Vulnerable AND Safe

For many of us, vulnerability is one of the hardest human experiences to manage. It can be terrifying and overwhelming. It can cause us to feel exposed, naked, unprotected, or unsafe – and we can find fifty ways to run or to hide.

Fleeing from vulnerability is a story as old as the human race itself. Following the fall, the whispers of shame urged Adam and Eve to run and hide themselves, and to try to cover their nakedness.

Unfortunately, I cannot be in an intimate relationship with God if I am hiding and protecting myself from Him. I cannot experience close connection with other human beings if I am hiding and protecting myself from them. You are perhaps familiar with the famous quote from C.S. Lewis:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

In the Incarnation, Jesus chose to be vulnerable. The eternal Son of God who was immortal willingly took on our human flesh. One motive was to be able to offer himself on the Cross, to pay the price of our redemption. As God, he could not die. As man, he could. But becoming flesh was not simply about paying a ransom on the Cross. The deeper motive was to love us, to show us how to love, and to make us all capable of loving in that way. From start to finish, vulnerable love was the motive of Jesus becoming flesh and of everything he said and did in the flesh.

“And the Word became vulnerable and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). That would be another way of putting it. To be human is to be vulnerable. This is the profound insight of Curt Thompson in The Soul of Shame: “So much of what we do in life is designed, among other things, to protect us from the fact that we are vulnerable at all times. To be human is to be vulnerable.”

At all times we humans are vulnerable – able to be wounded, abandoned, rejected, excluded, betrayed, injured, or killed. Sometimes we barely notice our vulnerability, and other times we feel it intensely. But it’s always there.

Jesus shows us how our human condition of vulnerability need not be an experience of shame and isolation, but can be transformed into an experience of healing and salvation. When we listen to the Gospels closely, we hear one story after another of Jesus modeling vulnerability for us. His heart remains wide open in love, even when others are misunderstanding, accusing, rejecting, or abandoning him. He does not break off to hide himself. Yes, he spends forty days in the desert, but that was actually an even deeper experience of vulnerability, enduring temptation as well as allowing himself to be comforted by the angels God sends.

Many of us resist and avoid vulnerability because we tend to associate being vulnerable with feeling shame – and shame is perhaps the most painful human emotion. When we feel shame as Adam and Eve felt it, we feel unlovable and devoid of dignity. We do not want to be seen or known. So we hide and isolate. Shame thrives in isolation. What begins as one traumatic experience – genuinely painful – becomes a perpetual cycle that we do not know how to break. Jesus, the New Adam, breaks our cycle of shame and opens for us a vulnerable path to salvation.

This path includes connecting with God and others. Again, Jesus is our model of what it means to be truly human. He does not go it alone. He consistently reaches out to his Father and to his friends – even when they choose to abandon him. He establishes the Church as a community of believers, calling each by name, but always into a community of faith. When we hear the story of the early Church in the Acts of the Apostles it is a story of community and communion, not of isolation. Salvation happens in Christian community.

The name Jesus means “Savior,” and salvation means becoming safe by becoming whole and holy. It is safety that we are seeking when we hide from our vulnerability. But we will not find wholeness or holiness in our hiding. We may need it for a time, especially when our survival truly depends on it. But our places of hiding, our panic rooms, will indeed become tombs and places of death if we refuse to let ourselves be seen and known.

The invitation to salvation is an invitation to become vulnerable AND safe. We may understand this at intellectual level, but it is important to experience it as well. That means finding a safe community in which we can truly be seen and known, heard and understood, cherished and appreciated and encouraged.

There are many in twelve step programs who have claimed that they find an experience of Jesus much more easily in the church basement (in their group meetings) than in the church itself, where they find plenty of people putting on masks, bustling about, rigidly following rules, judging and gossiping, or following familiar routines – but precious few people opening up humbly in vulnerable human connection. That is quite an indictment! Is that true of me or of my parish community?

To put it differently – when broken people walk through our doors, feeling their shame deeply, what will they encounter here? Will they find a friendly face who shows them that it is safe to be vulnerable here? Or will they find fifty new ways of hiding from their vulnerability?

Those are questions that we can all take to prayer this Lent!