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(This is the second article in a series aimed at building up parents in their role as primary educators and encouraging them to hand on the Catholic faith at home as they form their own Curriculum for Life.) 

Failure is not taught in schools—nor in the current culture generally. Failure has been replaced with lessons on entitlement with self-esteem as a virtue. Self-esteem is not a virtue. Thinking well of yourself is not a virtue—but thinking of yourself well is a virtue.  A villain can think well of himself (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Gangues Kahn, Nero, Pharaoh… positive self-regard was not a problem for any of them), but to think of yourself well means to regard yourself with truth and honesty. This means to think of yourself as God sees you. 

Kids do not need more lessons in self esteem; 
they need lessons in failure.

Children in this country have been done the great disservice of being disallowed to fail. If you play sports, everyone gets a trophy. Webster’s Dictionary defines a trophy as, “something gained or given in victory or conquest especially when preserved or mounted as a memorial.” Simply being on a team is not something gained in this sense. Showing up is not a victory or conquest, and if a team does poorly during the season, is it really something that should be “preserved and mounted as a memorial”? 

Kids do not need more lessons in self-esteem; they need lessons in failure. Being Catholic—being a faithful follower of Christ—is to learn how to fail well. 

Avoiding failure is not only anti-Catholic, it is anti-human, and if we stretch this idea all the way to the end, it is anti-God. God failed. This does not make him a failure, or anything less than perfect and all-powerful, but his success rate in turning men into saints on earth is quite low. His failure in perfecting us here is overshadowed by his perfect success in loving us while we fall short of his design for us. The entirety of the Old Testament is a sin-cycle of one failure after another. When we read the Gospels in the New Testament, we read about God’s greatest failure of all. His only Son, full of love, wisdom, healing, generosity, compassion, and mercy, failed to convince the people of his day about the Father’s plan for their lives. The very people he came to love and save and lift up to the Father killed him. When Jesus died, his “team”, the apostles, lost. They didn’t receive a trophy. The Sadducees did not throw them a pizza party. Three years of their lives were spent all to end in a most dramatic failure. 
 
But that is not the end of the story. It is not the end because God fails well, and not just well, God fails magnificently. God sets the bar and standard for how to fail. God fails so well that he took the greatest failure, the greatest evil, in the history of creation and turned it into the greatest success in history. Jesus did not avoid failures: He encountered them his entire public life and even at his birth. In Bethlehem, the Lord and King of the universe enters into our world to express to man the inexpressible and unfathomable love of the Father, and immediately Herod tries to kill him. In his public ministry he is ridiculed, tested, tempted, run out of his hometown, and accused of being Satan himself. Not infrequently, he teaches a lesson to a crowd only to find that his own apostles have no understanding of his lesson. Ultimately, this failure leads him to the Cross. For three years he pours himself into his ministry of teaching, healing, loving the people of Israel and beyond—the culmination of which is a most humiliating, painful, torturous death.  

Jesus pushed past the failure; 
he pushed all the way to hell and back
to emerge victorious on the third day.

What is hidden in all of this is the truth that the only real and lasting failure is to succumb to failure. To fail and give up. To fail and stop trying, stop moving forward, stop discovering the Father’s will in the midst of it. Jesus trusted the Father’s will and so he did not stop; he pushed past the failure. He pushed all the way to hell and back to emerge victorious on the third day. Jesus was so victorious that the very instrument of death on which he hung has been transformed into a beacon and symbol of salvation. 

The central sign of our faith is a sign of failure to the world—but it is a sign of victory to us because we know Jesus did not fail and quit: He failed to quit. In fact, the victory is greater because of the failure. Our Lord was nailed to the Cross but rose from the dead. He has overcome sin and death; he has overcome the world. 

Christian parents are called to be like Christ, which means that they are meant to fail well. In the face of adversity, parents need to face it, not turn from it. Where will children learn this? School? TV? TikTok? No. They are going to learn it from their parents, which means parents need to learn it from Christ to teach it to them. 

“Then he said to all, 'If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it’” (Luke 9:23-24). These are the conditions for discipleship and the paramount requirements for parents. To teach children how to fail, parents must first deny themselves. Teaching failure is not fun. There are many joyful moments in parenting; this is not one of them. But then again, neither was the Cross.  

“If anyone wishes to come after me…” Of course, we wish to come after him because he is in heaven, and our sole goal and purpose of life is to make it there. The entire vocation as spouses and parents is to help their get there as well. There is no other way to heaven than through the Cross.

Jesus’ Cross had his name on it “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” and there is a cross out there with your name on it too. Pick it up. Carry it.  You are going to stumble. You are going to fall. You are going to feel like you cannot possibly continue. That is okay. That is failure. Embrace it. Meditate on the stations of the Cross. Jesus fell three times and also needed Simon’s help. God does not ask you to arrive at your own personal Golgotha in one day but only that you keep picking up your cross and moving in that direction. 

That is the lesson we can teach our kids. Do not hide your failure from them. The only way to teach children how to fail well is to show them how to fail well. Let them see you fall but also let them see you stand up again.  

The people who fail the best are called saints.

The people who fail the best are called saints, and we are all called to be saints. Parents are teachers of sanctity. Teaching children to be saints requires tremendous work every single day. That looks like a cross and feels like a trial, and with persistence is the very way in which we share in the victory of Christ, the victory of the Resurrection.

There is no other way to the Father than through the Son, and there is no other way to the Son than through the Cross. That does deserve a trophy—an eternal memorial. It is called heaven, and in heaven, everyone is a saint.