Risky Business

For the first time here, I want to write about a gospel story. Last Sunday's gospel reading was the temptation of Christ in the desert, and it is one my favourite stories.  It is, on account of its incredible psychological depth and insight.  The 'accuser' (Satan) tempts Christ with the archetypal challenges which being human presents.  'You are hungry.  Make stones into bread.'  That is, fill yourself with that which doesn't really satisfy; for immediate gratification.  'Everything is yours if you will worship me.'  That is, sell out and get everything you ever (thought) you wanted. However, recently the one that has been most interesting to me is the second one:  'throw yourself down from the height of the Temple; God surely will save you.'  That is, you are special, you are protected, you are indestructible;  death does not apply to you.  For human beings in general, I think that this particular temptation is really about our unwillingness to face our mortality. Working with young people, I have realised that this has another dimension that applies particularly to the young - their sense that the normal rules of risk do not apply to them; and many have willingly admitted to me that they regularly take risks they know to be dangerous because they don't believe anything terrible will really happen to them.

Most of them will undoubtedly grow out of that phase.  But, I am left wondering if the reverse is any better - to take no risks at all. Unfortunately, that is the place many of us end up in as we get older.  I recently saw the movie The Princess Diaries, and in it the heroine's dead father leaves her a powerful verbal legacy:  'Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something is more important  than fear. The brave may not live for ever, but the cautious do not live at all.'  Life without risk is not really living;  and so both young and old are captured by the same question, seen from different ends of the spectrum:  the discerning of what is worthy of risk. For Jesus, throwing himself off the pinnacle of Temple for a dare wasn't; but, throwing over the tables of the moneychangers and sellers in the Temple was.

In my first blog entry I mentioned that I might just pose more questions than offer answers.  Well, here is the first truly open-ended piece.  Each person has to negotiate the level of risk with which she or he is willing to live.  Each person has to navigate for him or her self a personal path between recklessness and stagnation.