I have traveled so far to find so little
Meaning in tragedy or tragedy
In the search for meaning
Dark clouds have lead me here
Confined freedom
Guides us to security
What if everything
I have been taught is a lie
And all of my teachers
Have been wrong this whole time
Compelling us to fight
The battles they would not
They have already won
And we have already lost
If we don not learn from their mistakes
We have already lost
If we do not learn to change [ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/a/as_i_lay_dying/meaning_in_tragedy.html ]
In our spiritual journeys we sometimes feel that we have learned nothing and fained nothing but pain from the troubles we face along the path to our final destination. The issue of faith is cast in doubt, the teachers portrayed as being weak, sending others to fight where they couldn't win, and where we as their successors cannot without learning from what they did wrong
Sometimes when we fail at something we may try to get others to succeed where we have failed because we feel that in their success we will erase our failure. However, in doing so, we may lose sight of the fact that perhaps our mission is a mistake, at least in this new context. It can all become quite meaningless when it is all tied up in someone's weak ego. When we berate our successors for continuing to fail, we set them up to repeat the pattern.