The Sweet Fruits of Failure

Quotes Worth Contemplating
for the Feast of St. Rose Philippine Duschesne

No one in his right mind sets out to grow mealy apples. If you plant an apple tree and take the time to fertilize it, prune it, keep the pests off of it, insulate it from harsh winter weather — the last thing in the world you want are dry, puny, worm-eaten apples. If that is what you end up getting after all your trouble, why bother? Cut the dumb thing down and try oranges instead.

So, too, no one in his right mind sets out on an enterprise hoping for failure.

Like many of the saints, the frontier missionary, St. Rose Philippine Duchesne, whose feast falls on November 18, was well acquainted with the taste of failure, as evidenced by this passage from one of her letters:

The withdrawal and complaints of two postulants who had no vocation; the worldliness of our pupils who have left school and their forgetfulness of us; the indocility of the present pupils; calumnies circulated about us. All this makes us feel the weight of the cross. (Philippine Duchesne: Frontier Missionary of the Sacred Heart [FMSH], 490).

Many of us have had similar experiences. We raise our children in a Catholic community, send them to a Catholic school — and they still grow up and abandon the Faith. We join with likeminded parishoners in our diocese, pull innumerable strings to have a Latin Mass offered regularly — and the bishop still closes it down. We find a good priest to act as our spiritual director, determine to follow his counsel faithfully — and we still keep falling into the same sins as before. Why would God inspire us to make such efforts if He knew they would all be in vain in the end? Why allow us to cultivate seemingly good trees if all they will produce are evil fruits? Ours were holy ambitions! Yet oftentimes all we have to show for them are the mealy apples of frustration and discouragement.

Or so it seems from our perspective. Now let us try to see things from a more supernatural standpoint.

Failure, like any other fruit, bears within it seeds, in this case the seeds of sanctity, which, if planted in a docile heart, will in time produce a rich harvest of heavenly virtues. Hence, failure, from God’s perspective, is not infrequently cultivated by Our Heavenly Father, the Divine Husbandman, quite deliberately in order that it should bear fruits delightful to His divine taste. Sweet fruits. Fruits such as:

Humility. “Humility has a very special property of its own,” teaches Bl. Gueric, a disciple of St. Bernard,

it not only ensures that the other virtues are really virtues, but, if any one of them is wanting, or is imperfect, humility, using that very deficiency, of itself repairs the deficiency. Therefore, if something seems to be lacking in any soul, it is lacking for no other reason than that the soul should be all the more perfect by its absence, for virtue is made perfect in infirmity. Paul, saith the Lord, My grace is sufficient for thee. He for whom the grace of God is sufficient, can be lacking in some particular grace, not only without serious loss, but even with no small gain, for that very defect and infirmity perfects virtue; and the very diminution of a certain grace only makes the greatest of all God’s graces — namely, humility — present in a fuller measure and more stable way. (This Tremendous Lover, 257)

Patience. We know from St. Vincent de Paul that,

The good which God does is affected almost by itself, without our thinking of it. You should be patient rather than active, and in this way God will effect through you alone what all men together could not do without Him. (St. Vincent de Paul, 250)

Purity of Intention. “Success is a dangerous thing for the majority of souls,” Cardinal Merry del Val warns us,

because very few are able to bear its weight, and in your case it is a very dangerous thing. Your desire to succeed should extend no further than willingness to do the best possible in the eyes of God. When you have done this, you will have attained success. But if failure should result, at least externally, then thank the Lord for protecting you from pride which in all probability would have overtaken you if you had acted from merely human motions or with the idea of taking pleasure out of your successful venture. (The Spiritual Life of Cardinal Merry del Val, 132).

The list could go on, these three being but representative of the many sweet fruits of failure. Sweet to God, that is. But, in our heart of hearts, do we not desire His good pleasure far more than our own? Not only should we not be afraid, therefore, to see our best efforts come to naught, to have our holy plans postponed indefinitely or even dashed to pieces, but we should rejoice to think that the fruits of these same failures are doing their part to render us pleasing to our Heavenly Father. He is not interested in mealy apples either. He would see us holy.

If we but submit humbly to our Father’s divine program for our own betterment, we may even have the joy of discovering for ourselves what the good God knew all along — the sweetest of all the fruits of failure is trust. Listen to these words of Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange:

At times the sacrifice of Isaac is again demanded of the true servants of God, that they may labor at the task entrusted to them, no longer as if it were theirs, but as the work of Almighty God, Who can overcome all obstacles, and Who will infallibly overcome them if He has decreed from all eternity that the work in question should be established. (The Three Ages of the Interior Life, 412)

Therefore, whether we live, or whether we die, whether we succeed or whether we fail, we are the Lord’s (cf. Rom. 14:8). “Courage, then!” exclaims St. Rose Philippine Duchesne, “One is always richer for having made sacrifices for God” (FMSH, 486).

And one is always holier for having failed for Him.