What’s to be learned through failure, through being humbled by our own faults? Generally that’s the only way we grow. In being humbled by our own inadequacies we learn those lessons in life that we are deaf to when we are strutting proudly and confidently. There are secrets, says John Updike, which are hidden from health. This lesson is everywhere in scripture and permeates every spirituality in every religion worthy of the name.
The biblical scholar Raymond E Brown offers an illustration of this from Scripture. Reflecting on how at one point in their history, God’s chosen people, the Israelites, betrayed their faith and were consequently humiliated and thrown into a crisis about God’s love and concern for them. Brown points out that, seen at long range, this seeming disaster ended up being a positive experience: “Israel learned more about God in the ashes of the Temple destroyed by the Babylonians than in the elegant period of the Temple under Solomon.”
