The Truth About Failure

Growing up in the panhandle of Oklahoma, I found myself surrounded by religion. In my hometown of less than 2,000 people, there were at least 8 churches that I can recall, all Christian.

I never gave it a second thought until I became a teenager and started developing ideas and opinions of my own about the world around me. My observations produced a definite appreciation for religion. So many churches! To me, it meant religion provided people with something so invaluable that not one, two, or even three churches could or should be built to facilitate it.

I attended church, but not because my family told me I should. I started going to an evangelical, self-proclaimed non-denominational church in a nearby town with my best friend and continued doing so throughout high school. I prayed, worshipped, socialized, ate, and even slept there sometimes. My dad died on a Sunday my senior year of high school, and a week later I was in service at my church, sitting on the front row. After his sermon, my pastor said, onstage with his mic still on, "Luke, I've been looking at you this whole time and can't help but feel moved to pray for you." The entire congregation surrounded me and we all wept together.

It is for this reason precisely that I'm drawn to religion.

I've never felt more alive with religion or more at peace with myself, something I've noticed to be common amongst people everywhere. On the other hand, religion has raised more questions in my mind about life than anything else I've yet experienced. My deep appreciation for the divine and desire to understand what it is is what characterizes my occupancy in a world of questions without concrete answers, one dominated by human emotion and driven largely, I believe, by fear. What comes with religion is, to paraphrase the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, an answer to the complex question of life itself and its apparent lack of meaning. When the desire to understand the world converges with the fear of failing to understand it, religion is born. 

Religion embedded a formidable sense of morality in young Luke. Before I came to college and started living on my own, I thought I had a definitive sense of right and wrong. For instance, I knew for certain that murder, hate, and lying were all wrong, and by the same token, I knew without a doubt that compassion, love, and honesty were all right, or "good."

Because of religion, I'm currently at war with myself. I simultaneously revere and despise my morality because it makes me feel so conflicted yet I can't seem to shake it. I've come a long way from classifying things as simply black or white in typical evangelical fashion, but I haven't quite decided for myself how much morality is necessary for the survival and proper function of society and how much is superfluous remnants of ancient superstitions regarding some cosmic sense of judgment.

I haul my morality around with me wherever I go. It wakes up with me in the morning and goes to sleep with me at night. I am married to my in-flux sense of right and wrong. I bring it with me when I go to class, or don't go to class, and it speaks to me about how I should feel about my behavior. It's like my friend's pit bull Molly. She's so damn annoying, and from time to time while riding in the car, she will invariably step on my crouch with her sharp dog talons, but how much can anger can you really hold toward something so cute and innocent and willing to give love without asking anything except the most basic of amenities like food and water in return? All that doesn't keep me from wanting to kick Molly when she inconveniences me.

I refuse to let my morality get in the way of me doing what I want to do, when I want to do it, as long as I don't hurt anybody else. But that last qualifying clause "as long as I don't hurt anybody else" is the kicker. It's because of that clause that I question my behavior at all. I'm so afraid of letting other people down. I'm so afraid of letting myself down and coming up short of whatever mysterious vision I think my life should be. Because, really, should it be anything at all? My human side says yes but my rational side says not necessarily.

College is a wonderful test of faith in oneself and one's own sense of morality. "Should I go to class?" Well, if you want to pass and get one step closer to graduating, then yes. There's nothing good or bad about that answer. It's pretty straightforward in its moral approach to the situation.

I want failure to be something I embrace as equally as I embrace success.