A Contemplative Moment: Vulnerability (Reprise)

Vulnerability 

is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become someone we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.

 

To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances, is a lovely illusionary privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers; powers eventually and most emphatically given up as we approach our last breath.

 

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful , always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

 

by

David Whyte

Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment,

and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

On The Holy Spirit, the Hospitality and Vulnerability of Friendship, and the New Life Eastering in Us

 The last few days have been full of God's surprises, "gifts beyond imagining", as my director might say! Everything has been about the deep bonds we form, sometimes lose touch with, and then discover again or reestablish in a new way. While these days have meant renewed relationships with friends and Sisters once grown distant in time and space, they were especially informed by the readings for two Communion services I did and the reflections I offered on those readings. On Friday we looked at the Gospel reading about Jesus calling us friends and the shift from the bonds of law that held Israel together making one People out of disparate tribes to the bonds of love which motivate (or are called to motivate) Christians. We also reflected on the challenge Jesus calls us each to, namely, that, in the power of the Holy Spirit, we allow him to be a friend to us and that we respond as those who would be friends to him and all he delights in. In particular, in Friday's reflection I spoke of sin as falling short (hamartia), not of the demands of the law, but of our own true humanity while the bonds of love animate and empower us to fulfill this God-given potential. This is our most fundamental vocation.

Communion Services and Readings:

On Monday I enlarged on the idea of this challenge and the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives because the readings focused on the sending of the Holy Spirit to open our hearts and make us hospitable. I reminded the assembly that the term "heart" is a theological term which refers first of all to God and I noted something I have written about here, namely that is it not so much that we have a heart and then God comes to dwell there, but that where God comes to dwell in us (and where we open ourselves to that more and more in the power of the Spirit) we have a heart!! "Heart" is defined in the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament as the place where God bears witness to Godself. Hospitality is the key to understanding what it means to be truly human.

But hospitality is also the key to understanding what it means for God to be truly God. While we have grown up with the omnipotent, immutable, impassible God of Greek philosophy, that is not the God Jesus reveals to us. Instead, Jesus reveals (both shows and makes real in space and time) a God who has chosen not to remain alone, a vulnerable God who loves and suffers, and opens his own heart to us, a God who, in Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit has determined to take humanity (and perhaps the whole of creation) into Godself. Ours is a vulnerable God, a God who, though he might have been entirely self-sufficient and alone, has chosen not to remain so. And so Jesus will go to prepare a place for us within God's very life; he will share with us that deep bond of love that obtains between himself and his Abba and, in that Holy Spirit, animate and empower us to be Friends of God and all of God's creation.

What struck me most in Monday's readings was that as Jesus shows us who we are and he shows us who God really is, the key word defining the situation in either case is "hospitality." The Holy Spirit opens our hearts and makes us vulnerable and, in the same way, that Spirit opens the heart of God to us and makes God vulnerable to God's own creation. In all of this I was reflecting on what I first referred to a few posts ago as "bonds of being" --- those deep bonds which link us to others in the power of the Spirit. These are the bonds that animate and empower us to be truly human, to come to perfection, completion, or fulfillment. And they are the deep bonds without which we live superficial lives which, in one way and another, "miss the mark".

Renewing and Strengthening Deep Bonds --- Camaldolese and Franciscan:

And in the midst of all this reflection I was renewing or strengthening the deep bonds of my own life, first with the Camaldolese, especially the monks and oblates of Incarnation Monastery and New Camaldoli Hermitage. And then, I was led to a link regarding the Jubilee celebration of a classmate of mine from the Franciscans. I watched the video and there Sister Christine was! But she looked frail and where I have been aware of her from time to time over the years, I never contacted her; but here, because I felt concerned, I determined I would contact the Mother House and see if she was okay. Sisters in the MH sent my note to Sister Christine and she contacted me; we began emailing last week. Yesterday we met via ZOOM and caught up some on our own lives and then the lives of our original classmates!! 

The sharing we did was a complete joy! We talked about and compared things we had forgotten or never known about one another including the fact that we were both born prematurely at almost identical weights in the very same hospital in So CA!!! We were equally premature and spent the same amount of time in incubators. We were also both converts to Catholicism with families who, at least in the beginning, did not approve our conversion (I did remember that Christine was from a Methodist family but she had not recalled I was also a convert to Catholicism).  It turned out our lives were full of such similarities we had been unaware of all those years ago. Some of them, more contemporary, significant, and surprising similarities, very much define who we are today.

But what was really most wonderful was the way Sister Christine caught me up as best she could on what happened to herself and other classmates once I had left the Franciscans and opened herself to knowing me in a new way. There were deep bonds formed (and forming) 50 + years ago, though I had not appreciated that sufficiently; there were deep wounds as well (it is never easy leaving a congregation, I think). I experienced a new sense of healing and wholeness from this renewed connection, and I look forward to wherever it takes us. I came away from all of this aware that God has been working overtime in my life these past weeks reminding me of all the ways we are made for hospitality and all the ways we need it if we are to be our truest selves. I had a sense of "coming home" when I visited New Camaldoli a couple of weeks ago, and I had a sense of "coming home" yesterday as Christine and I met by ZOOM. In all of that I experienced the gift of the Spirit Eastering in us ---empowering and animating deep bonds that transcend time, and space, and (as Jesus reminds us) even death --- gifts beyond imagining! Thanks be to God!!

Fourth Sunday of Advent: Vulnerability by David Whyte (Reprised)

Throughout the Gospel of Mark Jesus' invariable title for himself is Son of Man which can be translated as "Son of Humanity" or even "the Human One". One of the things Mark is concerned to show his readers is that Jesus reveals the nature of authentic humanity. Jesus is the One in whom humanity is exhaustively transparent to God. This is one way of seeing how it is he can reveal both the nature of humanity and divinity at the same time. At the heart of this double and paradoxical revelation  stands the critical and peculiar openness to God and to all God wills which we know as obedience and also, a radical vulnerability.  We see this in the creche and we see the same openness in the events of the cross. One of the most wonderful pieces I have read on the nature of vulnerability and its centrality to authentic humanity is the following piece by David Whyte:

[[Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become someone we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.

To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances, is a lovely illusionary privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers; powers eventually and most emphatically given up as we approach our last breath.

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful , always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door. (from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of everyday Words)]]

In Christ authentic humanity becomes a reality in our world and in him it becomes a possibility for us as well. It is truly a humanity which does not "fall short" of the dignity to which we are called by God. (Remember hamartia which is translated "sin," literally means, "to miss the mark" and the mark we actually miss is, as noted in recent posts, that of realizing our call to be imago dei and becoming imago christi.) The birth of Jesus marks the coming of this new possibility into our world. As we approach the Feast of the Nativity may we each recommit ourselves to the vulnerability which allows us not only to say yes to God in the way Mary did, but also to grow in the grace and stature of an authentic and self-emptying humanity as did Jesus. 

Best wishes and prayers for a wonderful last week of Advent and a fruitful Christmas! Sister Laurel, Er Dio.

A Contemplative Moment: Vulnerability

 

Vulnerability

 

is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become someone we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.

 

To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances, is a lovely illusionary privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers; powers eventually and most emphatically given up as we approach our last breath.

 

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful , always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

 

by

David Whyte

Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment,

and Underlying Meaning of everyday Words