Amazing Catechists

Teaching and learning the faith together

Failure vs Success: Lessons from the Cross

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Do you know about St Bridget of Sweden?  If you don’t and you are a mom, you want to get to know her.  Here is an excerpt of her biography from catholic.com:

“In fact, nothing [St Bridget of Sweden] set out to do was ever realised.  She never had a pope return to Rome permanently, she never managed to make peace between France and England, she never saw any nun in the habit that Christ had shown her, and she never returned to Sweden but died, [a] worn out old lady far from home in July 1373” (read the full biography here).

Don’t you love her already?  I do.  How much of motherhood feels like failing at everything–only to die a worn out old lady!  The dishes are piled up (again), the house is a mess (again), I yelled at the kids (again), I didn’t pay a bill on time (again), I forgot even to ask my husband about his day (again)…the list goes on.  I’m not the only one, I know, who occasionally feels this way: the phrase “mom fail” has become commonplace in our culture.  You know, how you sum up the story to your friends about the time when you earnestly praised your oldest for his generosity of spirit, sunny attitude, and helpful nature–only to end by calling him the full name of the wrong child.  Mom fail.

Today I was sitting in the church mulling over the “both and”-ness of Catholic theology.  (This is a topic for another post, but you will get the drift in a minute.)

I am nothing (who am I that the Lord knows my name) and yet I am Everything (to the one who loves me so completely that He died for me).

I am nobody (one of billions) and yet I am Somebody (an adopted daughter of the God who created all things).

I am insufficient (brimming with faults and inadequacies) and yet I am Enough (willingness to cooperate with His grace being the only requirement).

So much of what I have tried has looked like failure: various groups I have started, certain friendships, even the little blog off in the corner of the internet.  Motherhood can feel like a failure at times; motherhood, which for me has had a way of exposing the depths of my temperamental deficiencies.  I feel often–not always, because there are those occasional Supermom days–like a failure.  Most days I am so quick to become angry, so preoccupied with my own thoughts as to brush aside an eager child’s slo-mo replay of a football move, so lazy as to ignore distasteful household chores, and yet so busy as to forget to read a book to my little kids.

There I sat in the church talking with God about this topic, and when I raised my eyes, I saw Him on the cross–a cross which, it struck me suddenly, sure looks a lot like failure.  What about the cross looks successful?  Without the eyes of faith, nothing.  There were those three days before the resurrection when the cross, far from looking like part of a divine plan for success, looked like the very depiction of defeat.

Motherhood can feel like living in those three days between the crucifixion and the resurrection.  In other words, I have the hope of the resurrection.  I have the hope that these things I do daily–cleaning, feeding, loving, hugging, teaching, listening, holding, tending, training–will end in victory.  But for now I live in the moment when they often look like failure; it’s precisely this interim wherein resides Hope.

I hope in the Lord, not in myself.  If I were to hope in myself, my family would be on the Titanic.  Instead, I hope in His mercy and in His grace, and I entrust everything–even what presently looks like failure–to the One who can and does redeem all things and who transforms what looks like failure into an eternal victory.

So I love St Bridget of Sweden because she reminds me that the world’s vision of success–implementing something productive, known, used, or profitable–is not God’s definition of success.  Someone who failed by every worldly metric is, in fact, a saint.  So what is success in God’s economy?  We learn from Our Lord that obedience to God’s will is the very definition of success–even if the results look to all the world like failure.  We have a saint to remind us of that, and should we forget her, we need only look at the cross.

(This post first appeared at www.inaplaceofgrace.com.  Photo by Tunde (2017) via Pixabay, CCO Public Domain.  Text by Amanda Woodiel (2017).  All rights reserved.)

Christ’s Resurrection and Ours

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The closest we’ll ever come to experiencing creation, as the Creator did, is to experience the re-creation of what’s already been created in new ways… like when the writer puts words on a blank page, or the pianist improvises arpeggios at the keys, or the artist finds new interpretation for the hues on the palette.

We, in some way, participate in creative endeavor, but we don’t create as God did: creating something from nothing. Even the amazing conception of a human person, whose genesis necessitates the genetic donation of his or her biological parents, is not a creation ushered forth from nothingness… but, rather, a loving gift of Creation already set in motion by the hand of God ages ago.

On the other hand, the closest we’ll ever come to experiencing resurrection, as Jesus did, will be our very own resurrections.

I find this to be the most astounding, stunning, and extraordinary reality of the Christian faith. That the person who dies will mysteriously live again… not just resuscitated, like a person who comes back from death thanks to CPR, or like Lazarus who was called out of the tomb by Jesus. (Cf. John 11:1-44.) Even though Lazarus lived again, his old body eventually died again.  No, one day, after we die, we will be truly alive in an eternal, non-stop, supernatural, transcendent, and glorified way. Thanks to the redemption won for us by the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Resurrection from the dead is a foundational truth of Christian faith—right after the idea that God could become incarnate. What a mighty God we have!

What Jesus did first, in rising from the dead with a glorified body, we, too, will do in the joy of heaven.

We find these ideas encapsulated in the Compendium, a question and answer type of catechism, which is a concise and faithful synthesis of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Question 126: What place does the Resurrection of Christ occupy in our faith?  [See CCC 631, 638.]

The Resurrection of Jesus is the crowning truth of our faith in Christ and represents along with his cross an essential part of the Paschal Mystery.

Question 131: What is the saving meaning of the Resurrection? [See CCC 651-655, 658.]

The Resurrection is the climax of the Incarnation. It confirms the divinity of Christ and all the things which he did and taught. It fulfills all the divine promises made for us. Furthermore the risen Christ, the conqueror of sin and death, is the principle of our justification and our Resurrection. It procures for us now the grace of filial adoption which is a real share in the life of the only begotten Son. At the end of time he will raise up our bodies.

Question 204: What is the relationship between the Resurrection of Christ and our resurrection?  [See CCC 998, 1002-1003.]

Just as Christ is truly risen from the dead and now lives forever, so he himself will raise everyone on the last day with an incorruptible body: “Those who have done good will rise to the resurrection of life and those who have done evil to the resurrection of condemnation” (John 5:29).

The Church gives us fifty days of Eastertide to ponder these mysteries! You might also want to consider picking up a copy of the Compendium for your shelves, as it presents a wonderful overview of the Catechism!