Failure and Forgiveness

In my life the most meaningful lessons were learned from my failures more than any success.  Would that it were different, but such, in my experience, has been the lesson learned.  I suspect I am not alone here.

The consumer marketing machine, it seems, plays on everyone’s hopes for the good life: the getaway cruise, the flashy new car, the land of milk and honey, lifestyles of the rich and famous.  To my mind these are diversions, distractions, from the hard work of honest integrity.

Among my failures was being held in contempt of court, United States Federal Court, Northern District of Illinois. It dragged on for months, and one day into the courtroom United States Marshalls entered, guns holstered, locked and loaded.  My counsel nervously waited to petition on my behalf, but surprisingly, they had come not for me. I did not go to jail.

A banker from Lichtenstein did go to prison to serve a three-year term.  I was a co-defendant in a lawsuit concerning off-shore Trust Asset Management, guilty not of fraud but of naïveté.  The case eventually was settled. The experience gave me reason deeply to reconsider. 

Following that settlement I filed a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which taught me the remarkable experience of forgiveness.  It is extraordinary to learn – in the first person – that forgiveness lies at the core of American civil jurisprudence.  

Our system of justice is fundamentally about redemption and resolution.  In practice often such may seem not the case – for profit prisons, for example – but forgiveness, in fact, does seem to lie at the core.  Is not the hope for a better future the American dream?  Such, at least, has been my personal experience.  

In beginning that new chapter I further learned to let integrity be my bank account.  Our culture deifies money.  We are drunk in the belief that wealth must equal intelligence and character.  We could be no further from the truth.  

When I was a boy the popular phrase was “A man’s word is his bond.”  Long out of date that is now.  Our delusions are different from the truth, which remains that our character is key, that integrity is – in the end – all that matters.  

I am not alone in feeling a seismic shift unfolding.  This week I received a missive from a Franciscan monk, the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation, who wrote:

“I have been increasingly convinced that we need a worldwide paradigm shift…(which) becomes necessary when the previous paradigm becomes so full of holes and patchwork “fixes” that a complete overhaul – which once looked utterly threatening – now appears as a lifeline.  [We must] move beyond the reward/punishment paradigm.”

He told the Sufi-inspired story “The Angel with the Torch and the Pail”

“An angel was walking down the streets of the world carrying a torch in one hand and a pail of water in the other.  A person asked the angel, “What are you doing with that torch and pail?  The angel said, “With the torch I am burning down the mansions of heaven, and with the pail I am putting out the fires of hell.  Then, and only then, will we see who truly loves God.”

The monk concluded by saying, “The most loving people I have met across the world in my lifetime of teaching and traveling all seemed to know that if love is the goal, it must be love for everybody.”

The bromance playing out on social media and in the halls of government is not about love for everybody.  The situation in America is child’s play to the global trend toward authoritarian strongmen.  To my mind most certainly this will result in a humanitarian failure, which would force we the people, on this small planet, deep into reevaluation.

We must own our failures before we can be reborn. Once we do that, what if redemption and love become the result of these uncertain times?