GIOTTO di Bondone: No. 36 Scenes from the Life of Christ: 20.
Lamentation (detail), 1304-06;
Fresco, 200 x 185 cm, Cappella Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), Padua
The Angel of Risk
by Anselm Grün
Many think that the most important thing today is not to attract attention, not to make any mistakes. Then the career is not in danger. Then you won’t be criticized in your community. Then you don’t have to step down from your office. Then life will be a success. But this attitude of not being prepared to take any risks actually inhibits life. Who does not want to make any mistake at all, makes the biggest mistake of all. Because she doesn’t take chances, she doesn’t take risks. And thus nothing new can come into existence. In economy as well as in politics, in the Church as well as in society no one is willing to take risks any more. Because in that case they would be vulnerable. Things could go wrong. And that would be the catastrophe. Then you would be forced to leave your soft cushions and you would have to stand up for yourself and your mistakes in public. Many are afraid they would not survive that. They are so fixated on the approval and attention of other people that they don’t trust their instincts any more and don’t risk anything.
Psychology tells us that missing the courage to take risks is connected with missing a father, a condition common in our society. Under normal circumstances, it ought to be the father, who encourages us to dare something, to take a risk. If this positive experience of having a father is missing, if there is no father to encourage you, you need a substitute. This is the ideology, the unchangeable rule you hide behind. Security is everything. You don’t want experiments. Everything is supposed to stay the way it is. You don’t permit yourself to think of something new, much less to do something new. After all there is no guarantee that the new idea will work. So you don’t do it. Our times are characterized by a marked lack of fantasy as well as of courage to risk something. “Risk†is Italian originally and means danger and peril. Many demand a life without danger. You ought to get insurance against all kinds of dangers, so that nothing can happen to you. But the more effort you put in being safe, the more insecure you become. And slowly you lose your confidence. Everything has to be insured. No venture without sufficient safety. This leads to torpidity, as the current economic and political situation shows. We will only be able to get out of this dead end if we take a chance, if we risk making mistakes.
I wish that the Angel of Risk may encourage you to take your chance with life and to risk new ways for yourself and people around you. The Angel of Risk may back you up and bolster you so you are free to take a risk with yourself and to trust your impulses without trying to develop safeguards for everything. The world will be grateful to you, if you dare to do something new, if you don’t ask everyone and his brother for permission to implement your ideas. Because we experience every day that old solutions are failing. No one dares to go new ways in employment policy. Instead you hide behind platitudes and blame the others. Everyone is just waiting for the other to make a misstep. Then you can criticize them. But no one dares to take the first step. You are waiting to catch mistakes in others instead of risking a mistake yourself. I wish that the Angel of Risk may empower you with the freedom to also risk mistakes in order to open up new ways for yourself and people around you. Only if you trust the Angel of Risk you will make it possible for something new to grow into this world through you, can people discover new opportunities because of you.
© by Anselm Grün, 50 Engel für das Jahr, 1997;
translation by JunoMagic.
Song for December 7:
Die Flügel des Schutzengels (“The Wings of the Guardianangel”)
by Hans-Jürgen Hufeisen,
album “Engelskonzert” (“Concert of Angels”)
Psychology tells us that missing the courage to take risks is connected with missing a father, a condition common in our society.
Just curious…when was this guy writing? Because this sounds very out-of-date to me. (So I’m hoping it wasn’t written within the last ten years or something!)
I’m still following along…you’re wonderful for doing this, Juno! Oh, and I love the new layout. 🙂
I’m thinking about 1996 or so, as the book was published in 1997. However, as a Benedictine monk he’s no specialist and he is also likely to take a rather conservative/old-fashioned approach.
I’m not a psychologist, but nevertheless I think if someone has an “unstable” childhood with one parent missing or proving herself/himself unreliable/abusive, or dying, it’s more likely that someone has problems with risk/trust than someone who had a fairly happy childhood with both parents alive and together.
Of course I know that it always depends on the situation and on the person (challenge and response?) …after all, I manage to have a good marriage so far, even though my mother left my dad and me. But I also can’t deny that I have some issues because of that.
I am sounding like a broken record, but I just love this. Thanks for putting all the work into it that you do.
I am one who believes that kids need to have both parents, and that if you elect to have kids, you should consider yourself drafted to the duration. Other than death, or severe problems with one of the parents, there is no honorable reason for kids to grow up without both parents. They didn’t ask to be born, you had them, they are your responsibility.
I do see that I am the one who pushes Anna to take risks to get rewards, while my wife is risk averse, seeking to shield her precious child from harm. She is no less precious to me, we just differ on the best way to keep her safe. I think this is the way of most parents. Mothers wish their children to avoid danger, fathers want them to take risks because it strengthens their spirits, and a strong spirit is essential to dealing with danger.
