Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

The Uses of Failure

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I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. 
-Thomas Edison
Image Credit

Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
Lauren Winner kindly sent me her book, Still about her divorce and mid-faith crisis.
I was struck by these sentences: I simply could not stay married. I came to believe that I could not do this thing I had said I would do; I could not do it. I was unable to do it. It is a mark of my charmed life that is was the first time I had ever tried to do something, and simply failed. And it was a failure: a spectacular, grave, costly failure.
I wondered: Is that indeed a charmed life? Not knowing failure? Can you imagine the stress levels if you’ve never failed, cannot fail? If failing is not an option?
·      * *  
The first failures of a normally high-achieving person are dreadful and humiliating.
Dying 
Is an art, like everything else. 
I do it exceptionally well. 

I do it so it feels like hell. 
I do it so it feels real, Sylvia Plath writes. 
Yeah, failing feels like hell; well, your first big failure, and your second… After your third, you shrug. Failure is now an option. Not so bad, not so unthinkable.  You are released into creativity.

* * *
Here are my three biggest failures to date: I went off to be a nun with Mother Teresa, when I was 17, left for the rest of my life I thought. I went up to boarding school to say goodbye to the nuns, went and said goodbye to my grandmothers and aunts.
And then, 14 months later, it was all unendurable. Oh, but the praise I had received. I had a stash of letters praising me. I belonged to a prominent Catholic family, and everyone had heard of it; everyone was predicting I would be the next Mother Teresa. And I was just 18 now. And leaving. Oh dear!!
At night, I stood before a statue of Mary (haven’t prayed to Mary since then…) and touched her feet in a sentimental gesture the other nuns did as they passed, and said, “Well, if I have to leave, give me TB, so I will have an excuse.”
No, no TB. I had to face failure and leave. And then, after a month at home, I coughed  blood, I had a shadow on the lungs. The TB I had foolishly prayed for appeared, but too late to be a convenient excuse… Lesson: do not pray foolish prayers!!
Other failures: I had an undergraduate degree from Oxford, and was accepted to a Ph.D on the mythopoeic imagination of Milton. (I don’t have the faintest idea now about what I might have written, but apparently I then had some ideas on the subject. Well, John Carey interviewed me, and I convinced him.)
All I had to do was get a First.  I thought I might; my tutor thought I might when she wrote my Ph.D reference. But I did not. Oh the shame! I was shattered! So no Oxford Ph.D for me. In fact, I moved left, from English to Creative Writing. Too crushed to apply to competitive US universities, I applied to schools with lots of funding, and went to the University which offered me the most money, the Ohio State University. Probably the right choice: I learned a lot about the craft and techniques of writing which I might not have in a snobbier school.
The third failure, the one which broke my pride was when my first book manuscript, which I was so sure would be published, which I struggled to write when Zoe was a baby, which I had told everyone about, was turned down by the publisher and agent. I was crushed!
 * * *
But I learned my lesson. I no longer defined myself by what I did. When people asked, I used to say I was a writer, I’d done xyz, I’d won xyz. Once I moved back to England from America, I waffle, “a bit of blogging, a bit of writing, a bit of business” and turn the subject to the other person. It’s setting up high expectations for yourself, or allowing others to hold them for you that makes failure so crushing. Being someone who does “a bit of this, and a bit of that,” well, that gives you the freedom to experiment and fail!
                                                           * * *
Both Roy and I were high-achievers, and, by temperament, very hard on ourselves and other people.  Both of us found it very hard to accept failure, stupidity or mistakes, our own, or each other’s.
When I started a publishing business–in which I didn’t quite know what I was doing, was partly learning from books, kind friends, and the internet, and partly inventing it as I went along–I made lots of mistakes. Some of them, of course, expensive ones!!
Roy would get cross. “Price to sell,” he’d say. “Oh, you under-priced!” he’d say. Oh the second-guessing.
In the summer of 2007, just when our publishing business was getting off the ground, I read Carol Wimber’s book “The Way it Was” about John Wimber, and how they established The Vineyard Movement at high speed. “Who were we to think that we were so smart that we should never make mistakes?” she wrote. They tried something; if it took, great. If there was a firestorm, they dropped it. And the willingness to experiment and fail meant they established the Vineyard at lightning speed.

