The Greater Sin Is Not Dreaming Big Enough

I’ve been meditating on a particular prayer that prefaces a sermon written by Davidson Loehr, a Unitarian Universalist minister in Austin, Texas. Through this prayer, I’m facing off with that great demon known to us as Playing-It-Safe. Davidson writes:

If we must fail, let us fail at high endeavors. Let us not fail to be mediocre when we could instead fail to be absolutely brilliant. Let us not fall short of being moderately compassionate. Let us rather fall short of being fully compassionate.Of all our failures in life, perhaps the saddest are those in which we failed even to try and serve the highest and noblest ideals.

It is a sin to fail at low aims. Not because we failed, but because we aimed too low.

But it is not a sin to fail at very high aims, like aiming for truth, justice, compassion and character. Because even our failure puts us into the company of the saints, the company of those who also believe that rising to our full humanity and rising to our full divinity may be the same rising.

Striving after low and mean ends is a boring sin, not worthy of us. Let us have greater ambition for our failures. Let us vow never to fail at anything that wasn’t noble and proud, never to settle for lower aspirations for ourselves, our lives, our country or our world.

We will all fail at some things. But let it not be a failure of vision, a failure of aspiration. If we must fail, let us fail at high endeavors, and then let our failures bless us – for they will.

Amen.

You can read the full sermon here.

The passionate idea of working toward great and noble ambitions in our lives offers both comfort and strength. When put into this context, we are free to set our mind and body toward the light we want to create. Even failure cannot touch us or our soul.

I think this prayer ties into Curt Rosengren’s recent post on an interdependence of dreams and actions. When we gather the courage to dream big things and then take action to follow our heart’s calling, we move beyond the small ideas of success and failure. These are often inaccurately measured based on someone else’s notion of the world. Instead, we journey on a path which is uniquely our own…where the endpoint is uncertain, but clearly a paradoxical place of excitement and solace.

Extended Play (04/23/06): My friend Garth at exploreplay has a great quote from Jon Krakauer’s book Into The Wild which really accentuates the power of following your sense of adventure. It starts: “So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism…” Visit exploreplay for the rest of the quote…you’ll be glad you did.