Tag: vulnerability

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Things I didn’t know I could get out from underneath – and other thoughts from Krista Tippett’s book ‘Becoming Wise’

Here’s my final post offering thoughts from Krista Tippett’s book Becoming Wise.

I was struck by this wise statement on community by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which she quotes:

The person who’s in love with their vision of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community wherever they go.

Brené Brown
Brené Brown

Brené Brown, one of Tippett’s interviewees, studies vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame – and has this to say about courage and vulnerability:

I cannot find a single example of courage, moral courage, spiritual courage, leadership courage, relational courage, I cannot find a single example of courage that was not born completely of vulnerability. We buy into some mythology about vulnerability being weakness and being gullibility and being frailty because it gives us permission not to do it.

Even more powerfully, she makes the point that:

the most beautiful things I look back on in my life are coming out from underneath things I didn’t know I could get out from underneath.

Brown is well worth listening to, as she has demonstrated in her TED talks on The power of vulnerability and Listening to shame.

Lastly, Tippett addresses another important issue when she says:

There is a fine line between saving the world and manipulating other lives, however well-meaningly, in our own image.

And she reflects on Courtney Martin rejecting the notion that the world divides into ‘savers and those who need to be saved’. As Martin herself says:

Our charge is not ‘to save the world’ …. It is to live in it, flawed and fierce, loving and humble.

.

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Litmus test

Nick Spencer, in his book Asylum and Immigration: A Christian Perspective on a Polarised Debate, talks about compassion for the vulnerable being the critical litmus test of a society’s social health – a truly sobering reminder of the state of our society’s declining social health, I thought. Spencer goes on to say that

a nation should be proud rather than grudging in its acceptance of the truly vulnerable, There are few higher callings than to clothe the naked, feed the hungry and house the homeless.

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St Peter

Impulsive master of misunderstanding,
You comfort me with all your big mistakes;
Jumping the ship before you make the landing,
Placing the bet before you know the stakes.
I love the way you step out without knowing,
The way you sometimes speak before you think,
The way your broken faith is always growing,
The way he holds you even when you sink.
Born to a world that always tries to shame you,
Your shaky ego vulnerable to shame,
I love the way that Jesus chose to name you,
Before you knew how to deserve that name.
And in the end your Saviour let you prove
That each denial is undone by love.

From: Malcolm Guite, Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year

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Mystery vs certainty

Spirituality and fundamentalism are at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum. Spirituality seeks a sensitive, contemplative relationship with the sacred and is able to sustain levels of uncertainty in its quest because respect for mystery is paramount. Fundamentalism seeks certainty, fixed answers and absolutism, as a fearful response to the complexity of the world and to our vulnerability as creatures in a mysterious universe.

David Tacey, ‘Rising Waters of the Spirit’

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Love recklessly

Some quotes on love and forgiveness from Francis Spufford’s recent book Unapologetic:

If someone asks for your help, give them more than they’ve asked for. If someone hits out at you, let them. Don’t retaliate. Be the place the violence ends. Because you’ve got it wrong about virtue. It isn’t something built up from a thousand careful, carefully measured acts. It comes, when it comes, in a rush; it comes from behaving, so far as you can, like God himself, who makes and makes and loves and loves and is never the less for it. God doesn’t want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.

God … wants us to love wildly and without calculation. God wants us to love people we don’t even like; people we hate; people who hate us.

We’re supposed as Christians to go out and love recklessly, as God does. We’re supposed to try and imitate Jesus in this, and to be prepared to follow love wherever it goes, knowing that there are no guarantees it’ll be safe, or that the world will treat such vulnerability kindly. ‘Take up you cross and follow me,’ says Jesus … risk everything, even death. Take love’s consequences.

We’re supposed to see God’s willingness to mend, to forgive, to absorb and remove guilt, as oceanic; a sea of love without limit, beating ceaselessly on the shores of our tiny island of caution and justice, always inviting us to look beyond, to begin again, to dare a larger and wilder and freer life. But it is possible to shrink it instead into something like a Get Out of Jail Free card, to be played by God only very occasionally in a game otherwise dominated by the same old rewards and punishments, human justice writ large all over the cosmos.

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Reluctant

Very often we are reluctant to admit that we are the sick and sinful Jesus came to heal, and very often we prefer our self-protecting isolation to the risk of our face-to-face encounter with the Other [God] in the silence of our own vulnerability.

John Main, Word into Silence

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