That idea set me free. Who am I that I shouldn’t make mistakes? All human beings are limited. All human being make mistakes! Who am I that I should never get things wrong?

And that helped me enormously in business. Try something, risk it, we might get it wrong, make a mistake, lose money. Or we might not. Conversely, we might make a lucky bet, make a lot of money. “Who were we to think that we were so smart that we should never make mistakes?”
The willingness to fail releases creativity. And the failure and successes of the business helped me in blogging. I post almost every day, which means inevitably that some posts will be slight, some will bore some people, some will fail.
There is nothing like blogging daily to get you used to keeping the car moving, keeping writing, even if most posts sadly are less than your best because of the limitations of time and energy. There is nothing wrong with sometimes failing in a blog post. You still learn things you can use in a successful post. You still develop writing skills. You learn what you can do well–and what you cannot bring off!! And you conquer the fear of failing which might prevent you writing or sharing anything in the first place!!
* * *
I had lunch and went walking on Saturday with an old friend of mine from my undergraduate days in Oxford who has rarely failed. Her parents were a long serving Tory MP and a director of a famous, fabled investment bank. She went to England’s most exclusive girls’ boarding school, then on to Oxford, where she got a First, and  eventually a Ph.D. Got a job in Management in a leading FTSE company, and earned more than her husband, a consultant in a top London teaching hospital. Brilliant, pretty, extremely well-dressed, nice, with integrity. A straight arrow.
So she adopts her only child 7 years ago, from a nation known for their intelligence. And recently got him into a leading private school in London. She said that nothing, no university she had applied to, no exam she had taken, no job she had applied for, had every stressed her as much as getting this boy to a leading private school.
I have observed her consumed by this all year, and wondered why. I suddenly realized. She would have felt she had failed as a mother if her adopted son did not get into this posh school near their house. And she had rarely ever failed. She had always systematically set herself to succeed. Failure was not an option.
* * *
I am at the other end of the school saga, and last week attended an applying to university evening at my daughter’s school in Oxford. Haggard strained faces! Those who had themselves been to Oxbridge, and were successful were stressed about whether their daughters would follow their route. Those who had been to a mediocre university, but had nevertheless been successful wanted their daughters to have a better chance in life. And there were the haunted faces of those who had neither been successful in higher education or in life, but so wanted more for their daughters.
It’s a highly selective, highly competitive school. Like Lake Wobegon, everyone acts as their child is brilliance itself. The school’s self-esteem policy prohibits disclosure of marks. And then suddenly, in this pack of geniuses (if you believe their parents) some go to Oxbridge, and some go to Loughborough. No wonder, there were such strained faces.
I would have got as stressed as my old college friend if I had not failed before. If I had not learned that it’s okay to fail; it’s not so bad, you shrug your shoulders and get on with life. So truthfully, I am not stressed about university admissions. If she does not get into her first choice of university, I will feel as I have failed as an involved parent—and that will be true, because we have been distracted parents. We’ve left their education to the girls and the school. But knowing I’ve failed, well, it’s happened before. It’s part of being human. It no longer has the terrible shame it used to have for me.
Okay, I am trying to talk myself into sense. To tell the truth, they had representatives from Oxford, Cambridge etc. talk about interviews and personal statements and university visits and it seemed to us, Roy, me and our daughter a bit much to handle in the pressured final year at school. So she’s decided to do a gap year, and do her university application in the autumn, and then an amazing voluntary internship somewhere—24/7 prayer perhaps, Soul Survivor, Lee Abbey, the possibilities are endless.
So will I get stressed about university admissions when it finally comes time? Well, I don’t intend to stress. And if I do, I can always read this!

