July 5, 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Mark 6:1-13

There is something about failure in great people that we find interesting, possibly even encouraging. It’s not a morose desire to see them fail. It’s rather the irony of seeing people who are accomplished in so many things fail miserably in others. We often marvel at the inner strength that propels them forward despite their failure. And often we are told of their failings as a way of spurring us ordinary mortals on to greater achievement.

I remember being quite disappointed when Walter Issacson, in his biography of Albert Einstein, refuted the oft-reported story that the great physicist had failed math class in his early years. This story, told in scores of books and on thousands of websites as a way of reassuring underachieving math students, simply was not true. According to Isaacson, when a rabbi in Princeton told Einstein that the story had appeared in a widely read newspaper column, Einstein chuckled and assured the rabbi that before he turned 15 he had already mastered differential and integral calculus.

With that myth debunked, I could only take comfort in the fact that early in Einstein’s career, even after devising a revolutionary quantum theory of light, he was rejected in his efforts to seek university employment and had to settle for a job as a third-class patent examiner. Einstein was not deterred by this early rejection and failure, and many Americans would come to know later of his great successes.