These excerpts are from Waldo Beach's "Education for Failure," his 1957 Palm Sunday sermon at Duke Chapel. It seems especially appropriate at the moment, what with the Olympics on the horizon and assorted contests/rivalries spawning an array of unsettled feelings in me -- some directly, and some from the commentary I've glimpsed. I can come up with various objections to Beach's assertions, of course -- after all, he preached this over fifty years ago, and in this post-9/11-era, we have to stand guard against would-be dictators who want everyone to live in a state of preparation for tragedy.

But I feel Beach's claims are worth pondering nonetheless -- particularly as I watch friends grapple with recent tragedies that have indeed been heartwrenching enough to shake or even shatter their faith. My minister delivered a beautiful, heartfelt sermon yesterday on the love of God being like gravity -- always present, able to keep us grounded -- but I also stood next to a woman up the hill from a child's ashes being buried who spoke of no longer being an agnostic: she now didn't believe in God, period.

Much of the psychological quackery that passes for religion helps to sustain and to perpetuate this American dream of success [that "everybody has to be a winner"]. Vital, successful living is guaranteed if you practice these scientific ten step. It's so simple, you can't lose. It is rare that anyone challenges this abracadabra. But the fatal weakness in this whole scheme is suggested by an exchange of letters in the newspaper some time back. Somebody wrote a testimonial describing glowingly how a certain athlete of indifferent ability, by viritue of practicing the ten steps to success, had won the 440 race handily in the next meet. Then somebody else wrote in: "Alright, but what if the ten steps to success had been practiced by all the runners in the meet?" That question punctures neatly the whole inflated, fantastic ideal of success.

Everybody can't be a success. There have to be also-rans. Everybody can't be an "A." There have to be B's, and C's, and D's, and F's. This is life's built-in grade curve. There is great peril in the whole idea of education for success, and especially the way success is understood on campus, as meaning coming in first, winning out.

...Tragedy comes in many forms. It may mean a sudden catastrophic blow. Sudden death smashes in our house of serenity, leaves us numb and powerless --- unless we have acquired some resources of spirit and mind to draw on. Everyone encounters some smashing tragedy of this sort, or at least a brush with it along the way. Yet our education is so carefully oblivious to this radical evil in life, so preoccupied with successful and happy living, the specter of death and tragedy is avoided until unavoidable. We practically have a phobia about it, like William Randolph Hearst, who refused to have anyone mention "death" in his presence. The catastrophic, devastating emergency just doesn't fit our scheme. So we are not unlike third-grade schoolchildren in a civil defense air raid test. They must be considerably mystified about human destiny when they crawl down under their desks during the air raid, and then crawl out to resume reading Cinderella where they left off before the siren sounded.

Though there are the sharp and sudden tragedies, the usual type of failure are of another sort. These are the small and seeping failures of daily living, the gradual dying of hopes and dreams, the gray disenchantment of the years, the slow attrition of time's blows, the unspectacular failures of talent and intelligence into a dull mediocrity, the settling down of high courage into a tired, middle-aged cynicism. Countering at every point in life the hope for a better day tomorrow, the hope for an achievement surpassing the old and winning out, is the opposite, limiting factor, which turns back the hope, which makes living a slow form of dying.

...There are many kinds of responses of faith to the failures of life, either its stark tragedies or its small letdowns, in which men repeat ancient answers. ...For Christianity, the drama of human existences is neither a farce nor a grim tragedy, but a drama for the education of the soul, wherein it can learn -- by way of failure or success -- the true purpose of life and the true understanding of what we are here for. ...If the last question asked by American culture is, "Were you successful? Did you win?" the last question asked by Christianity is, "Were you faithful?" It is integrity, not success, which is the Christian mark of worth.

...To be a little more specific, what most of you confront after college is far from glamorous, romantic, successful -- far from being queen. Rather, it is life in the ranks, life in the level of gray Monday morning doings. There are the drudgeries of the menial and the humdrum, miles from shoe-and-slipper weekend. There are miles of typewriter ribbon to bang. On average, there are 39,000 dishes to wash -- per housewife, per year.

There is considerable contrast between white duchy and dirty diapers, and by this fact there is not much success, by Chanticleer standards. But education informed by the Christian faith can equip the student ahead of time to realize that the meaning of life does not consist in success but in faithfulness, in trust, in love, in patience, in long suffering, in the daily meeting of human need, in thankless devotion. We are here not to succeed, but to love -- whether our love has a happy ending or a sad one. Its worth stands in failure as much as success.

In this sense, Christian faith is disenchantment with the success fable, but it is re-enchantment with authentic success. Christianity never should be construed to offer the cash prize, the straight "A," the presidency. What it does offer is the reward of serenity and confidence, which is nonchalant about success and which is serene within failure. It is education in equanimity for life and death. This is what St. Paul means when he says, "Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's." Unless a Duke student gets some inkling of this ideal, he is headed for sure despair and frustration. But if he has learned to see beyond the mirage of success to the truth of the cross, he will even now be putting on something of the armor of God.

In a curious way, the Palm Sunday story can be seen as appropriate to this Christian truth. It is usually taken, in a Hollywood sense, as being a success story. The triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the shouts of the crowd, what a happy day when the Messiah arrives. But this is entirely the wrong way to take it. It just wrenches it out of its context in Holy Week. It is rather a day of tragic irony, where success and failure are all mixed up. The crowd missed the point of the story in the entry. They took Christ for what he was not. They missed the symbolism of his riding on a colt, the symbol of the suffering servant. They took him for a military hero who would bring them political success through some magical trick. In the grand manner of a Cecil B. DeMille, Christ alone understands the irony. He knows the thinness of their loyalty. He knows their disillusionment. He can see the shadow of the cross prefigured over the palms of the Jerusalem road. Amid all the parading and rejoicing, he weeps. Jerusalem does not know the time of its visitation.

Palm Sunday is not a success story; it is a story of failure by the standards of the world. But it is a story of integrity and faithfulness, even unto the cross of Good Friday, where man's faithfulness within failure is transmuted into victory.