Christian and Buddhist Solutions to the Problem of Suffering

By

Carl Bloch






Okay, so we were somewhat early at Heathrow, breaking a bad habit of being the last people to board the plane–just when we hear “passengers Mathias, passengers Mathias.”

And so I wandered through the shops; oh my goodness, what an onslaught of consumerism!
Now I rarely shop. Literally, rarely enter a shop! Roy buys groceries, and most other things. I buy what I need on the internet. (In fact, I moved back to the UK in mid April 2004, and I reflected that the only piece of clothing I have bought in the UK in the last 7 years is a cardigan at Edinburgh Woollen Mills. I have got used to the American catalogues I shopped in LL Bean, Cold water Creek, Norm Thompson, and like a boring stuck-in-the mud have continued shopping there, and have paid shipping and customs duty for the clothes to be sent here. Roy tells me that this does not make economic sense, and he’s probably right, though I just shrug because I hate shopping. I pick up sweaters when we travel—and it’s harder then to resist entering shops because I have two girls.)
And so, the Alladin’s cave of Harrods and other blingy stores really caught my eye.
‘
“Do you know I haven’t bought any clothes in the UK for the last 7 years,” I said to Roy, in poor brave me tones.  “I don’t even know what my UK size is.” (Well, perhaps that’s just as well!!)
I glance at the price tag on a silk shirt and the drum beat of consumerism began to beat.
Must. Make. More. Money.
                           * * *
Now if it is essential to make money—for instance to  pay for the right school for the girls, albeit private, or for something we really, really want, like our house which we both fell in love with—that dreary drumbeat Must Make More Money can be energizing and creative. I enjoy lying face down, in concentrated prayer, seeking wisdom and creativity if I need money for an altruistic or creative or spiritual or healthy endeavour. Or even to pay bills!

But to buy stuff?
Nope. Condemning myself to make more money to buy pretty stuff is like signing my life away to being pricked by many griefs.
                               * * *
There is another way to deal with the siren call of consumerism and shops with all their pretty glitzy things. The endless black hole of The Next Thing.
Buddha discovered this.
It is a two world koan.
Desire less.
* * *
Buddha, Prince Siddharta, saunters forth from his sheltered palace and sees a sick man, an old man, a dead man. The inevitabilities—sickness (perhaps), aging, and death.
And is this the end of all mortal desire? He meditates under the Bodhi tree in Gaya, and formulates his Four Noble Truths,
Life is suffering.
The root of suffering is desire.
Suffering can be eliminated by eliminating desire.
Desire can be eliminated by the noble eight fold path–right views, aspirations, living, mindfulness, speech, conduct, effort, conscience.
Yeah, nice way to live if you can manage it.
                             * * *
God is just and God is merciful. And so God gives every religion some shadows, some intimations of the truth.
And that is indeed one way to avoid suffering. Reduce your desire. Witness: The subprime crisis and the global credit crunch and economic crisis, unmanageable consumer debt, home repossessions, the whole sorry freight of grief caused by unruly, out of control desires.
Tone down your desires, do not buy things unless you really, really want or need them,and you save yourself a lot of unnecessary  more-month-than-money syndrome, make-more-money slavery.  overwork, debt, anxiety, constrictions, sleeplessness, and sicknesses caused by overwork and worry.

Charles Dickens (who like Chekhov had has health permanently damaged by having to work hard as a young person to help support his family, a feckless family in Dicken’s case) famously formulated one secret to happiness “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds and six, result misery.” Saving 2.5% of one’s income can make the difference between happiness and misery, Dickens guesses.   I now, mercifully, can save a minimum of ten percent of what I earn, and am grateful for this, but there was a tense period of a couple of years when I was establishing my little business, when I did not do so. And so I can second Dickens.
Or to put it another way. Do you want to suffer less? Desire less.
* * *
                                                                  
And what’s the flaw in this noble injunction?
Yeah, tell a woman with PMS to desire less chocolate. Simple, ain’t it?
Tell an overweight person to run and diet until he or she is slim.
 Tell an anxious person to be a bit rational about their anxieties.
Tell an angry person to keep calm.
Tell a disorganized person to do first things first
Or an untidy person to put things in the right place.
Easy, isn’t it.?
Just stop it.
As in this sketch
                                                                        ***
The focus of Buddhism is cautious and negative—life is suffering, and we can avoid suffering by avoiding desire. If we want nothing, and love nothing, then nothing can wound us by its loss, brokenness, recalcitrance or betrayal.

