Like Peter.

What place does failure have in our lives? I don't mean the occasional setback or bad day. I mean the things that go terribly wrong. The marriage we couldn't save, the child lost to drugs, or the job we languished in for decades.

Christians believe that the triumph of Easter began with the (quite literally) excruciating failure of Calvary. Catholics keep the failure of the cross in explicit, daily view, Not only do we see it in the crucifixes we hang in our houses and rectories and school cafeterias, but we also reenact it over and over again in the Eucharist. I imagine it all seems rather unsettling to those unfamiliar with our ways. Of course, it is unsettling. It's all about death.

And failure.

We are responsible for some of our failures. These are the failures of compassion, charity, courage, or simple understanding. Other failures result from things that happen to us. Call it misfortune, bad luck, or what you will. Wherever our failures originate, whether we are responsible for them or not, we're left to deal with the mess.

Self-help books, therapy, and psychopharmaceuticals can help. There's nothing wrong with these things, unless they lead us to believe we can escape failure with a change of outlook or brain chemistry.

Whatever we may want to believe to the contrary, we know that life is full of failure. That's why we can't get enough "reality TV." The most compellingly real thing about reality TV may be that it dramatizes the very human experience of failure. This stuff may be prurient, it may be an occasion to gloat over someone else's apparent inadequacies, but maybe we're also drawn to it for a better reason, even a higher one. Maybe we tune in not to see the winners but the losers. Maybe it's the losers--who fail because they are not clever, intelligent, strong, or attractive enough--we need most in our lives. It may be that we crave their unfortunate, discouraged, tearful company because we've all been "voted off" more times and in more ways than we can bear to remember. These shows remind us that we are not alone when we fail.

To lose the capacity to live with failure is to become vulnerable to a triumphalist form of Christianity that promises that every day, indeed, every moment, can be an Easter. Christians must not forget how preposterous it was to preach Christ crucified, to insist that misunderstanding, miscalculation, doubt, and (let's say it again) failure can be occasions for God's entering the world. To live the Christian life is to put failure in the middle of the table. At every meal. Day after day. This is one of the things we do when we celebrate the Eucharist. Call it a dose of "reality Christianity."

We always have faced the possibility of failing as lovers, spouses, parents, worshipers, employees, and citizens. The possibility seems greater and more frightening all the time as traditional understandings of sexuality, marriage, family, faith, and our place in the economy and the world come widely into question.

One response is to deny our uncertainties and their attendant failures. We can entrench ourselves. Or, if we want a better view of the enemy, we can stand on the ramparts and assume a stance of moral certainty. This stance is ultimately one of fear and hostility, and breeds in us a compulsion to destroy everything that threatens the old certainties. We may even kid ourselves that we can destroy failure itself if our convictions are strong and our aim true.

Another response is to recognize in uncertainty and failure nothing less than the prospect of transformation and redemption. This requires that we be vulnerable, and we can not be vulnerable if we are preoccupied with success, narrowly understood. The real successes, the ones we encounter in the gospel, the transforming ones, are the ones that attend moments when nothing works the way we hope or expect or want, when our logic fails us, when things go all wrong, the way they went so terribly wrong for Peter as he warmed himself at the fire, uncertain and afraid.

Like Peter, like the other disciples, like the hungry, eager, sometimes overwhelming crowd that follows Jesus, we keep getting it wrong. We fail in so many ways. And we deny Jesus no less than Peter did when we forget that God works through, with, and in our failures.

That's one thing we can be certain of.

William Jordan is program coordinator of Natya Dance Theatre in Chicago.