Descent

I say to God my Rock, “Why have you forgotten me? Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?” My bones suffer mortal agony as my foes taunt me, saying to me all day long, “Where is your God?”

Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. -Psalm 42:9-11

There is only one thing that can put you further ahead than success, and that is surviving failure.

When you are successful, you are whole and complete. That is wonderful, but you cannot break out beyond your own universe.

When you fail, you are broken. You look at the pieces of yourself lying on the ground and say, “This is worthless.”

Now you can escape. The shell is broken, the shell of a created being. Now you can grow to join the Infinite.

-Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
"Getting Ahead with Failure"
Chabad.org

I admit to struggling with seeing the glass as half-full as opposed to half-empty. In part, the search for God is the search for significance and meaning in life. Who am I? What am I doing here? Does my life mean anything beyond the immediate needs I fill? Is there nothing more than this?

The Psalmist says to put your hope in God when your soul is downcast, but it's not always that easy. There's sometimes a difference between faith in God and trust in God. I realize that's a horrible thing to say. After all, who doesn't trust God? Who is afraid that God won't take care of us in all of the troubles in the world?

Both the Master and Paul commented on this:

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? -Matthew 6:25-26

Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. -Philippians 4:6-7

So, you never worry, right?

Right. Sure.

And yet, when our lives are the biggest mess is the time when we call upon God the most. When everything we do turns to mud and all of our circumstances and problems threaten to overwhelm us, is when we manage to crawl up to our hand and knees and call upon the Name of the Lord with fear and trembling.

After one of his greatest failures, David poured out his heart, "Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice" (Psalm 51:9). But sometimes, after we have an encounter with God, we still feel crushed. Relying upon God doesn't always mean God will make you "feel better", as if you are a small child who fell down, scraped your knee, and went running to Mommy so she can make it all better.

Sometimes God makes it all better but sometimes he does not.

In the Jewish mystic tradition, it is said that God created the universe in a dark void from which He had withdrawn, and then sent in ten vessels containing a "primordial light" (Let there be light -Genesis 1:3), but the vessels could not contain such a Holy light and they shattered. Divine sparks scattered across the entire cosmos like sand thrown across a glass table, falling all over our world.

It is said that our mission as human beings is to gather the sparks and repair the broken vessels, restoring the brokenness of the universe. This is a mystic meaning to the Jewish concept of tikkun olam or "repairing the world". Yet in repairing the world, we also repair our broken selves:

For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you. -2 Corinthians 4:6-12

In our pain, despair, and brokenness, Rabbi Freeman says there is a unique opportunity to become more than who we are. Our vulnerability is also our openness to greater intimacy with God. In shattering our souls, we also shatter the wall between our world and the presence of the Divine.

When dining on ashes, we can dine with the Creator. If God goes down into exile with Israel (Genesis 46:3-4), then He goes down with us into our darkest abyss as well. The taste of the meal is bitter, but in that bitterness, we do not dine on the bread of our affliction alone.

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.