Making Mistakes
We should start off with a big whoo hoo! The day has arrived. The most hopeful day of the year. A new start is upon us. For 4,000 years, beginning with the Babylonians, humans have heralded the first day of the year as a time to cast off the bad and usher in the good. The Babylonians were the first to institute the tradition of resolutions with their most popular one being: return used farm equipment. Festivals and rites are celebrated the world over - promoting the age of the clean slate.
In Wales, at the first toll of midnight, the back door is opened and then shut to release the old year and lock out the bad luck. Then at the twelfth stroke of the clock, the front door is opened and the New Year is welcomed with all of its good luck.
Here in the U.S. we share a kiss at the stroke of midnight, which derived from masked balls common throughout history. Tradition held that the masks symbolized evil spirits from the old year and the kiss was the purification into the New Year.
For 4,000 years, we as humans have celebrated the beginning of the year with celebrations offering us clean slates - the chance to close the door on our bad luck, bad decision, poor choices, misguided behaviors and open a new door - one that offers us the chance to start over, cleanly.
And for 4,000 years, there is a part of us that knows this is just a bunch of bunk! Yes, you heard me - bunk. Researchers agree that three weeks after this day, in mid January, nine out of ten of us will have broken our New Year's resolutions.
And yet we don't need to be told this. We know it on some level. An effort doomed to fail from the beginning because there is no one among us who is offered a clean slate void of past mistakes. They live under our skin, residing like tattoos or scars. We may want to close the door on our mistakes each January first; but truth be told, the haunting part of them slips through, reattaching to us as we open up that new door each year.
Every few months or so, I have a lay-awake-at-night-regret session with myself about my first husband. Young and naive, I convinced myself two accelerator personalities could make it work. We needed a brake. A quote by Ann Beattie often runs through my head, "the real killer was when you married the wrong person but had the right children." But, in getting married at 21, I had made a mistake. And no matter how many emotional doors I try to close, no matter how many forgive-myself rituals I go through, the memory and the regret stays put - not as intense as it once was, but certainly there, like the stench of lingering kerosene.
Some of us carry around larger mistakes. My sister has a patient who was watching her two children in the bathtub when the phone range. She left the bathroom to retrieve the phone for no more than a minute and a half, with her four and two-year-old in the tub, came back, and the two-year-old had drowned. Now my sister treats this patient for depression, and wrestles herself with how best to provide care for her whole family. A mistake that haunts more than one person.
Mary Phifer recounts in her book, Letters to a Young Therapist, a mistake that continues to trouble her: "One of my saddest cases was a teenage boy whose father killed himself in a drunk driving accident. After the funeral, Brandon came in with his mother. The two of them fought constantly. Brandon ran away from home, yelled at his mom and stole from her. At one point, I suggested Brandon should move into a group home where there would be more control. The mother and son never returned to therapy. When I analyzed what had happened, I gave myself a well-deserved kick in the pants. These two traumatized people only had each other. Their fighting was a way to stay connected and diverted from their pain. I was a fool to think of separating them."
All of us make mistakes. All of us are haunted by them. If we are lucky, we've lived a life where our mistakes aren't so damaging; but after ten years of ministry, I rarely see folks getting through life without their own or others' mistakes seriously impacting their life and outlook.
You may have had parents who you wish hadn't made so many mistakes. You wish they had been gentler in their discipline, kinder with their words. You wish they hadn't tried to live their life through your own. You wish that they had loved you more fiercely, held you with more solace, hadn't used the back of their hand in place of firm boundaries. In short, you live with the mistakes your parents made - often vowing never to make the same mistakes yourself.
You may have lied, cheated or demeaned another. You may have used half-truths, manipulated or connived your way into or out of a job, a relationship, a friendship, a position of power. You may have been quick to judge and slow to forgive. You may have dismissed people more than once due to class, race or upbringing. You may have drunk yourself through the highpoints of your career, your children's accomplishments, your spouse's endearment. You may have used love as a weapon, waiting to tell a family member you loved them, only to have them die before you got to tell them how you really felt.
For 4,000 years we have tried to wrestle with our own or others' mistakes by making resolutions to forget, fix or let them go...but they ultimately fail. Mainly, because we assume a clean slate is offered us when it isn't. So where does this leave us, besides offer an awful depressing sermon. Well, I found some help from an unlikely source. An art teacher.
In a lesson she promoted - when drawing in her class, if you made a mistake - she would say, "Don't erase the mistake, make it beautiful."
Don't erase the mistake, make it beautiful. This approach to mistakes released a creative process by which I could reevaluate what to do with my own and others' screw-ups. How I could take something that was damaging, hurtful, wrong, scary, or painful and make it into something that brings more light, joy and creative energy into my own life and others. How to make it beautiful.
