Think you can't bounce back after a failure? Listen to Father Anselm Gron
Love failure, professional failure... Failure is scary. It is always difficult to live and accept, but it can be a great springboard to achieve happiness. Under certain conditions...
We must not make an ideology of acceptance of failure. There is no need to fail to be happy. But it is a fact: we cannot fail. Failure is as an essential characteristic of human beings. For the German Benedictine, Anselm Gron, this painful experience can be a real opportunity for a rebirth, an opening to God and a chance for a new beginning and a real happiness.
How do you define failure?
Father Anselm Gron: In German, scheitern (fail) comes from scheit (log, piece of wood) and scheiden (cut, separate). To fail is to separate what was one. The unit breaks, the whole falls apart, the initial project fails to succeed and breaks apart. The word scheiden is used, for example, to signify the breakdown of a marriage: the couple divorces, separates.
We also find this word in abschied, the "farewell": each failure thus signifies a farewell to the ideal image we had made of life and ourselves. And in verscheiden, which means "to die," failure also has something to do with death. Something dies, in which we had put all our hopes. In my love, my vocation, my commitment, I do not get what I was able to expect but, on the contrary, a negative and unfortunate result. The dream has broken.
Under what conditions can this misfortune be a chance for growth?
If we accept it, if we stop there and ask ourselves: wasn't our life plan so far too one-sided and narrow? At the heart of the failure, we must decide which new path we will take. We still need to be able to "distinguish," analyze why we failed, and how we will be able to put the pieces together to engage in a new life.
Failure can encourage us to collect the fragments of our lives so as to become the unique person that God wants to make of us. Happiness, in my opinion, is not only to be in agreement with oneself, but to be in tune with this unique and exceptional "image" that God has of me. However, failure shows precisely that I have substituted this divine "image" for another image that corresponds more to my own representations than to God's will.
Many people fall to the ground and don't have the chance to get up after a failure...
Exactly. We can't judge them. A lot of people have a very hard life, and I don't know if I would have the strength to cope if I were in their shoes. But I also see people getting bogged down in their suffering because they are not ready to break the misconceptions they have made of life. They are so disillusioned with themselves and "disappointed" with God that they renounce hope. It is precisely in failure that it is important to call upon faith in God, in this God who resurrects the dead and wishes to lift me from the tomb of my darkness and failures.
Every failure is accompanied by feelings of guilt. Isn't that another obstacle to happiness?
Guilt can paralyze and torture. Deep in our hearts — whether it is the failed couple, the cleric who leaves his order or the priest his ministry — we believe that we should have succeeded, that we should have persevered. Have we not given in to selfishness? Have we not allowed ourselves to be influenced by the air of time that speaks only of self-fulfillment? Wasn't the way forward to carry the difficulties like a cross and to the end?
But there is no point in suppressing guilt: you have to look it in the face and close.
We must not make an ideology of acceptance of failure. There is no need to fail to be happy. But it is a fact: we cannot fail. Failure is as an essential characteristic of human beings. For the German Benedictine, Anselm Gron, this painful experience can be a real opportunity for a rebirth, an opening to God and a chance for a new beginning and a real happiness.
How do you define failure?
Father Anselm Gron: In German, scheitern (fail) comes from scheit (log, piece of wood) and scheiden (cut, separate). To fail is to separate what was one. The unit breaks, the whole falls apart, the initial project fails to succeed and breaks apart. The word scheiden is used, for example, to signify the breakdown of a marriage: the couple divorces, separates.
We also find this word in abschied, the "farewell": each failure thus signifies a farewell to the ideal image we had made of life and ourselves. And in verscheiden, which means "to die," failure also has something to do with death. Something dies, in which we had put all our hopes. In my love, my vocation, my commitment, I do not get what I was able to expect but, on the contrary, a negative and unfortunate result. The dream has broken.
Under what conditions can this misfortune be a chance for growth?
If we accept it, if we stop there and ask ourselves: wasn't our life plan so far too one-sided and narrow? At the heart of the failure, we must decide which new path we will take. We still need to be able to "distinguish," analyze why we failed, and how we will be able to put the pieces together to engage in a new life.
Failure can encourage us to collect the fragments of our lives so as to become the unique person that God wants to make of us. Happiness, in my opinion, is not only to be in agreement with oneself, but to be in tune with this unique and exceptional "image" that God has of me. However, failure shows precisely that I have substituted this divine "image" for another image that corresponds more to my own representations than to God's will.
Many people fall to the ground and don't have the chance to get up after a failure...
Exactly. We can't judge them. A lot of people have a very hard life, and I don't know if I would have the strength to cope if I were in their shoes. But I also see people getting bogged down in their suffering because they are not ready to break the misconceptions they have made of life. They are so disillusioned with themselves and "disappointed" with God that they renounce hope. It is precisely in failure that it is important to call upon faith in God, in this God who resurrects the dead and wishes to lift me from the tomb of my darkness and failures.
Every failure is accompanied by feelings of guilt. Isn't that another obstacle to happiness?
Guilt can paralyze and torture. Deep in our hearts — whether it is the failed couple, the cleric who leaves his order or the priest his ministry — we believe that we should have succeeded, that we should have persevered. Have we not given in to selfishness? Have we not allowed ourselves to be influenced by the air of time that speaks only of self-fulfillment? Wasn't the way forward to carry the difficulties like a cross and to the end?
But there is no point in suppressing guilt: you have to look it in the face and close.
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