On The Blessedness Of Failure

Now, some of that was internalized ableism. I hated myself because I had internalized the normal “Protestant Work Ethic” nonsense of American culture combined with the burnout model of ceremonial magick, where no matter what happens you still do the rituals and prayers when you are supposed to. I was brought up on stories of Karl Germer gaining the “Knowledge And Conversation Of The Holy Guardian Angel” in a Nazi concentration camp and on stories of Crowley doing his “Hell-ride” through the Enochian aethyrs while traveling on foot through Mexico, and I learned my lessons well.

But pain taught me a different lesson. Facing the constant possibility of losing the use of my hands and arms made me desperate to use them as much as I could before I lost them. Being in pain all the time gave me courage, because the fear of pain no longer motivates me at all. And finally, all of that pain and suffering and depression gave me the courage to finally transition, because how could being hated because I am trans be any worse than the pain I am already surviving every day?

In the end, it was being a failure that brought me back to the Great Work. I passed through the ordeal and simply had nothing left to lose or to prove to anyone. I resumed the Great Work not out of duty but out of choice, and I am happy with the results.

So this New Moon, as I am celebrating my retirement (or perhaps graduation?) from the magickal and mystical tradition in which I have worked for 29 years, I am moved to talk about what happens when plans don’t work out. I wish to speak on those times when you hit the wall and the wall hits back. I want to talk about what you do on the day after the day you finally quit.

I am called to speak on failure.

I’m an American, at least until they take away my citizenship for being queer, poor, or disabled, and that means I was raised to think that failure was the worst thing that could possibly happen. I also grew up in Texas and I was mostly raised by my WW2 era grandparents. When I wasn’t automatically amazing at whatever my grandparents gave me to do, I was blamed and punished for it. It was even worse when I started school. I was ridiculed and bullied because I couldn’t run fast or hit a baseball, and it was drilled into me that how I was being treated was actually my own fault for not being able to perform on command. It was considered failure to not be popular, to not be gifted at sports, and to get picked on, and I was a failure on all three counts.

However, sometimes it was because of what I could do that I was a failure. I was reading at 3 and reading novels at 6…failure. I was good at games, especially strategy games like chess…failure. I was good with computers and started programming in the fifth grade…failure. I excelled in school and the Young Astronauts program and got to go on a trip to NASA…failure.

So many ways to fail, so few to succeed, and none of them really make sense. It’s almost like the game is rigged. And I’ll tell you a poorly kept secret: it is. But that doesn’t mean the game is lost. Once you realize the game is rigged, you can start doing something pretty amazing.

For me, what being a pagan means is that I believe in what I call a naturalized theology. I believe that the surest, clearest way that we have to know the nature and will of the gods is by looking at the processes and structures of nature. And in nature you see a really interesting phenomenon: nature uses failure. Hell, nature loves failure. Failures feed the endlessly tragic and hungry maw of evolution. Failures become meat for the beasts, failures become the toppled trees that feed the forest with their own biomass, and failures present opportunity after opportunity for nature to do what She is best at: improvising.

We also see this in the mystical life. My spiritual life, the whole path of that life from my childhood yearnings towards the Divine all the way to this moment, seems more like a dance of errors, failures, and misunderstandings than the magickal and mystical career of a lifelong occultist. I did not walk my way steadily through my initiatory grades. I did not even crawl. I stumbled, fell, and was, by the grace of the gods, pulled along by the current. Sometimes for years. Sometimes it seemed like I was just running on sheer spiritual inertia. I would walk my way through my practices rather than dancing. I would do Resh mechanically rather than singing out my adorations. I persisted in error many times. I failed again and again. All of that happened.

And yet…

It happens to so many mages and mystics. We set ourselves upon a path but then the path moves on us. We swear oaths but then the spirit of the oath and the letter of the oath diverge. Sometimes the weight is too much. Sometimes we bend and then we break, again and again, until finally we heal. We become.

We transform.

This isn’t some sort of feel-good story of recovery and healing. I am still permanently disabled. I am still in pain every day. I still live in fear of my condition worsening. I still struggle with my worst moments. I still feel the pain of the heart that I must keep broken open so that the sweetness can drip out into the world. All of that is always true.

But my failures were moments where I grew the most. When I fell and the current pulled me along, someone new pulled herself, spitting and sputtering, out of the depths and resumed the journey. Someone different. I don’t know if this person I have become, dozens of iterations later, is better. I can’t judge that. That’s up to all of you and up to history. But I do know that I am different.

I am transformed.

So let us look to those moments of forgetfulness. Let us remember those times that we stumbled and even fell. Let us take the time to remember all the selves that have come and gone along our way.

Let us honor failure.

Blessed New Moon, dear ones. May the blessings of the gods fall upon you all in the coming two weeks.

In love,

Soror Alice