I recently read about a fellow who had spent the younger part of his years dealing drugs. His avenue to a more meaningful life came when he got a tip that the authorities were going to raid his apartment. Now, unlike his friend who was incarcerated and sentenced with a heavy penalty, he managed to take the $40,000 he had on hand and escape serving time. But his narrow escape from incarceration proved a turning point. Instead of continuing on the same path, he joined the priesthood. He took a vow of poverty and gave away the $40,000 to those he had harmed in the past with his mistakes - users and innocent victims of the drug culture. He made a mistake, and yet made something beautiful with it.
Perhaps the most famous example is of Oskar Shindler. Shindler first made a substantial profit over the plight of the Jews in war-torn Poland and later realized the depth of his mistake. He then started to shelter Jews by recruiting them as workers, and insisted to Nazi authorities that they were essential industrial workers critical to the German war effort, saving 1,200 lives in the process. He took a mistake and made it into something beautiful.
Or let's take Alfred Nobel, an engineer who invented and developed dynamite in 1866. He went on to build 95 companies and laboratories in more than 20 countries. Through the sale of dynamite and other explosives, bought predominately by governments using the material for bombs and explosives, Mr. Nobel became a very wealthy man. But as he looked over his life, he also saw the destruction, devastation and death associated with his invention. So with the majority of his vast fortune he created the Nobel Peace Prize. The Prize was first awarded in 1901 to those people whose work most benefited humanity. It was set up to reward human ingenuity toward peace. He took what he later viewed as a mistake and made it into something beautiful.
Or how about some examples of what others have done when a mistake was done to them.
I found an article highlighting two mothers whose sons had both died as teenagers from gun violence perpetrated by other teens. Their life work now is to go into juvenile homes and talk to kids about their choices. They formed a non-profit group - Life Sentence - which educates youth, parents and the public on the effects of violence. They spend most weekdays in jails and detention centers telling kids that the bad choices they make have consequences that stick around and touch lots of other lives. They use simple exercises to spread their message. Lifting a bill into the air, one of the moms asks the kids, "Who wants this?" Hands shoot up. Then she crumples the bill, and tosses it on the floor, steps on it and grinds it with her shoe. Then she says, "Who wants this now?" picking up the mangled bill. Hands still go up. She says, "Sometimes our lives are like that: crumpled, torn up, and dirty. But that dollar still has value, you have value!" she says. They later ask, "Are you going to change the world or hurt the world?" Their work with over 6,000 children pays off by the letters of gratitude they receive from numerous kids who thank them for sharing their story, reminding them that their life has worth - how they needed to hear that message and how it served to change their life. By reminding kids of the inherent worth and dignity of their life, they are doing deeply religious work. These two mothers took a mistake and made it into something beautiful.
In the real world, this taking a mistake and making it beautiful is what starting over really means. No matter what our New Year's resolutions suggest in their offering, a blank slate is never obtained, but a chance to change the course is.
My son and I study fiddle together. A couple of weeks ago we were preparing for a recital and he kept making mistakes and wanting to start over from the beginning. I had to remind him that as much as he wanted to start over, his teacher and accompanist were going to keep going on if he messed up; that he had a chance to make it beautiful after the mistake, not go back and start over. He had two choices, neither of them involved reversing time and beginning again: he could stand there and demand that "this is not the way it was supposed to be" - basically being stuck mired in a standstill or moving on, dancing with the mistake, slowly and surely bending it, redirecting it into something meaningful, something positive, something beautiful.
So often we are stuck like my son. Hoping for do-overs we stand firm, looking and pointing at the screwed-up moment in the past - fixated on wishing we could do it over while the world keeps moving on without us.
But my friends, days spent in longing for do-overs are lost days.
This morning my message is simple: give up on longing for do-overs - stop standing there wishing for do-overs and get on with it!
I think we know deep down that the real work of addressing our mistakes as religious people takes more than forgiveness or absolution; it takes a commitment to this art teacher's directive as a spiritual calling. For when we make our mistakes beautiful, we serve to fade the scar, lift the vaporous haunt even more - allowing joy, and life and celebration into our lives and those around us.
So as this New Year's Day is as fresh as it gets, I'm giving you an assignment. I want you to take a mistake, either one that was done to you, or one that you've made, and make it beautiful.
Take your time figuring out how to do this. I've ruminated on one of mine for the last week, and I'm not sure I've figured it out, but it's serving as a tweaking spiritual assignment. I'd like you to do the same. May we have the strength, insight and courage to do just that - make some mistakes beautiful. Amen.
January 1, 2006