God angry by my seemingly constant regressions?
The only answer to these questions is a reorientation in our point of view.
Somewhere along the line, most of us fall into the subtle trap of believing that our discipleship is more about perfection than love. This is a sneaky kind of scrupulosity that can hurt us more than help us. It’s important to examine ourselves and ask some hard questions - do I believe that my worth in God’s eyes is tied to my sinlessness? Do I spend more time thinking about my failures than God’s love? It can be hard to ask these because sometimes scrupulosity masquerades as virtue! The difference is that virtue is concerned with Jesus’ work in us, not our efforts at self-perfection (as important as those are).
The truth is that we worship a God who cares more about being close to us than our keeping a clean streak of sinlessness. Our constant failures do not trigger in Him anger and disappointment - they spur Him on to draw close to us. Like my brother-in-law and our day of shelf building, it’s more about the relationship than the project.
Part of this might be traced back to a misunderstanding of Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:48 “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” In Greek, the original language of this passage, the word used is τελεοι and it’s just as rightly translated as “mature.” The word “telos” in English is closely related to it - it means our final end, our ultimate goal or purpose. What is the ultimate end of a human person? It’s to love God and love our neighbour (Matthew 22:36-40). Jesus’ command to be perfect is not a command to never fail - it’s a call to become perfect in our love for Him and for others.
What better way to do that than by letting yourself be loved by God when you fail, rather than turning away in shame? To mature into receiving His goodness rather than obsessing over your faults and sins? To see the thousands of ways God’s mercy has kept you from sin than to constantly hold before your mind the one time you fell? It’s important to be careful not to allow the devil to lie to you with shame, the belief that you are intrinsically bad, not that you’ve done something wrong. The Holy Spirit doesn’t accuse you of being “bad”; he convicts you when you fail and calls you in love and mercy to something deeper.
There’s a little practice recommended by Father Jacques Philippe in his beautiful work “Searching for and Maintaining Peace” that’s been incredibly helpful to me when I struggle and fall. He recommends that when we experience failure, we start by letting ourselves feel the weight of it. Especially when our failure is sinful in nature, this can help us develop a sense of “true contrition,” or real regret at the way our sins separate us from God.
However, rather than staying in that place, he encourages you to move to gratitude – gratefulness to God for not letting you sin or fail in more serious ways, for His infinite mercy, and for His love. This step is the turning point - our sin moves us to gratefulness for God’s love, not to turn away. Finally, we ask for His grace and firmly resolve to avoid that sin or failure again in the future, knowing in humility that it’s likely we’ll still fall again.
This three-step pattern is a beautiful way to receive God’s kindness and truly break free from the chokehold failure can put on us. Living in God’s freedom instead of our shame means turning our attention from ourselves to God. It means worshipping Him where you’d be tempted to convict yourself. It means focussing on living in and receiving His love, not on never sinning. This doesn’t mean you don’t work to avoid sin - it means that you focus on God’s love as the site of healing for sin.
It’s at the Cross, the deepest failure of humankind, that the fulness of God’s love, healing, and mercy was poured out. Every time you fail, whether it’s for the first time or the millionth - that same love and mercy and freedom is available to you.