However, Lewis famously says in The Four Loves,
There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one,  not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.
But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as a way in which they should break, so be it.   
* * *
Christianity has a positive focus. We are not to focus on the negative—on suffering and how to avoid it, not to live our lives in fear of suffering, tiptoeing on eggshells trying to avoid it.
We are to focus on a person. A very creative person (whose creativity is so essential an attribute that he is known as the Creator.
We are to align our lives with his wisdom.
And what will that look like?
Well, since God is infinitely creative, it will look different for each person. For C.S. Lewis, it meant writing, as it does for Michael Wenham of the brave Donkeybody blog, or for me. For Simon Cozens, it is being a missionary to the Japanese. For Beth Moore, writing Bible studies. For Heidi Baker, adopting 10,000 orphans. For my friend and fellow-blogger, Lesley Crawley, pioneer ministry.

So instead of avoiding desire to avoid suffering, we are to follow a person, whose words have been recorded. Certain things will stand out for us in letters of red or gold as the Spirit highlights them. And his spirit fills in the gaps of the written word. Offers specific directions for our lives.
It’s a far better road map than avoiding suffering by avoiding desire, isn’t it?
* * *
What does Christ say about suffering? That some voluntarily chosen suffering is essential to a decent Christian life. Follow him. How? By taking up our cross.
This again will mean different things to different people. For me, who am not particularly disciplined, it means, for starters, staying in the battle to exert self-discipline in what I eat, in trying to keep my body reasonably strong and healthy, in keeping up with the house ( I’m naturally untidy!!), in controlling my speech, annoyances, and moods, in basic self-discipline in sleep wake cycles (I am naturally a night person, but staying up reading or blogging till 2 is not the best thing if one lives with people—neither is it the best way to spend the next morning).  In making as much use as I can of my gifts. All these things give me plenty to be getting on with—and ironically, they are just the starting point of a life of taking up one’s cross and following Jesus.
* * *
What else does Christ say? That suffering is inevitable (John 16:33) This world has a crack in it. It will be redeemed, but while we wait, we groan.  However, we are to be of good cheer, despite the certainty of suffering, because of the power of Christ to give us grace to endure, to change us (and sometimes to change our circumstances). As Paul says, we will be able to handle both being abased and abounding through Christ who strengthens us.
And while we would never choose this refinement, suffering does refine us like diamonds, like gold. It takes its place as black borders, and splashes of red in the tapestry of our lives.
What else does Christianity have to say about the problem of suffering? We might not be told to desire less, but we are certainly told to sin less. Much—though by no means all!!—suffering is self-inflicted through sin– laziness, greed, self-indulgence, meanness. Selfishness. We sow bitter seeds, and sadly eat their fruit.
                            * * *
So while reducing desire reduces suffering, as Buddha said, and as anyone in debt or struggling with decluttering and messy houses can tell you, and while avoiding sin will reduce suffering as any counsellor can tell you, Christianity is not about avoiding, but embracing. Embracing a person, and dancing with him where he leads, sometimes on the mountain tops and sometimes in the valleys, sometimes in the wilderness and deserts, and sometimes through green pastures.
Bless me, oh Lord, and may I dance with you on the heights,  the mountain peaks, though green valleys, quiet waters and places of blessing, but Lord, better the wilderness and desert with you, than the fleshpots of Egypt or the milk and honey of the promised land without you.
                            Amen
                                                                              

Like is like Chess. As long as you have your King, you haven’t yet lost.

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It’s like Chess.  If you lose everything and have your King, you haven’t lost. But if you have everything, but lose your King, you have lost.                                                                                                  Zoe Mathias, aged 8