Abstract
Failures abound in religious and spiritual life: Religious prophecies can fail to come to fruition, prayers sometimes go unanswered, and adherents are often unable to feel God’s presence. Experiences of perceived failure and personal shortcoming — especially when frequent or salient — can erode religious commitment. How then can we account for individuals’ persistence in the face of these experiences? Drawing on fieldwork in two organizations dedicated to the transmission of personal spiritual disciplines — an Integral Yoga studio and a Catholic prayer house — I find that texts and teachers at both sites promote a similar interpretive style related to experiences of shortcoming, one which translates perceived failures into constitutive features of practice. In doing so, this authoritative discourse normalizes, universalizes, and even valorizes the most common sources of frustration and anxiety for practitioners. More, I find that this interpretive style is tied to both identity and progress: The enactment of these socially-sanctioned scripts becomes a way to project oneself and to identify others as committed and authentic practitioners. More broadly, this research draws attention to the ubiquity of failure in cultural systems, and to the challenges posed by these events. Drawing on insights from social psychology and cultural sociology, it reveals the importance of organizations, social interaction, and meaning-making in accounting for persistence.
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Notes
A form of silent prayer similar to mindfulness meditation.
All individual names are pseudonyms.
Provisions for dealing with failure can be practical as well as interpretive. Tavory and Winchester (2012), for example, find that religious leaders often suggest modifications to practice—increasing the frequency, or adding new forms of practice—in response to experiential failures. The focus on interpretive responses in this article reflects the findings at my specific field sites. Future work should consider when, where, and why communities emphasize different kinds of solutions to the various forms of failure they encounter.
Pamphlet on Centering Prayer, distributed by Contemplative Outreach, and handed out to participants at an “Introduction to Centering Prayer” workshop at Trinity Prayer House.
Prayer groups met once per month, for two to six hours per meeting, between September and May each year. Participants registered and paid ($50–200) for the entire year, making attendance relatively stable across sessions. Each meeting involved at least one period of collective Centering Prayer practice.
See Satchidananda 1970 for complete overview of the Integral Yoga Hatha practice.
Eight of the yoga interviewees were participants in the 200-hour teacher training program at which I conducted participant observation. I interviewed these individuals on three occasions: before the training began, immediately post-training, and again one year later. By doing so, I was able to examine how their experiences and interpretations shifted over time.
Hatha yoga classes at the IYI follow a fairly rigid pattern or structure, with each component of the course clearly outlined in the “teacher training manual”: a three-inch binder containing several hundred pages of information. For each component, the manual includes a general description, information on benefits, a list of acceptable modifications, and a script for how to instruct the pose.
Other work has also found evidence of this interpretive approach to suffering and failure. Sullivan (2011, 140-143), for example, uses the concept of “redemptive suffering” to capture an interpretive framework that depicts suffering as an opportunity for personal growth, ultimately helping to make the person more holy.
Heartfulness: Transformations in Christ, DVD set. http://www.contemplativeoutreach.org/product/heartfulness-transformation-christ-dvd-set
Luhrmann (2012) also found a link between failure and spiritual maturity in her study of Evangelical Christians. In that context, failed petitionary prayer was interpreted as “part of God’s plan to build a better relationship with the person praying” (271). Adherents believe that God “wants his more mature followers to turn to him for the sake of the relationship and not for his stuff […] In this developmental trajectory, God always answers your prayers specifically only if you are new to belief” (271). The idea of “spiritual maturity” enables people to “reinterpret a disappointment as, in effect, a promotion” (274). In this case, failure itself serves as a marker of spiritual advancement and maturity, rather than one’s response to failure, as is the case in the communities I studied.
The Stanford Resilience Project, for example, emphasizes “the importance of failure in the learning process” and seeks “to ultimately change the campus perception of failure from something to be avoided at all costs, to something essential to a meaningful education.” [https://undergrad.stanford.edu/resilience]
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
While the determinants of success and failure appear less ambiguous in other contexts—boxers get knocked out, students receive an F, gardeners’ plants do not produce fruit, and quitters relapse—definitions and discourses of failure and success are often more complicated and diverse than assumed. Boxers, for example, can fail in a variety of ways outside the ring, including failing to live up to the “professional ethic” of diet, exercise and sexual abstinence (Wacquant 2004, 201), or to uphold the ethical standards of courage, mutual respect, and humility that define the ideal boxer (125). At the same time, losing a match is not always interpreted as a failure. While most studies of persistence tend to take “failure” as an objective outcome, people often have a variety of ways of defining (and redefining) what “counts” as success (see also Granberg 2006 on dieting).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Robert Wuthnow, Joanne Golann, Victoria Reyes, Thomas DeGloma, Paul DiMaggio, Janet Vertesi, Maggie Frye, and Tanya Luhrmann, as well as the Editor and reviewers at Qualitative Sociology, for their invaluable feedback and suggestions on previous drafts of this manuscript. Earlier versions of this article were presented in the Religion and Public Life workshop at Princeton University, and the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (2014). This research received financial support from the Center for the Study of Religion and the Department of Sociology at Princeton University.
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Johnston, E.F. Failing to Learn, or Learning to Fail? Accounting for Persistence in the Acquisition of Spiritual Disciplines. Qual Sociol 40, 353–372 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-017-9361-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-017-9361-z