Men and women are different… Vive la différence
mk
And I *love* all of my online friends. This is a way of expressing this happiness I feel about the wonderful people I met during the last year and a half. 🙂
Thank goodness and YAY!
I didn’t study child psychology beyond child psychopathology, so I’m really no expert either! I winced less at the notion of a children left without a parent than the fact that the father was specifically mentioned as the one who promotes risk-taking behavior and that children without fathers grow up timid as a result. I think this does a disservice to the many strong-willed, independent single mothers out there who raise their children just fine without fathers in the picture. Sure, in a perfect world, kids grow up with both parents, but plenty of kids who grow up with single parents grow up better adjusted than their peers with traditional families. I am a good example: I had two parents and neither particularly encouraged me to take risks (if anyone did, it was my mom), and I grew up very timid as a result. (I’ve gotten over it, but only through a lot of personal hard work and a very patient, understanding husband.) But this was caused by other factors in my life–namely peers and teachers–more so than anything that my parents did/didn’t do.
Like I said, I’ve studied very little child psychology. I intended to become an adult practitioner, so it wasn’t a subject that I needed. But still, I’ve never heard a theory of this nature; it struck me as one of the old-fashioned ideas that we studied when discussing the history of psychology, when many theories and practices merely reinforced harmful stereotypes against women and minorities.
I have to admit that I resent it that it’s always women that are exemplified as good single parents; as if you can easier make do without a father than a mother, as if women were generally the better parents…
I see a tendency in society to pretend that family, having both parents, is not at all important to how you grow up. And, sorry, I don’t buy that. Of course the most important thing is that children grow up without being abused in any way, so there are many cases in which single parent families are better off than having both of them together and complete chaos.
But where did we get the idea that a *working* family is so irrelevant and that single parents are OH so great and liberated?
I have to admit that I resent it that it’s always women that are exemplified as good single parents
I would wholly agree with this. In the US anyway, I think it’s pretty clear that dads are overlooked, whether single or not, in the role they have in their child’s upbringing. The most obvious example of this is baby-changing tables: It is hard to find a women’s restroom without one, yet most men’s restrooms don’t have them. In this country, money talks, and establishments will cater to the folks that they see as bringing them valuable business. That single dads, stay-at-home fathers, and *gasp* fathers who might want to change their child’s diaper are overlooked in so many places is sexist and unfair. At least, in my opinion. 🙂
But where did we get the idea that a *working* family is so irrelevant and that single parents are OH so great and liberated?
??? I’m a bit confused by this. Maybe it’s a difference in our respective home countries? Because no one here certainly advocates a single-parent family as ideal over a functional two-parent family. I know that most of the research points to functional families as being of primary importance, whether single- or two-parent. Still, here anyway, single parents still catch flak. A lot of the “conservative morality types” cite preserving the family (meaning two-parent family) as utmost importance, despite the presence of abuse or whatnot. Single moms catch criticism and single dads are overlooked or seen as oddities. Over here, at least.
Certainly, I’ve never heard anyone saying that single parenthood is ideal over a functional two-parent family. I think that psychological research as well as anecdotal knowledge tells us that two parents in a functional family is ideal. Unfortunately, “ideal” seems so often impossible in this world…. :^/
Turn that around: sometimes I feel that we are getting to the point where you are looked upon askance if you “advocate” a *two-parents* family, or worse, a family where one parent does not work full-time (no matter if that is wishful thinking economically or not), a family that is not willing to give the children away for daycare as soon as possible.
As if that automatically makes you an evvol conservative who wants to chain the mothers to the hearth.
There’s more than one reason why I am not sure if I ever want a kid.
a family where one parent does not work full-time (no matter if that is wishful thinking economically or not), a family that is not willing to give the children away for daycare as soon as possible.
I always find these people so bloody hypocritical. They talk about women (or people in general) having the right to do what they want to do. They talk about all the fighting that had to be done to achieve (a semblance of) gender equality in the workplace, and then they want to tell women (or whomever) how they should spend their lives.
If I want to go to Africa and volunteer for AIDS relief, no one looks down their nose at me. But if I want to stay home and take care of my family, I am less of a woman.
Incidentally, I just read an article the other day about stay-at-home dads and the kinds of things they put up with.
Here, we have an interesting battle between the hardcore “feminists” who believe that stay-at-home motherhood is bad for women and the conservative fundies who think that women don’t belong in the workplace at all.
Then there’s the majority of us–myself included–who believe that people should do whatever makes them happy in life.
Exactly. And you are so right about how the lifestyles of women in the middle are caught between a rock and a hard place. 🙁
IMO the most innovative kind of politics would work with reality instead of ignoring science left and right and, most importantly would aim at helping people find the best individual solution for their way of life. No matter if that means a stay-at-home Dad or Mom, a single parent, polyamorous arrangements or whatever.
Talk about wishful thinking…