This is the script of this morning's Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4's Today programme:
Chatting recently to an academic who leads a leadership consultancy, I was a little surprised when he said: “The two things that the high-powered business people who come here can't talk about are failure and death.” I replied: “Oh. That's where we start.”
Christian faith begins not with a running away from failure and death, but rather with a totally realistic appraisal – based, of course, on experience – of human failure, and the facing of mortality. Come to terms with these two beasts and the rest begins to fall into place. To paraphrase Martin Luther King: what we might be wanting to live for will be determined by what we are prepared to die for.
I have been thinking about this while wondering what is going on during the last week or so in the mind of the failed US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. She has spoken about wanting to curl up with a good book and not go out of the house. To have been so close for so long to the seat of power and then to lose it in a flash cannot be anything but hard to handle. Anyone with a shred of empathy – whatever their politics – must surely be able to comprehend this.
Is it not true that the measure of the man or woman is not how they handle victory, but how they handle defeat? Living with failure can be a gift in that it dismantles pretensions, dismisses illusions and disables hubris? Think of St Peter – protesting that he would stand by Jesus of Nazareth whatever happened … before running away when identified as one of his friends from Up North. Peter's self-image bled into the soil beneath the cross where Jesus died … but, he found a renewed future in a conversation with the risen Christ back on the beach where he worked as a fisherman.
This is not romantic nonsense – a sweetening of the bitter pill of defeat. Rather, it is realism born of the experience of people throughout the generations. Defeat can be humiliating, embarrassing and painful – especially in the light of the great claims to power made during an election campaign. Yet, it can bring freedom, release and the possibility of a new start in a new world in which we are no longer measured by our trophies, but by our humanity. Confronted afresh by our mortality, defeat can give us the opportunity to strip away the illusions and face the truth.
One word for this is 'repentance' – in the Greek this means literally 'to change your mind'. It means daring to look differently at the world and ourselves in order to see differently in order to think differently in order to live differently. Or, to put it differently, to snatch hope from the jaws of defeat.
