It may seem comparatively easy to be humble when we fail and are disappointed but, in fact, it is a very difficult task. Failures wound our pride, and wounded pride is wont to resent the smart. Either anger, rage, or a desire for revenge on those who have caused our failure supervenes, or else we are utterly cast down and dispirited, and ready to give up all further effort. Ask yourself how failures affect you.
Yet even when they are not borne altogether as they should be, failures are very useful to the soul. Under their influence, we can scarcely keep from having a lower opinion of ourselves, and learning the necessary lesson of endurance of what we dislike. It yields, almost without any co-operation on our part, the peaceable fruit of justice to those that are exercised thereby (Hebrews 12:11). Though failure may bring out evil tendencies which are more powerful to us, and of which we cannot help being conscious, yet the unconscious pride that success engenders is far more dangerous to the soul. Thank God, then, for your failures.
What would be our spirit under failure or apparent failure?
• We must not be cast down or dispirited, but begin again cheerily.
• We must beware of blaming others who have caused or contributed to it.
• We must attribute it to our own defects or to the just judgment of God punishing our sins in the past.
• We must thank God for it, offer it up to Him, and beg that it may make us more humble.
• We must remember that, for those who love God, there is no failure.
All is success under the guise of failure, for to those who love God all things work together for good.
- text from Humility, Thirty Short Meditations by Father Richard Frederick Clarke, SJ